London's graffiti-riddled corpse is a warning of our apocalyptic future

Telegraph

21-06-2025

One of the founders, Joe Reeves, 28, shared his rationale for trying to save London, wash cloth by wash cloth. 'I grew up in High Wycombe, which is a 25-minute train ride into Marylebone and then the Bakerloo line into Oxford Circus. The Bakerloo line was this symbol of 'I've arrived in the greatest city in the world.' I was going down the stairs and through this tunnel, and then I would appear somewhere in this amazing city surrounded by opportunity.'
Flash forward to his experience now, which most people will find familiar. 'Every morning, I go to Lambeth North station to go to my office, and I see someone push past the barrier,' Reeves says. 'I tap in and follow them in, and then I share a lift with them down to the platform, this person that just stole from me and everybody else on the platform in front of me. They're playing music out loud on their phone. Everybody else is rolling their eyes, frustrated, but no one's doing anything, and the carriage is covered in graffiti.'
Personally, I do not think that spray-paint on public (or private) property can ever be called art.
But when vandalism is just hideous it's somehow easier to take than when it becomes murderously political, which is the turn it's taken since, you guessed it, October 7 2023.
With the license to treat London like a toilet or a rubbish bin firmly in place, courtesy of Sadiq Khan's bizarrely anti-improvement mayoralty, it wasn't going to be a big leap to target 'Zionists', directly or indirectly, on as many public surfaces as possible, constantly.
It's a perfect storm. In neighbourhoods like mine, a strong presence of illegal migrants doing their thing below the radar (some of it decent hard work, some of it not), hostels for new arrivals and asylum seekers, and lots of unemployed youths who have given the two fingers to education are all part of the meteorology of the moment.
Once home to refugees from Nazi Austria, Germany, Hungary and Poland, my area of London became famous for its Mitteleuropean café culture in the mid-to-late 20th century. People who frequented these cafés in the 1950s and 1960s remember hearing strongly accented old people talking about psychoanalysis where vape shops and grungy middle-eastern supermarkets now sit.
'The bus conductor would call out 'Jerusalem' or 'Vienna'! The German accent in the streets was predominantly Austrian,' recalled Walter Gratzer, a refugee who became a distinguished chemist upon release from an internment camp on the Isle of Man at the start of the war. Now the same road is stalked by feral youths, people who speak no English at all, and has become a throbbing centre of virulent anti-Israel, sometimes Hamas-glorifying, noise-making.
We hear it, we feel it, and we see it everywhere in bright ugly letters. That it has become an epicentre of such stuff is not a surprise: it is now home to a large community of people from backgrounds that make them more likely to give voice or be sympathetic to anti-Zionist outpourings.
Over the past few years, I have come to see cars, even on the quiet tree-lined roads parallel to my own, emblazoned with emblems of the Palestinian cause – one has a map of Israel done up in green, red and black and a few lines of Arabic translating to 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' on its back window. It's not just unnecessary: it's aggressive.
Other daily sights, albeit painted over quite quickly either by horrified locals or the council (I suspect the former) include scrawls (to take just a few recent examples) of 'Israel kills kids', 'F--k Israel', 'Gaza' and 'Free Palestine' and 'Zionists out' over street signs, security grilles and protective covers of shop fronts, and buildings. You can't not see this stuff every day, no matter the route you choose. As soon as one vile message is taken down, another pops up.
It's not all bad. For all the scary louts, the nocturnal vandals with spray cans, the phone-thieving chancers, the shoplifters, the music-blaring ruffians, the weed-smoking trespassers, the fare-dodging criminals, and the Islamist sympathisers there are lots of kind, decent people of all ages, backgrounds, both men and women.
Someone is always on hand to enthusiastically help with a heavy suitcase or a pram and generally people are considerate on public transport. It's just that the exceptions to this have become painfully frequent and give a feeling of a society coming unstuck, brewing nastiness and danger of a type not seen since in several generations.
We have a double society. We have the ugly, dangerous descent into lawlessness, the trashing of our cities by people who feel entirely free to visit their anti-social, crassly political impulses on public property.
But we also have the noticeable, reliable kindness of people. I now believe that each type of behaviour is simply a matter of personal inclination, since nobody has much to fear from order-enforcing authorities anymore, either from police or other people's judgment. As the guys from Looking For Growth have found, people keep to themselves and say nothing because they are frightened to intervene. We all feel that fright.
I just hope that the good people don't lose the courage and the decency to go on being good, as the cities around them decay into crime and the personal studios of people who mean not just 'Zionists', but all of us, ill.