Adapted from a feature that first appeared in June 2025 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.
What is a Londonist - besides the name of this website? It's a question I'm often asked.
At risk of sounding like Alan Partridge, Londonist is an attitude; it’s a frame of mind. It’s a way of looking at this great city.
To be a Londonist is to be one who celebrates or champions London. Not in a blind or naive way — for London has many problems. But with optimism, positivity, curiosity and an eye for the history and continuities of the city.
Londonist.com and Londonist: Time Machine (our history newsletter) strive to embody all of those characteristics. Always have, always will.
Where did the phrase ‘Londonist’ come from?
The word Londonist was coined in 2004 by Rob Hinchcliffe and Euan Mitchell. They set up Londonist.com as a UK analogue of already popular American sites such as Gothamist (New York) and Chicagoist. (Note that the website is Londonist, not The Londonist… in the same way you wouldn’t say The Time Out.)
Londonist in its current form might only be 22 years old, but the term has a much older antecedent.
The first person to use the phrase in a meaningful way was Marcus Fall in his 1880 book London Town: Sketches of London Life and Character. Fall titles his very first chapter ‘The Londonist’, and sets out to define such a person:
This vast confluence of streets, and lanes, and squares, and parks, and institutions, and nationalities, and telegraph wires, and interests, and commerce, and ambitions called London is to him the most amazing and glorious spectacle ever presented to the human eye, the most enthralling theme ever given to the human tongue.
Fall notes that a typical Londonist is not necessarily from London, but often from a small northern or midland town. Incomers from big cities like Manchester or Liverpool, or from overseas, have too much sense of rivalry and pride in their origins to ever fully embrace London. I’m not sure how true that is generally, but as someone from a small midland town (Grimsby), it certainly describes me.
For the Londonist there is no place in all the world like the region of his worship. You may seek to argue with him. You may tell him Calcutta is hotter; Quito is higher; Paris is less muddy; Rio Janeiro is better situated; Rome is crowned with the laurels of successive histories;—all to no purpose. So far as he is concerned, he thinks it better to be buried in London than live and reign anywhere else on Earth.
Oh dear. I feel seen. Almost 150 years after those words were written, here I am, Mr Londonist, a man who has not left the country in 12 years, because he gets all the travel thrills he needs from a rainy bus journey through Penge. No, I really do.
Are you a Londonist?
Here are some habits that might mark you out as a Londonist, as opposed to a regular Londoner. How many can you tick off?
- You never walk by the quickest route, but by the most interesting route.
- A regular Londoner will never admit to visiting ‘tourist traps’ like Leicester Square or Piccadilly Circus or (shudders) The Mall. But you do, because you know that there is life and wonder and history in these places, too.
- You carry a Tube map everywhere. Not for navigation, but so you can tick off every station you’ve been to.
- You instantly know the answer to the old pub-quiz question: “Which is the only Tube station to contain none of the letters in ‘mackerel’".
- You know precisely where to stand on the station platform so that you’re in the optimal spot for the exit at your destination.
- Open House weekend(s) in September, when lots of buildings open their doors to visitors, is marked on your calendar a year in advance. You have turned down wedding invitations to ensure you don’t miss it.
- You know the difference between a K2 and a K6 phone box. And who designed them. And what else he designed. And who his grandfather was.
- You know your alleyways, and you’re not afraid to use them. (Except on Sunday mornings when the uric miasma is impassable.)
- The words ‘secret’, ‘underground’ and ‘tunnel’ individually send a demi-quiver of glee up your spine.
- While regular Londoners might do jocular impressions of the ‘Mind the gap’ announcements, you can replicate the unique ways that ‘Neasden’ and ‘Highgate’ are enunciated on the Tube.
- You take your family on holiday to Swanage, ostensibly to have a nice seaside vacation, but really because you want to photograph the various bollards, railings and clock towers that were shipped there from London in Victorian times.
- You know the difference between Northwood, Norwood, Northolt, Norbury and Northfields.
- The words “Do not touch the walrus” are meaningful.
- You have a niggling desire to visit North Ockendon, purely because it’s the only significant part of London outside the M25. You may already have been.
- You’ve visited every pub in the Square Mile, or walked the entire Thames Path, or photographed every one of Mark Wallinger’s Tube labyrinths… or some other completer-finisher task with a London flavour.
- You’re late meeting friends because you stopped to photograph a curious example of street furniture.
- You’re more likely to have been in the Sewing Machine Museum or the Ink Museum than Madame Tussauds.
- You have pet names for each of the City boundary dragons.
- You can name at least one Lord Mayor of London who isn’t Dick Whittington.
- You know very well that ‘Big Ben’ is the name of the bell and not the tower, but you still call the tower Big Ben to troll people into saying “Big Ben is the name of the bell and not the tower,” just so you can then correct them by replying “No, Big Ben is the name of a bell, not the bell (there are five), and in any case it is a nickname for the Great Bell of Westminster, so if it’s OK to use the nickname for the bell, then I shall also use the nickname for the tower, which is known as ‘Big Ben’ to 90% of the world’s peoples”. … “No, wait, come back!”
So, are you a Londonist?
