Locals only
On building community: from bookshop to barber, and beyond.
“The usual?”
Two words. A lifetime in the making.
I moved to London just under two years ago. I’ve lived in a few different flats, but I’ve always stayed within fifteen minutes of London Fields. So I feel like a local.
I’ve got a barber. A dry cleaner. A bookshop. A gym. A club. I basically live like Belle from Beauty and the Beast. I walk around with a book, doing laps of the neighbourhood, saying hi to the same faces.
But it’s not just about finding home in places I’d expect — it’s about finding community in places I didn’t. My gym. The dry cleaner. They started as chores. Now they’re touchpoints.
Traditionally, third places were community. Church, a club, the pub. They came bundled in with a postcode, a routine, a bit of luck. Now they come with a membership. A branded tote. A £300 invoice. We’ve put a paywall around connection and called it curated. But you don’t need to subscribe to belong. You just need to keep showing up.
Which is why the 15-minute city conspiracy theory always confuses me. Somehow, being able to walk to your café, your gym, your bookshop has become controversial — like it’s part of some grand dystopian plan. In reality, it’s the dream.
And that’s especially true if you live alone. Or work remotely. Or both. When you don’t have coworkers or housemates or a packed calendar, “the usual” becomes your scaffolding. These small recognitions — a nod from the trainer, a chat with the charity shop guy — give shape to your days. You build identity not through intensity, but through continuity.
It’s not magic. It’s just muscle memory.
Some places felt like home to me straight away. The Barbican. The Mildmay Club. I’m there every week. But there’s also something powerful about building community in the places that don’t come naturally.
For me, that’s Rumble, my gym. I didn’t grow up loving exercise. I’ve learned to enjoy working out, but mostly as a byproduct. Still, I keep going. And now the trainers know my name. They’ll notice if I miss a week. We’ve become friends.
Even the transactional stuff has softened. I look forward to catching up with Hayden, my barber. I swap stories with my dry cleaner. The guy in my local charity shop keeps books aside for me. It’s a lovely thing, being the Belle of East London. I just hope they haven’t secretly written a song about how weird I am.
This is part of my ‘every day in May’ series: unpolished writing, published daily.