An interesting new perspective on London is doing the rounds. Our capital city is being advertised as a paradise. London, it seems, is suddenly a place where every building is a Wren, where every sunset is a Turner, where every neighbourhood is Notting Hill. The sentiment has even got a name – ‘Londonmaxxing’. It’s been invented by tech accounts on X who got excited by the long queues at AI events run by Vercel earlier this month. There has also been speculation that a disgruntled-with-Trump Anthropic could move to London.
As much as I love London, like any true sceptical Londoner, I suspect bollocks. Look at the map by our resident artist J.G. Fox. Anyone considering the move should in fact be sniffer dog-aware of a multiplicity of perils. Those of us living here will already be familiar with them, but they might startle a novice.
In Camden market, you can hardly move for 15-year-olds scoring their first bag of weed
Let’s start in King’s Cross, where the tech bros would likely be working. The number of fentanyl-zonked gentlemen outside the station may make anyone from San Francisco feel at home, but it does make a trip home from the excellent local pubs a rather ‘interesting’ experience.
To the north, there’s Camden market, where you can hardly move for 15-year-olds scoring their first bag of weed. There’s a risk, too, of encountering Britain’s remaining goths. Refuge might be found further north-west on Hampstead Heath, but don’t expect to have a quiet walk. Instead, observe the Passchendaele-like mudbaths on some terrible dates. And any excitement about seeing Dua Lipa or Taylor Swift’s ex Joe Alwyn walking around is cancelled out by the prospect of spotting Alastair Campbell in the lido.
To the east, where the bros would probably set up home, there are other dangers. Finsbury Park may have some good pubs, but it also has Jeremy Corbyn. It’s home as well to hundreds of stolen phones, nicked from the centre of town, ferried up on the Victoria line, and hidden in the back of shops.
Heading east, there’s London Fields, where the rite of passage is to smile and pretend the £13 you spent on a Dusty Knuckle focaccia sandwich was worth it. The area also threatens you with Charli XCX. A fascinating prospect awaits further south in Tower Hamlets, where Lutfur Rahman’s borough testifies to the Olde English tradition of corruption with some aplomb. You could then go west into the City, where the hiccupping stockbrokers of the 1980s have been replaced by proteinmaxxers called Miles who sleep in their gilets.
To Bloomsbury, where a run through the gauntlet of SOAS students protesting against, well, only one thing really, will get you over to Oxford Street. There, rickshaws ferry fat families of tourists around to the sound of ‘Despacito’ played at 130 decibels. The money-laundering candy shops don’t even try to hide what they’re up to.
South of there, Mayfair is risky: steer clear of 5 Hertford Street, for fear of encountering Liz Truss. In South Kensington, the French are aggressively French. Beware, too, the school trip.
As you journey south, the areas get more duplicitous: Clapham Common may look nice, but it has a fourth-year-of-Durham energy, which means that anyone living there in their thirties must be treated with extreme suspicion. There are also a lot of Australians.
Barnes is London’s prettiest area – such a lovely pond – but watch out for Gary Lineker, or even worse, the smarmy Stanley Tucci whispering in your ear that ‘Italian cooking is the simple things, done well’.
Anything else south of the river can be rejected outright. It’s just roundabouts and people shouting at each other.
So there you go. To be fair, I must admit that this doubles up as a covert operation to keep the San Francisco drips away, and stop them from importing their matcha, their therapy-speak, their rocket emojis, their veganism, their cold plunges, their polycules, their ayahuasca and ketamine macrodosing, and their weird belief that having sex with your dog is all right.
But whether it’s Rolex pinchers or £8 coffees, tech bros should, to use their language, be bullish with caution.
Download a large-scale version of the map here.
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