When I lived here, this mix of dripping corporate inauthenticity and stultifying paternalism was there like a suffocating blanket, but the city had a strong counterculture to balance it out. London is a city of endless helpful requests coldly delivered to sound like orders, alongside matey propaganda designed by M&C Saatchi to make corporate platforms look warm and cuddly. It spikes further as I try to avoid looking at the MFlow cameras from Human Recognition Systems Ltd, their swirling lights trying to attract my attention so they can log my iris and track me around the airport to optimise crowd control. It builds as I force myself to look into the facial recognition cameras to trigger the e-gates through the border. It must be something subliminal I’m picking up, but what? It starts when I see the HSBC billboards that line the passage to the passport control, with pictures of grandparents and kids alongside slogans like ‘together we thrive’. She means it half-jokingly, but it’s true that I sense a creeping darkness looming in the city that I can’t easily put words to, but feel in my body. Alarms start ringing in my nervous system, like those birds that cause a racket when danger is approaching.Ī friend tells me it’s because I’m an ‘economic empath’. As I disembark at Gatwick airport and step into the terminal, I’m hit with the punch of an invisible forcefield. I lived in London for 11 years, and hold a deep affection for the city, but when I visit now I feel physically uneasy.

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