North London’s security wall

THE HORROR of our northwest London friends when we suggest they cross the river and visit us in Richmond is something to behold. We may have the Thames, the Boat Race, the largest green space in London and live deer, but it is so, so, far away from Barnet and Camden. The tendency to think that the Jewish world begins and ends in north London and the Hertfordshire suburbs becomes more intense all the time. I was a little concerned to hear Stephen Pack, distinguished president of the United Synagogue, telling my colleague Quentin Letts on Radio 4 that the reason that new Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis would be living in Hendon, rather than the more central St John’s Wood, was to be within walking distance of the community.

But that is not strictly the case. The community is vibrant in every part of London, from west to east, from north to south. The latest Census shows 1,460 people identifying themselves as Jewish, living in the London Borough of Richmond alone. We now have a Jewish primary school in nearby Roehampton, and our neighbouring borough in Wimbledon has a thriving Chabad shul, with an inspirational rabbi, and a large Reform community with around 1,000 members.

Yet, over time, we are seeing a retreat by the rest of London, indeed the whole country’s big Jewish institutions, to north London. This, despite the fact that most people earn their living in the West End or the City and the big interface between the Jewish community, the political system, the interfaith community and the rest of public life, takes place in Westminster or elsewhere in central London.

As a long-time contributor to this paper it always seemed to me that part of its success was that it had a national and world view, a strong intellectual backbone and was freethinking in its views. Its image as part of the Jewish community, but standing above the fray, stemmed from the fact that its headquarters were on the fringe of the City where so many generations of Jews have laboured.

The move to Golders Green diminishes that aura.

One of the great qualities of British Jewry is the way in which it climbed out of the crowded ghettoes of London’s East End and in other cities, and spread in all directions on the map as it became more prosperous and worldly. But the current tendency is to go backwards.

It may be enormously convenient for Hampstead Garden Suburb and northwards that Dame Vivien Duffield and other benefactors have chosen to locate the new Jewish Community Centre on Swiss Cottage’s Finchley Road. But, for someone like me, with an office in Kensington, and a home in Richmond, getting there can be as long a journey as visiting family in my native Brighton.

Either by accident or design, Anglo-Jewry is recreating its own ghetto. The pull of north-west London, its Jewish institutions, its marriage market and the easy availability of kosher food and produce, is having a deleterious impact on other communities.

Herding the community and its institutions together in one part of town makes us more of an inwardrather than an outward-looking people. It creates its own culture of north London accents, north London attitudes and opinions and a “keep-up with the Cohens” form of affluence.

Everyone living and working in London deserves the easiest access to our greatest institutions whether it be the Office of the Chief Rabbi or cultural institutions. The stranglehold on our community institutions by north London needs to be challenged.

Alex Brummer is City Editor of the Daily Mail