A half-century after the Khans immigrated to Britain, their adopted neighborhood is fittingly at the heart of an anxiety shaping Mr. Khan’s mayorship — about the status of working-class London and whether it can still be saved.
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Andy Haslam for The New York Times
Today’s Tooting sits on the property development vanguard: an uncertain neighborhood caught between “up and coming” and “arrived.” Already, it has lost its status as predominantly blue collar and scarcely resembles the borough of Mr. Khan’s boyhood.
Get out at Tooting Broadway station, by the century-old statue of King Edward VII. On a recent Sunday morning, a lone flower merchant at a stall just outside the station was selling bouquets of pink lilies — and “orchids for a fiver” (5 pounds). Across the road, the remnants of a raving Saturday night lay untouched: an overturned grocery cart, swiped from the megastore down the road, a half-full bottle of chardonnay and a neat pile of vomit. Walk north on Tooting High Street, which follows the line of a Roman-built road.
If Bus 44 seems to begin in the beating heart of Imperial Britain, its ending here is decidedly post-Empire: a heady cultural mix. The side-by-side Broadway Market and Tooting Market are worth a morning’s wander. Past the vape store and the craft beer shop, things get interesting: an Afro-Caribbean takeout restaurant, salons hawking hair weaves and henna tattoos, an abaya bazaar, a bicycle-themed cafe, a comic shop selling old Marvel prints and the Annapoorneshwari Astrology Centre, which boasts a specialty in “all types of astrology” including “future of your life” and “black magic.”
The low-budget “Oriental Shop” sells canned jackfruit and Cheez-Its while, next door, a sleek pizzeria serves pies on sourdough crust. At the tiny Harry’s Chocolate Emporium, try the 60 percent chocolate bar filled with cheese fondant. (The bacon version is too cloying.)
It’s enough to make a Londoner — even a Canadian transplant, like this writer — nostalgic, in the sour sort of way that one can pine for only something that has yet to pass, but is sure to go soon. In British newspapers, Tooting is sometimes referred to as “the new Shoreditch” in reference to the slick East London neighborhood that was also, once upon a time, down on its heels. To translate: That’s a bit like labeling something “the new Brooklyn” or “the new Berlin” and hoping things stay cool, stay “authentic.”
Many of Tooting’s lower-income residents (often immigrants from South Asia and the Caribbean) have already been priced out, but many others remain in sprawling housing developments or turn-of-the-century townhouses. For now. Of the 16,239 Tooting residents counted in the most recent census (2011), nearly half were born outside Britain and 53 percent identified as mixed race or nonwhite.
That number brings Tooting in line with Greater London, just 45 percent of which identifies as “white British” — down from 58 percent in 2001, and compared with 80 percent for broader England and Wales. Muslims make up 21 percent of Tooting’s population. More unusually, 0.4 percent of Tooting (63 people) identifies religiously as “Jedi Knight” — in reference to the “Star Wars” films.
The area’s ability to evoke urban nostalgia is perhaps why Mr. Khan’s childhood in Tooting featured so prominently in his early campaign addresses. Indeed, the Labour Party candidate’s strategic use of Tooting did not go unnoticed. Opponents accused Mr. Khan of a mushy sort of wistfulness — of endlessly alluding, in stump speeches, to a bygone 1970s era, when life in London was ostensibly sweeter and fairer. Conservatives branded him a political nostalgic, much as detractors of Donald J. Trump in the United States objected to his descriptions of 1950s American “greatness.”
Northward leads you past the Tooting Islamic Centre and the Mirch Masala restaurant, which Mr. Khan has claimed as his local spot and where he was sometimes interviewed for glowing campaign articles that invariably involved photo shoots featuring food. On a Saturday afternoon, the dish to order is the nihari: a lamb leg delivered in a thick, fat-laced broth — so tender you could cut it with a butter knife.
Across from Tooting’s northern subway station, Tooting Bec, is the Wheatsheaf pub, an old public house. “When I was growing up, it was an I.R.A. pub and I used to run past it,” Mr. Khan told The Guardian in 2014, referring to the Irish Republican Army that fought for independence from Britain during the bloody Northern Ireland conflict. “Now I come here even though I don’t drink. There are quizzes on Sunday nights.”
Today, the Wheatsheaf is a kind of every London pub: recently renovated from rugged old-man boozer into bright, upscale-ish bar with dark wood interiors. Its menu is designed to accommodate almost everyone — with appearances from French onion soup, crispy pork with Asian slaw, cauliflower curry, pappardelle with Italian sausage, and a tenacious steak and kidney pie with mashed potatoes.
East from your starting point brings you along Mitcham Road. There is an Italian shoemaker, a West Indian bakery, a Polish deli and Balkanika, an eastern European food shop that sells canned tripe soup and trashy romance novels in Balkan languages. While you are there, peek inside the Gala Bingo Club, which used to be the famed Granada Cinema and which debuted, in the 1930s, with a screening of “Monte Carlo.”
Built in the Art Deco style, the playhouse was so elegant that it was known, in its time, as a “cathedral of the talkies.” Early on a recent Sunday, two elderly women in black orthopedic running shoes sat smoking on the building’s steps. Inside, a lone patron played Sizzling Slots under a chandelier.
If you keep moving east, you’ll hit Furzedown, a quiet, residential area where Mr. Khan and his family live. It’s fairly unremarkable, where houses cost a little less than in central Tooting, because they are farther from major transport links.
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Adam Ferguson for The New York Times
A stunning 75 percent of voters in Wandsworth, the London borough encompassing Tooting, voted against Brexit last June. That figure stands out from the rest of the capital city, which also rejected Brexit, but by a smaller margin.
Mr. Khan, for his part, is fighting Brexit from the capital: trying to insulate a city that didn’t want what is coming. He started a “London Is Open” public relations campaign and is angling for special deals on post-Brexit work visas. At the same time, he has seized the spirit of the time to push for more municipal autonomy. In October, he joked about declaring London a city-state, akin to Vatican City. “I love the sound of El Presidente,” he joked in The Financial Times.
Still, it’s hard not to see Brexit and Mr. Trump as populist repudiations of what Mr. Khan stands for, symbolically, as a Tooting-born “son of a Pakistani bus driver”-turned-mayor. Or even as a more concrete slap in the face; Mr. Trump, after all, has threatened to ban Muslims from terror states from entering America.
Another way to look at things, though, is to see London’s mayoral race as a foreshadowing of what was to come in greater Britain and America — but what people weren’t quite ready to see back in May 2016.
During the campaign, Mr. Khan’s opponents worked hard to link him with Islamic extremism: drawing attention to moments when Mr. Khan shared conference stages with reported Islamist radicals — or when, as a human rights lawyer and campaigner, he defended some people he described as “unsavory characters,” including a hard-line Islamic cleric who called for the destruction of the Jewish people. They pointed out that Mr. Khan represented an extraordinary 21st-century paradox: He was a career politician whose popularity hinged, in large part, on his claim to outsider status.
Mr. Khan’s team accused the Conservatives of using racially tinged political messaging. Conservatives, in turn, accused Mr. Khan’s people of trying to avoid normal political scrutiny by branding competitors as Islamophobes and racists. But then Mr. Khan won, and many a political commentator declared that rationalism had triumphed over bigotry — and everyone moved on, for a while. Tooting, for its part, was left to bask in the light of Mr. Khan’s ascension.
Today, Mr. Khan’s Twitter feed reads almost like a caricature of earnest liberalness, with tweets about homelessness, pollution, subway disruptions and worthy municipal task forces. He posts photos with multicultural groups of beaming Londoners and makes reference to his attendance at lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender events and interfaith services.
