London Dream, The
by Chris McMillan

The London Dream is about the mythology of London as a place of opportunity, excitement and the possibility of prosperity. But, who really profits from the London Dream?

The London Dream tells the story of a city that promises opportunity, excitement and the possibility of prosperity. It is a mythology has launched millions of migrant journeys. No one benefits more from the flow of willed and willing workers than London’s employers.

And still, they come. They come to a city propelled by a newly cool capitalism and hungry for workers to serve it.

From actors to cleaners, academics to café workers, The London Dream explores the stories of Londoners chasing the dreams offered by the city and the economy within which their precarious hopes become profits.

Reviews:
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. An excellent Marxist reading of working conditions in the gig economy in London. He started off wanting to chart the misery of working conditions but found workers fond of London and keen to get on. Good on "Cool capital" and why exploitative companies don't feel the need to change. ~ Liz Dexter (Reviewer), NetGalley

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. London is the place to be, the place where with a little fortune you can make it big. This is the idea that has soaked imaginations in millions of students or migrants in search of a better future. But the reality is much more complicated and it is made of precarious working conditions, zero-hour contracts, hard work and resilience. With a deep analysis, Chris McMillan demonstrates the intimate connection of the London dream with the brutal logic of capitalism that has at its core a great sense of inequality (accumulation of wealth on one side and misery on the other side). And London is not an exception, because, generally, the most attractive cities are also the most unequal.

London is a place where all migrants are welcome and this openness has made London an attractive hub for businesses and people willing to work above anything else. The City is hungry for new bodies and new dreamers, of people still believing that things can get better because London will provide them with opportunities unavailable elsewhere, of workers desperate to be exploited, even if their salary is well below the London Living Wage. The London dream is the narrative that has motivated Londoners and newcomers for centuries and helped them to justify their suffering. The story of London as the place to be has been continually revived, and even today there is a healthy supply of human material ready for exploitation by the city’s employers hoping for a better life. ~ Francesco Camodeca (Reviewer), NetGalley

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Upfront - I am a researcher in political science and have a special interest in migration and London. So, this book is an excellent match for my personal and academic interest.

I really, really liked this book. McMillan did an excellent job at conveying fact and anecdotal information. "The London Dream" is something that has ingrained itself as a social and cultural phenomena globally. The pull of London is its "coolness" and its history, as well as the potential for excellent work. The stories of migration to London, even if its Englanders moving to their capital or expats from other countries, vary in cause and impact. I think this is an important facet of understanding why and how people move around the globe, especially in heightened globalization + migration (and backlashes against these phenomena). Excellent book and will be suggesting it for my university's library. ~ A Home Library (Reviewer) , NetGalley

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. This book was so informative and interesting. The beginning was a lot about the founding of London and history in the 1800s. It was super interesting but not entirely what I had expected. We then got to current day London which was more of what I had expected. I am very pleased with how it came together and made such an enjoyable read. ~ Katie Martin (Reviewer), NetGalley

Chris McMillan knows the London Dream all too well, and his book shows how the city exploits labour whatever the form of capitalism it has hosted, finds Morgan Daniels

Chris McMillan, The London Dream: Migration and the Mythology of the City (Zero Books 2020), 360pp.

Arriving in the capital a decade ago from his native New Zealand, Chris McMillan expected to find steady employment. Instead, he survived for years through a precarious mix of bitty jobs that just about allowed him to pay the rent. Things were so desperate at one stage that he was tempted to take work as a guinea pig for flu medication (‘all I had to do was not move for a week’). McMillan’s story eventually had a happy ending: he now has both a permanent job and two young children, but as he explores in his timely and witty new book, London doesn’t work out quite so well for everyone.

The London Dream is concerned with the Big Smoke as a place of promise, a grand fantasy that has drawn in millions of migrants across the world and across the centuries. The backbone of McMillan’s research is a series of interviews with workers in a wide range of fields, each of whom has lived the dream in one form or another: a Swedish actor; an Austrian entrepreneur; an outsourced security guard from Nigeria. These contemporary case studies are complemented by a fine sweep through London’s history, going back to the settling of Londinium by the Romans.

McMillan is grounded throughout by Marx, in particular his insight into capitalism’s need for a ‘disposable industrial reserve army’: put otherwise, ‘a mass of human material always ready for exploitation’. Whether The London Dream is profiling an early career journalist, a copywriter, or a casualised academic, the story is usually the same: the jobs market in London is obscenely over-saturated, meaning that there will always be hundreds if not thousands of others ready to be exploited if you’re not. ‘Thus,’ writes McMillan, ‘those not being employed within a given field but still searching for work there have a vital economic function. By being excluded from industry and yet standing as potential workers, they compel employees to accept and endure conditions they are presented with’ (pp.214-15).

One of the most famous examples of the ‘reserve army’ in action in London was on the nineteenth-century docks, when only a third or so of labourers had permanent work. The rest would be up at the crack of dawn in places like Limehouse, prepared to physically fight one another for the hope of a day’s pay. Though we might find such a process ‘barbaric’ today, observes McMillan, the ‘logic of the Victorian docks’ persists in a particularly pronounced way in the gig economy, in the basement-level exploitation of Uber and Deliveroo drivers. The London Dream suggests one big difference between then and now:

‘Although twenty-first century sweated labour has become cleaner, no Victorian employer would try to sell the benefits of insecure work. London’s gig economy companies have less shame, instead promoting the benefits of flexibility, freedom and control’ (p.236).

