Judah - This is London : life and death in the world city

I have to see everything for myself. I dont trust statistics. I dont trust columnists. I dont trust self-appointed spokesmen. I have to make up my own mind. This is why I am shivering again, in Victoria Coach Station, at 6 am.

I am being pushed around. Automatic doors slide and close. Crowds are dazed with arrival. African men in hoodies and pleather jackets rub their eyes. Polish meatheads grip onto huge toolboxes as they make for the street. Arab men in body warmers and fleeces pull out throwaway phones, and dial those they know.

I have been coming to the coach station every morning now for weeks: counting the buses, and pacing up to strangers first dozens, then hundreds recording what they say into my phone. Again, I am hung-over. I am cold. Again, the freeze steams every pane, and the damp air kneads itself into my clothes.

Wheels crash through dirty water as coaches, bleeping and reversing, unload Paris, Bucharest and Rome. Pigeons flutter and ventilators moan. Hard rain patters the vaulting glass over the grubby terminal like a babys rattle. My hands sting red as I key rapid notes into my screen: this is what life is like, morning after morning, at our miserable Ellis Island. The point from which our society is changing.

This cramped hall, lined with grimy old payphones, echoes with languages I cannot understand: Sinti, Turkish, maybe Swahili. Tiles shine with electric light. Now Eurolines empties. A Romanian woman in a grey shell suit pulls off her hood, smiles timidly, a step away from a stocky man, and flicks her long glossy, brown hair back and forth. An oily, unshaven boy, in all-black hoodie and puffa jacket, drags a sports bag and stares blankly into the squiggling colours of the tube map.

I am standing in the damp again, keying in what I can see.

Because I only trust what I can see. I was born in London but I no longer recognize this city. I dont know if I love the new London or if it frightens me: a city where at least 55 per cent of people are not ethnically white British, nearly 40 per cent were born abroad, and 5 per cent are living illegally in the shadows. I have no idea who these new Londoners are. Or even what their London really is.

This is why I keep coming here.

Paris bleeps in. Wheelie bags click-clack, tugged by French metrosexuals in drainpipe jeans, chirping and gossiping. They wipe the rain off their moisturized faces and brown horn-rimmed glasses. A tall, masculine girl, with a slothlike frame and a jean skirt, pulls herself up to the tiled wall and leans on it for a moment, closing her eyes, until a harried African cleaner in Day-Glo, clutching a mop, accidentally, thwacks her shoulder, and apologizes. But she hardly registers, as my fingers quickly input her reactions: like that Day-Glo is on an invisible man.

Now Cologne bleeps in. Two Bulgarian toughs with lined faces and puffy eyes, in matching sky-blue ski jackets, unload charcoal rucksacks, packed with pneumatic drills. They both scowl as the belly of the coaches empty, as frumpy, squabbling Roma in forest-green headscarves and long black skirts snipe at each other as they haul bin bags, stuffed to bursting with torn blankets and mouldy duvets, over the mirroring puddles. They are following a yawning man under a black leather cap clutching only a scratched violin case.

Making sound recordings of the murmuring din, I lose count of the coaches. Every week two thousand migrants unload at Victoria Coach Station. This is where tens of thousands of migrants arrive every year, the equivalent of a whole city, the size of Basildon or Bath. They are all part of the same thing: the new London.

There is now a little light.

The cold tingles my nerves. I am here because I dont understand this city.

I shove my phone into my pocket. You never learn it all just watching. You never learn it all from the numbers. You have to go up and talk to people: completely, utterly different people from you. I want to talk to those three Roma. I refuse to let someone else tell me what they think.

I follow them into first light.

Three Polish labourers crouch at the entrance, over crinkled plastic bags, gesturing they want to cadge some fags from French flops in beige macs. But here, these are too expensive to share.

Yelling and cursing, and waving to their stragglers, the three Roma trudge forcefully out into the hissing rain. They are all pushing granny trolleys, each massively overloaded with plastic weave sacks, and half a dozen crutches.

They look like they know where they are going.

I pace behind them in scuffed trainers like a thief, keying in what they see: thundering traffic, watery light, the ornate red-brick Edwardian mansion offices, with column porticos, or the monumentally flat, blue glass office fronts, where by the vents the tramps are still sleeping. Around Victoria Station sleeping bags are everywhere. Tramps sleep in the arches, they sleep in the shuttered gates, they sleep in the stone carved colonnade, they sleep by the vents of the dismal space-age mall, they sleep at the bus stops, and in dozens, they sleep on newspaper beds.

I notice the three Roma linger and glance at the tramps huddling all along the porticos of the fantastical, cross-dressing facades on the road to Buckingham Palace.

I count the street-sleepers behind them: six, seven, eight. Twice, I watch them pause, as if looking for friends. The further I follow them, the sooner I realize the Roma are looking for someone, in the sleeping bags curled up on the manky steps of these studied fantasies in stone, these drag queens in fancy dress who long to be ancient Greek and English at the same time, as the road curves round sinister spear-like railings, built to keep the poor out of dark dripping garden squares.

Who are they looking for under these overweening buildings?

They push on past curved lintels and fleshy balustrades overblown geometries, and cornices buildings sculpted with that lurid, time-melting imagination which gripped the English when they were powerful. The Roma are eyeing the tramps waking up until they reach the hurtling traffic and begin to traipse along by a dirty low brick wall, sealing off the bare crowns of chestnut trees, topped with black spikes and barbed wire. These are the battlements of the gardens at Buckingham Palace.

The three Roma glance back, worried.

They know they are being followed now.

This is Hyde Park Corner. Rimmed with enormous pretensions. The stern classical palace its columns and preening pediments, fantasizing it is the Acropolis was once a hospital. But now the Union Jack flutters over the most expensive hotel in London, where every guest has at his disposal a personal, perfectly trained butler. I stand in dim light and imagine the valets in tails throwing open towering old doors once for wheelchairs, patients and nurses to sheikhs, oligarchs and plutocrats. But there is no change in the limestone pudding over the road impersonating a Corinthian temple. This is the old palace of the Duke of Wellington. And his aristocratic progeny still use the upper floors above a fusty museum.