The process of yookay-ification

A personal tour around an emerging country

A version of this article was previously published in The Critic on the 11th June.

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The value of the word ‘yookay’ is that it reveals the reality behind the rhetoric of multiculturalism. Those who employ this rhetoric are most comfortable talking about new varieties of food and music, learning from other cultures (though exactly what is being learnt is never specified), and vague notions of communities coming together. Multiculturalism as an ideal has always derived from think tanks and editorials, but insofar as the vision is based on real places, they are the fashionable areas of cities like London; places like Brixton or Hackney, for example.

These neighbourhoods have the food and the music and the diverse communities living in close proximity. These communities though do not, of course, really come together, the diversity here serves primarily as a backdrop to the lives of those who create our narratives of multiculturalism. Despite representing a very small proportion of the ethnically diverse areas of the country, these places hold an outsize importance because of how influential they are in the official discourse of what multiculturalism is. The demographics of TV adverts, for example, owe much more to the streets of Brixton than to somewhere like Birmingham (i.e. black people are more represented than Asians), even though the latter is more representative of what ethnically diverse Britain actually looks like.

The opposing vision of multiculturalism has been one of impending doom and collapse that draws on the worst pathologies of the new Britain, of grooming gangs, crime, Islamism, terrorism, and the looming spectre of civil war. Multiculturalism’s advocates generally dismiss this vision as non-representative, as a catastrophising viewpoint only taken seriously by overly online Americans. Regarding its most hyperbolic forms, they are right to do so.

The yookay, though, is something else: it is neither the vibrant vision that advocates are thinking of when they use the word ‘multiculturalism’, but nor is it one of societal collapse and ethnic conflict. The yookay is grotty, banal, and above all real, it is the emerging Britain that is generally unseen and unrepresented, precisely because it is not especially compelling either in a positive or a negative way. The more yookay a place is, the less likely it is to be on the cultural radar. If somewhere like Brixton represents the imagined multicultural community, the yookay represents the real one, and every year it becomes more representative of the country as a whole.

One way to visualise its growth is the ONS’s 2021 Ethnicity dot-density map, likely already out of date, but showing the change with a statistician’s regular neutrally-coloured dots. The yookay though is a more visceral and aesthetic concept, so I want to give my own personal (and therefore necessarily incomplete) account.

There are some parts of Britain which have, if anything, gone through the yookay stage and out the other side. Southall or Upton Park in London, Bury Park in Luton, or Westwood in Oldham genuinely do feel a bit like being in India. Here it is a rarity to see a white person or indeed anyone who does not look subcontinental (I should use the more technical term South Asian, but this has always smacked too much of international NGO-speak to me). These places were the original destinations during the first wave of 20th-century immigration, and the combination of this early start, continued inflows, and the undesirability of their locations for gentrification has meant that they have come to be, once again, relatively homogenous - just with different people. As an illustrative example, while in most parts of the yookay (such as Slough, as we’ll come to) the pubs are the last holdout of the English, so complete has the replacement been in these places that even this role has disappeared. The one I visited by the station in Upton Park, for instance, had an atmosphere reminiscent of the sort of downscale male-only bars you find in an Arab city like Tunis.

What does remain though is the characteristically British built environment of the 19th and early 20th century. The red brick buildings, rows of terraced houses, occasional Victorian churches, town halls and war memorials (and in somewhere like Oldham or Rochdale, textile mills) are juxtaposed with the new demographics in a way that defines the yookay aesthetic. Even the mosques often look like they have been built by Barratt Homes. Aside from the shopfronts (and the mosques), the architectural signs of change are generally more subtle: the black trimmings and front doors with a crescent-shaped set of windows on the terraced houses, for example.

Then there’s the places that are on their way to being somewhere like the above but are not quite there yet - central Slough for example. Recently I was walking down the high-street there where nearly everyone was Asian, and then walked into The Moon and Spoon at the end. It is one of those cavernous Wetherspoons that seem to go on forever inside, and it was full of what must have been hundreds of white English people, whose presence had been almost completely absent in the town up until this point. Standing outside, a sight I’ve seen in many similar places, were a few men warily observing the surroundings, appearing as if they were on some sort of guard duty. In the yookay, geography starts to lose its coherence.

