The lettering is the first thing you notice when you get off the train at New Malden. Hangul climbs the storefronts next to English signage, sometimes matching and sometimes surpassing it. There is an Asian grocery store the size of a small supermarket, a karaoke bar, and a bakery. Nando’s remains Nando’s. However, the scent of bulgogi wafts from a restaurant whose door is wedged open with a brick, and a woman is unloading napa cabbage crates from a van three doors down.
You wouldn’t anticipate this kind of detail twenty-two minutes away from Waterloo. On paper, New Malden appears to be a typical suburb in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. It was developed following the arrival of the railway in 1846, gradually grew through Edwardian terraces and 1930s semis, and was incorporated into Greater London in 1965. A fish and chip shop is located there. Iceland exists. A Costa is unavoidably present. In some way, there is also the biggest Korean community in Europe.
The tale of how that occurred is a combination of economics, accident, and the peculiar logic of diaspora formation. The original South Korean embassy was situated nearby in Coombe, and the ambassador’s home was situated on Lord Chancellor’s Walk. In the 1980s, Samsung established its first European headquarters here. The seeds of something can be found in a joint venture between Racal Avionics and a Korean chaebol in the 1950s. The rest is word-of-mouth; a Korean family moves in, followed by their cousins, their cousins’ coworkers, and so on, until the high street starts to change in ways that the original inhabitants could not have imagined.
Speaking with locals gives the impression that New Malden’s relationship with its Korean community has developed into something akin to dependence. The town was struggling—the kind of mid-recession high street where half the windows were papered over—before the Koreans arrived in significant numbers. Rent and foot traffic were restored by the Korean companies. What appears to be a calm, slightly perplexed coexistence has largely replaced any animosity that may have previously existed between locals and newcomers. On a Tuesday night, a man at the noraebang doesn’t seem to care that the lyrics on the screen behind him are written in three different alphabets.
Internal tension is more intriguing. Approximately 700 Koreans are from the North; they are nearly all refugees who risked their lives to flee. Many thousands of South Koreans live on the same high street as them, and the two groups rarely interact. Many South Koreans claim to have a temperamental affinity for the English, who they describe as being reserved and private in similar ways, and they typically travel for work or educational purposes. Arriving North Koreans bring something quite different. A few years ago, an escapee named Choi Joong-hwa told a journalist that he chose Britain because he had been taught it was the oldest democracy in the world, even in Pyongyang’s closed schools. It’s shocking to hear, but practically everyone who has conducted community interviews has said it repeatedly.
This gap manifests itself in subtle, daily ways. One woman openly acknowledged that South Korean parents are not always comfortable with their kids interacting with Northern students at school. The Northerners are still cautious because they have spent their entire lives in suspicion. Many of them have trouble speaking English, and they speak an older dialect of Korean that is occasionally incomprehensible to Southerners. Some are discreetly dismissed by their more affluent peers as benefit scammers. It is unsettling to watch this unfold on a single suburban high street in a way that feels distinctly contemporary—the geopolitics of a divided peninsula transferred into the line at a pharmacy in Kingston.
Nevertheless, New Malden succeeds in some way. To the best of everyone’s knowledge, it is the only location outside of the Korean peninsula where the two halves of that nation live, eat, shop, and pray so close to one another. There are Korean hair salons, Korean churches, and Korean nurseries. Charities that support the arts are attempting, with varying degrees of success, to unite the two communities. Here, twenty-two minutes from Waterloo, there is a subtle sense that something is being figured out, slowly and awkwardly.
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