In 1942, Olaf Hambro, an Old Etonian merchant banker, was eating oysters alone at the bar of Wiltons, Jermyn Street, when the church at the other end of the road took a direct hit from a Luftwaffebomb, killing everyone inside. For Mrs Bessie Leal, who had owned Wiltons for 12 years, including the darkest days of the Blitz, this was the final straw.
Mrs Leal folded her tea towel and apron, announcing that she was closing down Wiltons immediately. At the bar, Olaf Hambro finished his oysters and called for his bill, requesting that the cost of buying the restaurant be added to the total.
Olaf Hambro died in 1961, but to this day the Hambro family still owns Wiltons, the best seafood and game restaurant in London - which means the world. As for Mrs Bessie Leal, her fate after she sold Wiltons is lost in the mists of history. But the story of how Wiltons changed hands in 1942 perfectly illustrates the glory and the terror of London. For some, the city is a dangerous, difficult place, ultimately not worth the effort, while for others London presents opportunity, excitement - life itself. Yes, there will be bombs. Londoners have had someone attempting to kill them for the best part of 100 years - first the Luftwaffe, then the IRA and now Islamic terrorists. But London life goes on.
And in the end London presents every man with the same choice. Does London make you want to fold your tea towel and apron and flee to the suburbs? Or are you going to finish your oysters when the bombs go off and ask them to put the restaurant on your bill?
Many bail out. "The grievances are as familiar as old friends," sighed Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times. "House prices, inequality, foreign billionaires of negotiable virtue, the commodification of gritty neighbourhoods, the despoliation of the skyline, anything to do with banking." He was not sympathetic to the London leavers, mocking journalists who wrote tormented essays about becoming London exiles. "Writers chronicle their anguished decisions to leave the capital, as if the spectacle of middle-aged parents quitting a big city is scintillatingly novel."
And yet it does feel like there's a subtle difference to 21st-century flight from London. It is no longer simply the gruelling pace of life that is forcing some to throw in the towel. It is the cruel rule that, to live in London now, you must be prepared to compete with the rest of the planet. For the world has come to London. It feels like everyone wants to live here now, from Russian oligarchs to Romanian gypsies. They sleep rough in Hyde Park and they build palaces at Hyde Park Corner. When Londoners arrive home at Heathrow, we pass through exactly the same immigration channel as the citizens of 27 other EU nations. And the EU is just the start. It is only over the past few years that you have heard Chinese spoken on London streets - not the Hong Kong Cantonese of Chinatown, but real, mainland Putonghua.
They come to London for many reasons - because of the booming black market economy, because of the great private schools, because London property is the reserve capital of the world and because we speak English.
The greatest single expansion of the European Union happened on 1 May 2004 when ten new nations, most of them Eastern European, joined the EU. Only a few member states allowed the new EU citizens to immediately work without restriction and the UK was one of them.
But these ambitious, hard-grafting young Eastern Europeans were not interested in moving to Luton or Liverpool. In the greatest wave of migration in our nation's history, most of them came to London.
In terms of population, London is widely reported to be the sixth biggest French city (270,000) and the second biggest Hungarian city (200,000). There are 150,000 Poles and, a decade since the big EU bang, many of them have grown up here. These figures are endlessly disputed, for the truth is that nobody really knows. The numbers are too great to count, the immigration churn too epic, the magnetic lure of London too strong to be quantified.
But if you are going to live in London, then you have to take on the world. You have to compete - and it doesn't matter if you are a self-made millionaire or a van driver. The long-term Londoners who work hard are now contending with newcomers who work seven days a week. Londoners who fly first class are suddenly vying - for houses, for school places, for restaurant tables - with people who fly in private planes. In this new London, there is always someone richer than you, there is always someone who is prepared to work harder than you do, there is always someone who wants it much more than you do. At least that is the way London feels today.
Like the undisputed capital of the world.
This new London is not for everyone. In the FT, Ganesh noted that the conservative right and the liberal left had joined forces in their hatred of modern London. "Both sides see the city as a stage for unbound individualism," he wrote. "When a conservative blanches at mass migration and a social democrat seethes at the cocooned mega-rich, they are both taking on varieties of personal freedom. There is nothing odd or shameful about some people flunking out - high-velocity social change is not for all stomachs."
