London is “Obama on steroids,” she said; the rest of Britain is “essentially Trumptown, where I belong.”<br />It is strange to me that some Britons who live outside London seem to mistrust<br />and feel alienated from it, given how essential, and central, the city is to the country and how much people like it when they visit.<br />He lives in Bristol now but grew up in London, and the city, he says, “feels like a uniquely encapsulated version of what Britain means to me.”<br />“The government says it’s trying to get the country back,<br />but in the process it’s losing the heart of its people in London,” Mr. Shukla said in a telephone interview.<br />“We should be moving together,” he said of Europe, “instead of moving apart.”<br />I met Mr. Eden as I wandered around St. Pancras at the moment Britain officially filed for divorce from the European Union.<br />“The one thing we don’t actually see a lot of here is English people,” Mr. Djarian said.<br />To many people in the capital, the vote last year feels like a rejection not just of Europe but also of the values embodied by London, perhaps the world’s most vibrantly and exuberantly cosmopolitan city: values like openness, tolerance, internationalism and the sense<br />that it is better to look outward than to gaze inward.<br />London, she wrote, is “a city of ghettos behind a thin veneer of civility kept polished by a Muslim mayor whose<br />greatest validation is his father’s old job.” Far from getting along, she said, people hate one another.<br />But as Britain tries to bid farewell to its now-estranged partner of 44 years, London faces a different sort of challenge: how a great global city whose residents voted<br />overwhelmingly against Brexit in last summer’s referendum should adjust to an uncertain future governed by principles that feel antithetical to its very being.
