OPINION – JOSH GLANCY: A bus ride of reflection through my north London heartland
A new public transport route designed for safety in uncertain times speaks to a creeping sense of domestic unease.
I board the 310 bus at the southern end of Golders Green station, outside the building that used to be the Hippodrome, nearly became a mosque and is now a slightly mysterious megachurch. I am, as far as I can tell, the only Jewish person on board.
We drive through my north London heartlands. Past the house on North End Road where I used to have handwriting lessons to cure my illegibility; past Kenwood, scene of my triumphant year 3 history project and so many childhood rambles.
We trundle past quiet gated streets and wide plutocratic avenues. This, it occurs to me, more than anywhere else, is my home; verdant, solid and affluent, a place of ease and plenty.
And yet the very existence of this bus speaks to a creeping sense of domestic unease. Upon unveiling the new 310 bus route between Golders Green and Stamford Hill, London mayor Sadiq Khan emphasised that “given the terrible rise in antisemitism, this route will provide a safe route for local residents”. The BBC agreed: “Bus service to help Jewish Londoners feel safe” ran its headline.
The truth of the 310 is slightly more complicated: the bus route has been mooted for 15 years as a connection between the twin totems of frum London – it is not simply a rapid response to October 7 and rising antisemitism. The bus also travels through long stretches of Hornsey and Archway with nary a yid in sight.
And yet Khan wasn’t indulging in mere empty virtue signalling. It’s also true that changing at Finsbury Park, which was necessary for Golders to Stamford Hill travel before the new bus route, has become a fraught exercise for visible Jews. The year since October 7 has seen a 278% increase in recorded antisemitic incidents in London, according to the Met Police. Some of these have taken place in Finsbury Park, for reasons that are sadly obvious.
It’s happening again, isn’t it? This is the clearest distillation I can think of to describe the feeling many Jews in Britain have had since October 7. A sense that the streets are more hostile, the mood darker, and the boom and bust cycle of diasporic Jewish history entering one of its habitual downturns.
For 150 years and more, Britain has been pretty good for the Jews. We’ve entered both houses of parliament, the supreme court, the honours list, the rich list, but nothing lasts forever. It will happen again eventually, we assume.
This may sound paranoid, because it probably is, but after the “cruel and painful” year that has followed October 7, as Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg recently described it, our imaginations have wandered along these dark, familiar pathways of Jewish memory.
And yet, I still don’t buy it.
In the days and months after October 7, I drew sharp criticism from some parts of the Jewish community online for saying I still thought London was broadly safe for Jews. For saying that the pro-Palestine marches, for all their periodic antisemitic sloganeering, were not a clear and present danger to Jewish safety. What we’ve seen is very troubling, I argued, but it should be viewed with a sense of perspective: Britain has long been a relative haven for Jews and that won’t change overnight.
There are undeniably some worrying trends apparent in Britain, but I still believe this country to be civilised and tolerant and fundamentally liberal
Thus far at least, I believe I’ve been vindicated. There is undeniably a darkness in our lives that wasn’t there before; a year ago, I was still writing comic columns for the Jewish Chronicle, splitting the difference between bagels and beigels. Much has changed. Life is heavier, more fearful. Antisemitism is certainly more present. But the pogroms of the Pale, the murderous rampages that drove most of us to seek sanctuary here in the first place, have not come to the streets of Britain. Nor do I expect them to anytime soon, though the potential for violence still lingers on the margins.
On my 310 bus ride to Stamford Hill, wending our way through Haringey, I listened to Isaiah Berlin’s Desert Island Discs from 1992. The liberal philosopher spoke of his childhood, seeing the Russian Revolution in St Petersburg. He said that he considered Britain to be the best country in the world.
Why did he think so, a slightly surprised-sounding Sue Lawley asked. “I think it’s civilised and fundamentally liberal,” Berlin said. “I think it’s unsqualid. On the whole people are more tolerant. If liberal civilisation is what we’re in favour of, then of the great countries of the world I think perhaps it comes top.”
The pogroms of the Pale, the murderous rampages that drove most of us to seek sanctuary here in the first place, have not come to the streets of Britain. Nor do I expect them to anytime soon
Berlin, who came to Britain from the fires of totalitarian Bolshevism, admired the fact that in this country people are broadly left to live how they please. “To go their own way, if need be, provided they don’t obstruct other people too much.”
Nowhere is this more true than in Stamford Hill itself, where my bus journey ended. I disembarked the 310, which had finally picked up some actual Jews, outside Rav Pinter Close, next to the Yesoday Hatorah school and Shloimy’s Judaica shop.
Everywhere in Stamford Hill there are frum Jews going their own way, their lives hardly different in character or rhythm to the ones they once lived in Grodno or Bialystok. Unlike in Tsarist Russia, however, they are (mostly) protected by British police, supported by the British state and left pretty much to their own devices.
There are undeniably some worrying trends apparent in Britain, but I still believe this country to be civilised and tolerant and fundamentally liberal. If that means putting on an extra bus route, in part to assuage fears of sectarian cruelty, then that is what the Muslim mayor of our capital city has done. When one thinks of all that has transpired elsewhere this past year, it is worth remembering that for all our anxiety, both justified and irrational, British Jews today remain transcribed in history’s book of life.
• Josh Glancy is News Review editor at the Sunday Times. You can read more of his Jewish News columns HERE
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