One such area is Old Union Yard Arches, made up of a collection of establishments, including the Africa Center, a Spanish theater company, an aerial fitness gym, a Genovese restaurant and Bala Baya, an Israeli-Bauhaus place that serves delicious small plates such as stuffed peppers with smoked freekeh and citrus yogurt, or chickpea and oxtail accompanied by the best tahini I have ever tasted. Whether this tahini will rescue the soul of Bankside remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t count it out.

Nearby, the new Hilton London Bankside on Great Suffolk Street has made an effort to inculcate itself into the neighborhood by bridging past and present. While its lobby and facade are standard contemporary faux-chic, its Victorian steampunk bar, the Distillery, is named after the old Stevenson & Howell fragrance factory that occupied the site in the 1800s. I ordered one of its fragrance-inspired cocktails, “Thus With a Kiss I Die,” a delicious amalgamation of mezcal, amaro, sweet vermouth and chocolate bitters combined by the bartender in front of me with a great flourish. The problem was drinking the thing. I sipped my potation in one section of the bar, only to be told that it was reserved for a corporate party. When I moved to another part of the bar I was informed that it was also reserved for a corporate party.

“Where can I sit?” I asked. The waiter sheepishly pointed to a lone chair in the corner. “There, I think, is O.K.,” he said. Next to me, I could feel the ghost of Jane Jacobs cringing.

That evening I attended a show in the Bunker Theater on Southwark Street called “Dear Home Office,” put on by eight young refugees and their caseworker, in which they enacted the intimate and harrowing story of applying for political asylum in Britain. The theater was packed, a wonderful buzz permeated the air. The actors were not professionals and their nervousness was palpable, but their performance felt authentic; the art was the assimilation. Afterward, as I wandered through the construction zones and semi-abandoned streets of Bankside’s commercial district, I recalled what my waiter at Bala Baya had said to me: that he often feels a refugee in his own city, a city he no longer recognizes, a city in which he can no longer afford to live.

I returned to London a month later, in March, the day after a terrorist attack in which a man had run down pedestrians with a car before fatally stabbing a police officer outside of Parliament. The mood of the city was defiant; business had not stopped. Regular life became both a form of resistance and mourning. When another attack occurred in June, this time in Southwark itself, at Borough Market, citizens were again unyielding in their adherence to life: Even fleeing from the scene, at least one Londoner insisted on carrying his overpriced pint with him.

For me, such cultural defiance did not come so easily. I had come to town to witness the Tate Modern’s first performance festival, the awkwardly titled “BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights,” but found myself in a strange mood, mulling over the inherent sense of public trust upon which all cities depend. At a time like this, I couldn’t decide if my visit to a museum was an indulgent luxury or a reaffirmation of the city’s vital artistic humanism.