Brexit Diaries #5: (February 1, 2020)

My trip through the post-Brexit London on this day, 1st February 2020, continues, reaching its third and final chapter.

3.00 pm – At Vicarage Road, the Premier League match Watford vs Everton is about to start. Football is surely one of British excellencies, but its market will be affected by Brexit, too. Watford FC is owned by the Pozzo family, who alsoowns Udinese (in Italy) and Granada (in Spain). The success of their business consisted in the possibility to freely transfer players between the three teams thanks to EU’s single market; such practice is surely going to be more difficult to implement after Brexit.

6.00 pm – Travelling back to central London after the match in Watford, I look out of the train passing through London’s suburbs. Uniform red-brick houses in a row under a grey sky characterize many areas of the Outer London which haven’t been caught by London’s urban regeneration and gentrification grip yet and which suffer, according to official statistics, social issues such as low pay, scarce education and even premature mortality. Very few London boroughs (5 out of 33) voted Leave in the 2016 referendum; they were all located in the Outer London.

Follow a European Generation member Gioele Giussani as he travels to London in the first days after the United Kingdom exited the European Union. What are his impressions of post-Brexit London? How do Londoners and other Europeans feel about entering this new era? Read more from this series to find out.