I fly to London for the enduring richness of its established culture, not for stylish museums whose cafés serve tea-smoked duck. Which is why, one Saturday morning, I took the pricey, erratic Northern Line way down south to Tooting, an unloved and unlovely neighborhood thoroughly ignored by tourist guidebooks. Stepping into the bustle of Tooting Broadway, I was ravished by a sense of déjà vu. Here was an older London of butcher shops and off-license takeouts, tiny newsstands selling Silk Cuts, and seedy little betting shops where you could play a long shot on the fifth at Epsom. There wasn't a yuppie pub in sight, just the shops along the high street and side streets filled with row houses that had been there for decades. Here was the city as I knew it a quarter century ago.
Except, of course, that it wasn't. For while the buildings looked the same, the people did not. The sidewalk swirled with different colors, different nationalities, different languages—like a cinema verité spot for Benetton. A West Indian mother scolded her kids in patois but was answered in South London English. A Pakistani businessman rolled up outside Patel Bros. Market in a turquoise Rolls-Royce. White old-age pensioners with faces like spuds walked slowly, bent double under the weight of their shopping. There were laughing Nigerian teens, sullen punks pincushioned with piercings, stately Indian matrons who stared from their shop windows as if they owned the universe.
What a mix. And looking closer, those shops were new, too—halal butchers, Indian spice shops, greengrocers selling Caribbean tubers and produce. Although Tooting is far poorer than central London, which sometimes resembles a Potemkin village of prosperity, it's far more vibrant than the all-white London communities ever were.
If anything has made London swing again, it's the way these immigrants have created a new cultural hybrid—they've changed the city, and the city's changed them. For years, the only safe way to get a good meal in England was to shun standard British places (and cornstarchy Chinese ones ) and head straight to an Indian restaurant. It's no coincidence that vindaloo is now acknowledged as the national dish—routinely served with chips—or that you can buy ready-made pakoras at Marks & Spencer.
Nor was it accidental that, in Tooting, I should stop for lunch at Kastoori, a vegetarian restaurant owned by the Thankis, an Indian family originally from Uganda. Their Gujarati-style cooking integrates African ingredients to produce dishes unlike any I've ever tasted—green banana curry, kontola (a mountain vegetable) in garlic sauce, and the stuffed bitter vegetable known as karela bharela. Kastoori provided the best meal I had in London, far better than the one at the Michelin-starred Zaika, in Kensington, which aspires to give Indian cooking the refinement of French yet also serves such mutant food as samosas with a chocolate brownie inside. Even as the chocomosa (as it's known) epitomizes the new London, Kastoori is a reminder that it's possible to be original without broadcasting the fact.
As is the Sir John Soane's Museum, a few miles north in Holborn, one of the purest and most brilliant expressions of the London mind. Born a bricklayer's son in the middle of the 18th century, Soane became one of the Georgian period's most prominent architects, designing the Bank of England in the late 1780s (only the exterior wall remains, alas). But public and private lives have always coexisted, often uneasily, in London (think of all those cross-dressing Tory MPs), and the respectable Soane also happened to be something of a mad collector. He bought a house at 12 Lincoln's Inn Fields as a family home, then added the two adjoining houses, turning the whole thing into a gigantic display case for his endless acquisitions. When he died in 1837, he left the property to the nation with the provision that it should be left as it was.
Walking through the green front door is a bit like stumbling through Lewis Carroll's looking glass. The house is crammed with stuff, much of it classical, as if Soane had gone to some odd Athenian warehouse sale and walked off with the lot. There are marbles and casts, crypts and sarcophagi, Laocoön statues and Apulian vases, Cantonese chairs and copies of old masterpieces like the Vatican's Apollo Belvedere, all the original paintings of Hogarth's series The Rake's Progress, not to mention Soane's own scale model of the Bank of England. Yet what's astonishing about this museum is not the startling floor-to-ceiling proliferation of objects, but Soane's own deliberately surreal manipulation of space. Even after walking through the museum several times, I couldn't figure out how the rooms actually come together. For this is a house of domes, archways, weird skylights, secret doorways, panels that pull back to reveal more panels, windows that gaze into other rooms, and cunningly placed mirrors that give the illusion that still other rooms await you. Lucidly conceived and boundlessly self-referential, the museum is the architectural counterpart of a Nabokov novel.
The place knocks me out. Stepping into the watery afternoon sunlight, I began raving about why the Soane's museum is so much better than the Tate Modern. It's modest, not self-congratulatory, personal, not institutional, and its display is genuinely original, not some theory-spouting curator's desperate attempt to make the same old Picassos seem somehow new. In a city dying to embrace the future, Soane's old house is actually the most modern place around.
"And that's why the old London was better than the new," I manfully concluded as we began to walk away.
"Don't be so smug," said Sandi, pulling out her guidebook. "They restored this museum in 1995."
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