Hesitations, speech mannerisms and patois in the interviews, left unedited, create a sense of a fly-on-the-wall television documentary. Comparisons with George Orwell’s 1933 memoir Down and Out in Paris and London are inevitable and doubtless intentional: like his predecessor, Judah is a somewhat removed young gentleman on a Grand Tour of London, rarely in danger and always able to escape to the warmth and safety of middle-class life: exactly the sort of life absent from these pages. His black and white London of Africans and Eastern Europeans can seem a little too black and white in terms of its absolutism — rich Knightsbridge drunks versus homeless Roma in the Hyde Park underpass; Shepherds Bush ghetto gangsters versus inherited-wealth cokeheads. The average middle-class resident, whose numbers may have shrunk but still undeniably populate great swathes of the city, barely appears — except in comments about the “compounds of white privilege in Peckham” where nightclubs have an “eerie colonial feel”: “These people tell you they like Peckham, that they love the ethnic colour. But this is an expat society. They love it like a prop. Like a stage backdrop to evenings that the Africans are not invited to.”

There is a touch of the bleeding-heart liberal in Judah’s disdain for these hipsters. But, as a rule, he tells the grippingly fascinating stories of the new London without making judgments. Addiction is rife in this nightmare city: from the cheap cans of beer downed in the park (their consumers, the Poles, sniff contemptuously at the British habit of wasting money on more expensive pub pints) to the skunk and cocaine which surfaces in the majority of the stories, a route of escape for the new Londoners whose expectations have been so drastically dashed. The seemingly hopeless, pointless existence of so many is perhaps the reason for the title: a riff on Shane Meadows’s cult 2006 film This is England, which dramatised the lives and nationalist views of skinheads. In fact, so melodramatically apocalyptic does Judah’s story read at times that This is London seems more reminiscent of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Danny in the film Blood Diamond, who explains the ineffectuality of charity workers, the government and rebels in Sierra Leone with the cynical shrug, “TIA — this is Africa.”

Judah’s Londoners came to the city convinced that they would meet with immediate success and wealth. They swiftly discover the harsh reality.  One African immigrant, Akwese, describes the realisation that, far from the paradise he’d been led to expect, he is trapped in a cruel, ruthless nightmare. “The disappointment . . . It was bitter, so bitter.” It is hard not to finish Judah’s book feeling, if not the same despair as Akwese, a distinct sense of unease, due to the lack of any resolution. Judah did not set out to solve the migration crisis, or to right any of the terrible injustices meted out on a daily basis to those living illegally in London’s shadows. But This is London places the darkening condition of our city starkly before our eyes. It is a book that should not be ignored.