Jonathan Freedland

Has any city ever before experienced such a radical mood swing? At lunchtime on July 6, Londoners huddled around TV sets, turned up car radios and read speedy text messages to get the news: London had won the race to host the Olympics in 2012. They were surprised by that result - after years of British heroic failures, they were assuming defeat - and surprised by their own reaction too. They hadn’t expected to be so pleased; they didn’t realise how much it meant to them. The next morning they were once again engaged in the collective consumption of news - clamouring for the radio, frantically reaching for a functioning mobile phone. This time there was no excitement. It made for a dizzying 24 hours, a plunge from high to low that has shaken the city’s nervous system. But just as individuals often reveal their true character in extremis, so this strange swing has exposed an aspect of London that we may not have noticed before. It may also leave a mark that lasts.

For one thing, London seems to have a keener sense of itself. For years the city seemed more nebulous than its counterparts across the world. Made up of neighbourhoods and villages, each with a distinct identity, London seemed too amorphous to speak as a single city. For nearly two decades it lacked a political voice, indeed any governmental structure at all. Instead it identified chiefly as the vastly overmighty centre of England or Britain — the big throbbing heart of the country, rather than a city in its own right. These two events have not been like that. The pride felt on Thursday was partly at a British success, but chiefly at a victory for London. When people spoke of what “we’’ will do with the prize, the “we’’ was “Londoners’’.

The reversal from Thursday to Friday showed not only that London has a sharp identity but also what that identity now consists of. For what won it in Singapore? We know that Tony Blair and Sebastian Coe worked wonders to win the 2012 Olympic bid for the British capital, but the clincher seems to have been the projection of the capital as perhaps the most diverse city in the world, a place where every national team will find compatriots living close by, where every language of the world is spoken. That was reinforced again on July 7, and not only in the pictures of the injured, who were, predictably, black and Asian as well as white. It was picked up by the mayor, Ken Livingstone, who spoke of London as the place people come “to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential’’. He spoke as if early-21st-century London had inherited the mantle of early-20th-century New York: an immigrant city where masses come “to be themselves’’. Some of the broadcasters tried to invoke the Blitz spirit, suggesting that that would get London thr-ough. Yet it was Livingstone’s vision that felt more apposite. After polls that centred on fear of immigration, London has come to see ethnic variety as part of its very nature - and part of its strength, even against the most dreadful violence. —The Guardian