As the Baby Boomer generation edges ever closer to the Mortality Cliff, one thing is more certain than spending their kids’ inheritance: celebrity deaths will become a near-weekly occurrence. Forget the 27 Club, it’s now the 77 Club. Or, if they’re lucky, the OBE (‘Over Bloody Eighty’, as my dad used to say) Club.
The most recent of the swinging ’60s idols to shuffle off this mortal coil was Terence Stamp. Legacy media obits of the star dutifully name check his starring roles in films like Superman 2 and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Some even remembered his breakout role in Billy Budd. Most conveniently neglected stuff like Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace or The Haunted Mansion.
And you can be certain none of them will care to mention Stamp’s decidedly un-woke, if brutally prescient, comments from a decade ago.
It’s very sad how few English people there are in London now […] When I grew up in East London everyone seemed to speak English, and now you can barely get by speaking our own language.
It didn’t just seem like everyone spoke English: everyone did. In Stamp’s youth, London’s population was 94 per cent white British.
Stamp was synonymous with Swinging London, it should be remembered. In the ’60s, he romanced Julie Christie and model Jean Shrimpton and shared a flat with Michael Caine. He was originally cast as the lead in the quintessential Swinging London movie, Blow-Up, also starring Vanessa Redgrave and with a cameo by the Yardbirds, but was replaced at the last minute by fellow ’60s London icon, David Hemmings. Stamp was so synonymous with ’60s London that Ray Davies name checked “Terry meets Julie” (i.e., Christie) in his classic “Waterloo Sunset”.
But the city he was so associated with came to feel like another country, courtesy of mass immigration.
You see these mums wandering around with their prams and four out of five of them have these scarves wrapped around their heads. I feel like it’s not London any more; not the one I used to know anyway.
I do think a multicultural society can be a good thing, but when it’s at the cost of your own culture and history, then it’s gone too far and it would be very sad if London stopped being predominantly English.
With uncanny prescience, Stamp added:
It’s changed so much in such a short space of time, that God knows what London will be like in another decade or so.
Maybe God didn’t know, but Allah did.
Within just a decade, London did stop being predominantly English. In 2025, nearly half of London’s population was not only not ethnically English, but born outside England itself.
Well, at least Stamp didn’t live to hear the Muslim call to prayer ringing out from St Paul’s. But Morrissey probably will and we can be sure he’ll let us know what he thinks about it.