In the Guardian, Rafael Behr wrote a goodbye letter to London, full of bitter regret. "London's bigness is transcendent," wrote Behr, who was Brighton-bound. "It sees only New York as a rival, with Paris respected as a veteran of the game, past its prime." But in the end - as with all London conversations - Behr's sign-off returned to the city's great subject. Where are we to live? It is the great London dilemma. "Ultra-affluence brings its own peculiar kind of dislocation, palpable in places like Chelsea and St John's Wood, that were always well-off but used to feel more securely woven into the fabric of the place," he added. "The gilded class is more segregated now, gazing out from behind tinted glass and security-coded gates."
What changed most about London at the end of the last century and the start of this is that property prices shot through the ozone layer. The influx of the rich and super-rich had a knock-on effect in every corner of the city. Demand for homes in London apocalyptically exceeds supply. The average London house cost £493,026 in the summer of 2015, and estate agent Savills predicts that prices in central London will increase by 26 per cent by the end of 2017. If you did not clamber on the London property ladder in the 20th century, then the smart money says that you never will.
You either have to rent or move to Hove.
Zoopla reports there are now almost 250,000 property millionaires in London. There are 13 London streets with houses worth an average of £10 million or more. One of them, Frognal Way, NW3, is two streets from my home and the scary thing is that it doesn't look like much.
In Capital, his sprawling London novel, John Lanchester suggested that soaring property prices make London homes feel as if they have a life of their own. "The houses were now like people, and rich people at that, imperious, with needs of their own that they were not shy about having serviced," he wrote. "As the houses had got more expensive, it was as if they had come alive and had wishes and needs of their own. Vans from Berry Bros & Rudd brought wine; there were two or three different vans of dog-walkers; there were florists, Amazon parcels, personal trainers, cleaners, plumbers, yoga teachers, and all day long, all of them going up to the houses like supplicants and then being swallowed up by them..."
This new London - full of modest homes worth £1m or more - is completely different from the London that many of us remember in our youth, the old grubby London of bedsits, squats, flat shares - the London where there was always somewhere to live. That London is gone forever. Now those who own London property don't talk about moving out. They talk about cashing in their chips.
Lanchester wrote, "Having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner. If you already lived there, you were rich. If you wanted to move there, you had to be rich."
This was all true enough - but it makes London sound like it is the private playground of foreign millionaires rather than a teeming metropolis where nine million souls live their life. And the newcomers were not all cynical carpetbaggers who simply saw London property as the best investment in the world. Something happened to those rich Russians and Chinese who came to London, and to the young Poles, Hungarians, French and Italians.
Many fell in love with London. And there is a lot to love.
One morning in autumn, early for a business breakfast at the Ham Yard Hotel, I stepped off Piccadilly into the courtyard of the Royal Academy and wandered into a hallucinogenic experience, a fairy-tale woodland of monumental dead trees. It was an installation by Ai Weiwei, but it felt like magic - that strange London magic that creeps up on you at unexpected moments, the magic that can ambush you in the course of a working day. "Early rain and the pavement's glistening," sang Noël Coward, "all Park Lane in a shimmering gown."
You don't get that in Brighton.
This is what holds my heart to London - the moments of magic and mystery, the enduring romance of the place. For me it is a misty morning on Hampstead Heath and a triple espresso in the Bar Italia and getting two suits made on Savile Row and the Nash buildings that ring Regent's Park, as white as snow in heaven. And, yes, it is Dover sole and bone-dry Chablis in Wiltons, still owned by the descendants of the man who asked for the restaurant to be put on his bill. And my London is the starlit Thames and the two giant cannons that stand guard outside the Imperial War Museum, and Highgate cemetery and our ever-changing skyline, pierced now by the swaggering Shard.
Everything they say about London is true. To live here you must take on all comers. What they once sang about New York is actually truer of London today - if you can make it here then you can make it anywhere.
But scatter my ashes on Hampstead Heath. Let my dust blow across those green fields forever, may it be carried by the wind from the bathing ponds to Kenwood House to Parliament Hill. It will take everything you have, this city, this capital of the world, this centre of the universe, but London will be worth it.
Love it or leave it.
Originally published in January 2016. Follow Tony Parsons on Twitter: @TonyParsonsUK
