Some will be ugly. That might not be the worst sin: that, London can metabolize. Centre Point, stubby tower at the junction of Oxford and Tottenham Court Road, is ugly and, if grudgingly, rather loved. But London’s growing fake public space, corporate-owned stretches that pretend to be piazzas and streets but lock down and exclude citizens as Occupy movements and other irritations necessitate, abjures the backstreet-and-alleyway gestalt of the city. It and its planners have little room for any urban contingency, places where railway bridges cut low over streets, on their own business, at angles that make no sense from below, forming strange obliques and acutes with the houses they meet.

The question is whether London’s new glass boxes of large size can, over time, submit, surrender, become part of the city. This is something that Canary Wharf, the Docklands financial district begun in the late ’80s, every day a thuggish and hideous middle-finger-flipped glass-and-steel at the poor of the East End, every night a Moloch’s urinal dripping sallow light on the Isle of Dogs, has never done and will never do.

Diasporas have sustained us. It’s a terrible cliché, multiculturalism through food, but there’s a reason it’s what Londoners reach for. Smart restaurants like St. John have rehabilitated English fodder, glorying in pork, blackberries, eulogizing offal. Fine. If you’re of a certain age and grew up here, you remember that aside from the lucky, rich or recently immigrant, we had no food. We gnawed bread like bleached plastic, cheese like soap. We yowled, a hungry people. New Londoners took pity before the rest of us succumbed to malnutrition and misery, and shared their cuisines. Indian, Jamaican, whatever — name a culinary tradition, it won’t be too far to find, near the greasy spoons keeping the faith. Each new group of incomers brings something — now Polish food has mainstreamed, and there’s dense bread in the corner shops, krufki in supermarkets. Racism, of course, endures, adapts. According to the exigencies of ideology, it casts around for one, then another first-choice hate. Jews in the 1930s, then black people, then Asians. For the past 10 years, Muslims in particular have worn the bull’s-eye. If they’re women who cover their hair, those few who veil entirely or those who chat into scarf-tucked phones, the hijab hands-free, their choice of headgear is bizarrely troublesome to those whose business it is not. The government’s official counterterror strategy includes asking university lecturers to report depressed Muslim students. Hate crimes against Muslims rise, fueled, researchers at the University of Exeter suggest, by the mainstreaming of Islamophobia among politicians and in the media. You can say shocking, scandalous things about Muslims, and opinion makers do, then push out their chins as if they’ve been brave.

Feeding on that disgrace, Britain is seeing a mutation of its “traditional” fascism into a form fixated on these new scapegoats. Emerging from groups like the British National Party and football hooliganism, the English Defense League aims its spite squarely at Muslims. It follows a familiar trajectory of intimidation; it tries to march in “Muslim” areas. But it has taken a few unusual turns, too, showing off a (very) few members of color, Jewish members, gay members. Pitching for a “liberal” fascism.