For me, this straight line between the docks of old and the immoral economy of Uber exemplifies the real value of The London Dream. Just as Marx took the bourgeois economists deadly seriously so as to debunk them, McMillan gives respect to more recent theories of social class with the effect of showing them to be neoliberal nonsense.

Especial attention is afforded to the work of the urbanist Richard Florida’s rigorous promotion of ‘the creative class’ as the motor of economic growth and (therefore) the modern city. Florida’s ideas have had a tremendous influence in the reimagining of whole areas of cities in a ‘cool’ register - street art, wacky open-plan offices, bullshit bars with ball pits, whatever - in the hope of attracting ‘creatives’. The stories that McMillan tells undercut such postmodern conceptions of class.

What I mean is that The London Dream ultimately reaffirms class as a social relation. This is an essential lesson. For all the talk of the gig economy or the creative class, for all the wrecking balls taken to the very notion of labour over the past forty years, class remains a question of one’s relationship to the means of production. Are you the exploiter or the exploited?

‘Capitalism can be cool’ writes McMillan. ‘Capitalism can be cold and brutal. It is still capitalism, whatever form it takes.’ ~ Morgan Daniels, Counterfire

From gentle amusement to bewilderment, Chris McMillan's The London Dream explores what continues to draw so many wide eyed college graduates to the gloomy city streets. Tracing the precarious lives of "creatives" like museum workers, actors, writers and influencers through interviews, McMillan shows how London creates a "cool capitalism" that relies on a sea of talented, unemployed, and thirsty workers, Even more so, McMillan shows the policies and structures that allows cool capitalism to flourish and predate on those vulnerable dreamers. Most interestingly, he pulls the layers back on modern London to show the always hungry worker at the bottom rung, ready to do whatever it takes to make it up another ladder while those at the top watch on with bemusement. A chilling and eye opening read! ~ Nuha Fariha (Reviewer), NetGalley

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. The London Dream was an interesting read for me, having been a previous resident of the city. It pulled the shiny veneer off the city of dreams, claiming that it is essentially still Victorian-era London today with its mass levels of inequality, exploitation, and surplus of labour for few choice jobs. Great read if you're a fan of nonfiction migration stories. ~ Suzanne Bhagan (Reviewer), NetGalley

4 out of 5 stars. The London Dream is a look at the mythology around London as a city and the dreams of success that people have for living there. McMillan looks at a range of jobs and dreams and the ways in which myths have been structured to bring people to London, to contribute to its economy and to its 'cool' status, and how these use certain versions of capitalism and precarious work. Various Londoners have been interviewed and their experiences sit alongside the analysis of the image of 'cool capitalism' and how the labour of precariously employed and badly paid people keeps the cool, creative image of London going.

This is an engrossing book, not because the symbiotic relationship between the 'cool' image of London, which comes with dreams of making it big, and the underpaid, not-officially-employed labour that is needed to make London this way is a revelation, but because McMillan lays out these ideas in a clear, interesting way and combines them with the real stories of people who believe London is their place to be, but have also had to deal with many of its downsides. What feels particularly important is the fact the book covers both the dreams of aspiring creative types trying to break into industries due to the opportunities in London and the dreams of people looking to do often service industry jobs to support themselves and their families, and both groups have 'migrated' to London in some way from somewhere else, on the hope of work and experiences. The history of London in these areas is charted at relevant points, but the book feels very focused on the present, a kind of warning about the labour and personal realities of the dream of the big city.

As someone who did move to London for a couple of years and found some of the content very relatable (I worked alongside aspiring and out-of-work actors in hospitality), The London Dream was particularly satisfying, as a kind of proof that the image of London isn't all it is cracked up to be. The book's specific focus on particular areas of labour, notably the gig economy and the creative industries, means that it leaves you wanting more of a look at other broader and more specific issues, to tear down the 'London dream' and leave behind a reality where things could be better for thousands of people living in the city. ~ Siobhan Dunlop (Reviewer), NetGalley

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Isn't it funny that The London Dream vividly captured what the Nairobi dream is...through the eyes of the workers, of those who are hanging by a thread of hope and like 'New York' the feeling of if you make it here then you can make it anywhere? This book has just reminded me of a path I started pursuing but gave up on - the path of understanding and advocating for policies in cities, on housing and more so on minimum wages for casual laborers and a part of me truly thinks that I can still look into it. ~ Dora Archie Okeyo (Reviewer), NetGalley

In The London Dream, Chris McMillan offers an urgent and expansive account of how long-held fantasies underpin the precarious realities of those whose labour keeps our modern cities running. This is an exciting and timely project, both scholarly and accessible, which asks uncomfortable, necessary questions about the ruthlessness of late-capitalism and our complicity within it. ~ Laurence Scott, author The Four Dimensional Human and Picnic Comma Lightning