A folklorist’s meditation on urban mythology
Most people don’t think of cities as having folklore. Folklore is for rural areas, right? For places with long traditions and deep history. But cities have folklore too. It’s just harder to see because it’s constantly being created and destroyed and recreated.
London’s folklore is about power. About class. About who belongs and who doesn’t. Every street has stories about who lived there, what they did, why they mattered. And most of those stories are about money and status and hierarchy.
I was thinking about this while studying Knightsbridge folklore, and I realized that this neighborhood’s mythology is more carefully constructed than any rural folklore. More expensive. More deliberate. More consciously deployed to maintain power and status.
That’s what interests me. Not the old folklore of the countryside, but the new folklore of the city. The stories we tell to make sense of inequality. To make ourselves feel better about the hierarchy we live in.
