Cocktails with Mary Shelley, where the Irish in London live now, and synthetic sausages
Issue #4: With Roísín Lanigan and Amy Lewin
There’s a commonly-held belief that London is an unfriendly city — and after even just a day pottering around Zone 1, you can see why it’s gained that reputation. Rushing into the Tube will get you tutted at, walking too slowly down a busy street might earn you a small shoulder barge, and God forbid you stand daydreaming on the left side of an escalator.
But as someone who has made London home over the past two years — and occasionally crossed the boundary from ‘tutted at’ to ‘tutter’ — there’s a reason why thousands travel, sometimes thousands of miles, with their worldly possessions in hand, to squeeze into a basement flat somewhere in Zone 2 or 3. Because in London, though it might not seem like it when you’re in the throng of commuters staring blankly at a money transfer service ad on the Central Line, there are communities to be found everywhere, and it’s community I think that people come here for.
Journalist and soon-to-be novelist, Roísín Lanigan, talks about one such community in her Boundless feature today, as she sets out a history of where the Irish diaspora have made their home upon arriving in the Big Smoke, and where you might find them gathered now. ‘That freshly emigrated mafia created a cultural life, within and without their community,’ she writes.
And this reconstructed community is just one of many to be found across the capital. Just yesterday, Patrick Galbraith and I were walking through Whitechapel on our way to record the first episode of our podcast Tell Me How You Write (which will be coming soon, exclusively for paid subscribers) and found bustling South Asian grocery stores and Indian sweet shops, many of which sold things that were a big part of my own childhood.
But are those communities, those little worlds, under threat? Roísín notes that ‘Pockets of Irish existed in London because the housing was cheap there. Now, there is no cheap housing in London. The London Irish experience has become that of leaving, not arriving’, and I wonder what will happen now, as prices rise while wages seem to have simultaneously stagnated. I hope that the spirit of perseverance found in these little worlds will keep the kaleidoscope turning. Or, we could just have Gail's coffee shops on every corner and a thousand branches of Little Waitrose. What a future.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
Beyond Kilburn
Roísín Lanigan on where to look for the Irish in London
There are 32 counties in Ireland but there’s a 33rd in northwest London. Or at least, that’s how Kilburn was known until very recently. When people emigrated from the old country, they found a simulacrum of the old country up the Kilburn High Road. County Kilburn gave them GAA matches, pubs with snugs, and most importantly, other Irish people.
The London Irish diaspora trickled down from this northwest enclave. Throughout the Famine and after the Second World War in particular, Irish navvies and builders streamed into Archway and Islington and Camden, building roads and working mainly in construction in healthcare. In 2017, a public space opposite the underground station was renamed ‘Navigator Square’ in their memory. At one point the Whittington Hospital nursing staff were estimated to be 85% Irish. When Michael O’Halloran was elected in the 1960s to Islington North – presently occupied by another Irish favourite, Jeremy Corbyn – he called his supporters “the Irish mafia”.
And that freshly emigrated mafia created a cultural life, within and without their community. The London Irish literary canon is vast and rich and as densely populated as the Irish pubs of Ealing, Hammersmith and Sheen (other outposts for the diaspora). The novels arrived, recreating the journey from Ireland to London to ‘make your fortune’ — Dónall Mac Amhlaigh's Schnitzer O'Shea and Joseph O'Connor's Cowboys and Indians — or against your will, expelled from your home country by poverty or politics, as in John B Keane’s aptly-named The Contractors. Other literature — notably Anthony Cronin’s The Life of Riley – explored the so-called ‘diaspora blues’, the feeling of being at home in neither country and trapped between two identities, the past and the present.
Roísín's book I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There will be published on 20 February 2025
The race to become Europe's lab-grown burger king
The battle for Europe’s foodtech capital is on, says tech journalist Amy Lewin
Over a decade ago, the world’s first lab-grown burger was eaten, in London. It was, according to the food critics who tried it, ‘close’ to the real thing, in texture and ‘mouthfeel’ — although it needed a little more salt and pepper, and it wasn’t very juicy.
The burger had been grown in a lab in the Netherlands from stem cells extracted from cow muscle tissues, and then fed with culture to develop and multiply. The research required to get that patty to those critics’ forks had cost £215,000 — a cost that scientists and entrepreneurs expected would come down over time.
11 years later, lab-grown meat still isn’t on offer in the UK, even at the most high-end restaurants — although the same professor who developed that original lab burger says it would now cost less than a tenner to produce. (A bargain, by comparison.) To try some cultivated chicken, you’d have to get on a flight to Singapore.
However, things might be changing. In October last year, the Food Standards Agency announced the launch of a ‘sandbox’ (a testing ground) for cell-cultivated products. Companies developing lab-grown meat, eggs or seafood who get onto the programme will get help applying for a green light from the regulator, and that approval process should, if everything goes to plan, happen at pace.
Amy Lewin is the editor of the startup and tech publication Sifted.
The Corpse Reviver
This cocktail — dubbed 'The Corpse Reviver 1818' — was named in honour of the year that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was first published and features in A Gothic Cocktail Booklet, from the authors of A Gothic Cookbook.
Ingredients:
25ml dry gin
25ml Lillet Blanc or white vermouth
25ml green Chartreuse
A few drops of absinthe or similar spirit, such as Herbstaint
20ml of lemon juice
Lemon twist, to serve
Method:
Fill a cocktail shaker with ice and add the spirits (you only need a little dribble of absinthe or Herbsaint).
Add the lemon juice and shake well.
Strain into a chilled coupe or Martini glass.
Add a lemon twist and enjoy!
A Gothic Cookbook was published by Unbound in November 2024