Then there’s Dagenham in East London, which before visiting I’d expected to be a place full of Cockney exiles from places further east like Barking. In fact, I found that they had already abandoned it to the yookay. The only ones left gave the unfortunate but inescapable impression of Australian aborigines, drinking in the street, seemingly lost in a world that had left them behind. It was actually a few stops further along the district line in Upminster where the Cockney exiles had settled. Upminster is the final stop on the line, and it left me wondering what will happen when the yookay, already present in Upminster but at a lower level than Dagenham, becomes dominant here too.

Across the river from Dagenham is Thamesmead. Originally developed in the 1960s for working-class families moving from inner London, its brutalist housing estates were used as a setting for the filming of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. It’s not all tower blocks though, the newer bits are the standard type of red-brick housing estates you see everywhere in Britain. The distinguishing feature about Thamesmead though is that it is the place with the highest proportion of Africans in Britain: walking around it is a strange mix of British suburbia and West Africa. Anthony Burgess’s 1960s vision of youths speaking a Russian-influenced argot turns out not to have been imaginative enough.

The yookay aesthetic is grubby and downscale, but it would be a mistake to think of the yookay as universally impoverished. Many parts - Reading for example - are relatively prosperous, and are the sort of place that The Economist has cited as an example of an immigration success story. Reading does work, in the sense that it does not, as the Economist says, have the pathologies of somewhere like Rochdale, and the traditional sights of provincial England: teenage goths and pasty young men selling a communist newspaper, are still there alongside the burgeoning yookay.

Travelling towards London from the west, Reading station feels like the current border in this part of the country between Britain and the yookay. Around the station, as you will also find in places like Stratford or Ilford in London, are new international-style flats rising over the red-brick that houses both Britain and the yookay. Developments like these, together with shopping malls like Westfield in Stratford, are the sort of buildings that, if I were so politically inclined, I might describe as representing the ‘relentless march of global capital’. The yookay too, architecturally at least, is at risk of replacement.

More stereotypically yookay-like is somewhere like Ipswich, with its combined American-candy-and-vape shops on the high street next to the Ipswich Bazaar urging you to get your sacrificial sheep order in for qurbani. Places like this are what I think really defines the yookay, right on the transition line. David Goodhart talked of somewheres and anywheres. He was referring to people, but the dichotomy can also be applied to places. Southall, or Bury Park in Luton, is a somewhere (else) of a sort, while ‘anywhere’ implies a sort of rootless and aspirational global cosmopolitanism. The places that are most yookay though are not really either of these things; we could, at the risk of stretching Goodhart’s system too much, describe them as ‘nowheres’.

Finally, there are many places that are currently outside of the yookay but that are starting to feel its presence: Horsham in West Sussex is one example. Only a few miles from Crawley, a much more yookay sort of place, Horsham still feels quite traditionally English, though the Deliveroo riders and new dessert cafes show the direction of travel. Gay men have often been termed ‘the shock troops of gentrification’, if we could designate a similar group for the growth of the yookay today, it would be the Deliveroo riders.

Thanks to the Boriswave, we live in a moment when the yookay is expanding into Britain at an ever faster rate. This change on the ground, plus voters’ growing realisation that this is what the Tories chose to do with Brexit, is doubtless a big driver behind Reform’s surge. Starmer’s rhetoric on immigration is stronger than expected, but wedded fundamentally as he is to the existing paradigm, there is little he can really do to change things.

Yet this does not mean that we should blindly follow those who confidently and even hungrily predict an imminent catharsis, a civil conflict that would at least clarify things. People have an amazing capacity to find ways to keep on living in their own little worlds, even if they are increasingly tangled up physically in another. I remember staying in Beirut and being surprised at how the Maronite Christians lived their European-style lives, seemingly untroubled by the presence of Hezbollah a few miles away in the southern suburbs. Since then Lebanon has continued its decades-long descent into crisis, but I would bet that this particular separation persists. There is indeed a great deal of ruin in a nation, even in Lebanon.

Most people tend to quietly adjust to new realities, moving to areas they feel more comfortable in - regardless of their stated ideology - without really admitting the reasons even to themselves. While it is possible that Britain could devolve into conflict, it could also, as the multiculturalism advocates are so fond of saying, just continue to muddle along. Under this scenario its transformation into the yookay would continue to cause disquiet, but not enough to actually make anything happen, although I would say that the faster the pace of change, the more likely it is that something does happen. Regardless of the outcome, what we can say for sure is that the future of Britain is going to be very different from the country its people grew up in. And in predicting what this future will look like, the idea and aesthetic of the yookay will be a far more accurate guide than the idealised one of vibrant multiculturalism.

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