Which London tribe do you belong to?

Retro rockers

Find them at Blitz vintage store

Modern London is rubbish, according to its vintage tribe. That’s why they prefer to live in sexier, more stylish eras, spending their spare time scouring eBay and the Blitz warehouse for bygone bargains. Rosie takes meticulous care to match the perfect 1940s tea dress with authentic nylons and headpiece. The devil is in the detail. Her look is a mesh of wondrous signifiers, treading a fine line between subservient girly-whirlishness (gingham dresses, cupcake stalls, pearls) and resilient 1950s biker-girl chic (armful of sailor tattoos, stiff quiff – thanks to regular appointments at The Painted Lady on Redchurch Street – and red Cupid-bow lips). By night she takes swing dance lessons and learns burlesque moves – which isn’t ‘just stripping’ as she’s wearing a vintage corset and Agent Provocateur nipple pasties. Dave looks to Kevin Rowland and Mark Kermode as his fashion gurus, plodding about record fairs searching for rare St Etienne vinyl and wondering how many tattoos that hot girl in the Monroe-esque evening dress has. Despite looking to the untrained eye like they’re constantly in fancy dress, Rosie, Dave and everyone else in their tribe find each other perilously attractive, as proven by the goings-on at the regular rockabilly weekends in a Camber Sands caravan park, which are fun very much of the old-school variety.

Lactivists

Find them on Church Street

Trinny first met Josie, Liza and Gretchen during a ‘Midwife-led unit or water birth?’ debate at a Stokey NCT group. The women – dressed head-to-toe in deconstructed organic cotton pieces from Hub on Church Street – bonded over a mutual loathing of Pru, who openly supported a full epidural, pethedine and an SMA Gold feeding regime. To this day, Pru is not invited to kite-flying days, visits to feed the pygmy goats or Baby Pilates, and her child is being scurrilously blamed for closing down JungleTumble after a random poo was found in the soft-ball pond. These women once worked in high-pressure jobs, an atmosphere they’ve transferred to their current role of stay-at-home mum. Hobbies include moaning about their doula, hot-housing their kids in Cantonese, campaigning against social change in Stoke Newington (‘We don’t like the Park Café, it’s too expensive!’ ‘We don’t like Nando’s, it’s too common!’), or haranguing the school because little Sting isn’t eating his playtime nuts.

The Stokey mums are militant guerrilla breast-feeders but secretly they’re concerned about their friend Zilly who’s still feeding Luca, five, through the fence of the primary school twice daily, one nipple pushed through the wire mesh, but they won’t say anything, as they’re not ones to bitch.

Label lads

Find them hanging around XL studios in Ladbroke Grove

Sketchy, Riz and Casper: part of an industrious bunch of public school geeks made good, mostly male, 25-40, who control the output of British music, pinballing between Notting Hill and Dalston, underground ‘boiler house’ gigs in Bow basements streamed live on Ustream, studio sessions in Kensal Rise, after-show drinks in Soho where they ‘pop in to show face’ and lunches with Radio One in W1, in a bid to ‘keep Zane on-side’. Curiously label-conscious, the boys stride about in outfits that even Tinie Tempah would find a bit much, clinging to their iPhones as they wait for LA to wake up and return some stats on ticket sales, before they can pop by the Ray-Ban party at the V&A for some ‘facetime with Florence’ and a catch-up with Mark Ronson, who is their first child’s godfather. At some point Riz should ring his long-suffering girlfriend Karen, but she’ll only kick off about being left for ten days while he goes to Fuji Rock in Japan to chaperone hot new dubstep solo act ‘GNNNNNRG’, who Karen pointed out the first 137 times she heard his single, ‘sounds like a fork caught in a lawnmower’.

Hackney high-rollers

Find them on a bench in Hoxton Square

Jonty’s parents are horrified that he spent his inheritance on a flat in East London. What was the point in Granny squirrelling away those Liberian diamonds if the money was to be wasted on a terrifying property they can’t even visit (a basement flat in De Beauvoir Town, for crying out loud! It’s like the Bronx!). Jonty and his pal Hugo grew up in Dulwich and attended Alleyns independent school but have migrated East – they love the raw vibe, lock-ins at The Dolphin and nights at Lucky Chip eating burgers in a car park. Jonty, who mixes Beyond Retro vintage pieces with his Nike high tops, doesn’t have a job, although he did once act in a Punchdrunk production, and is now planning a ‘performance art immersion experience’ called Poke in the Fanny, where art lovers will be chased naked over Hackney Marshes at dawn while playing ‘Ride of The Valkyries’ on iPods. Tickets will be £28. Hugo, who was asked to leave Alleyns for cannabis smoking, now owns a house in London Fields, and used his latest inheritance windfall to open a café/slam poetry venue in Hackney Wick. He stops serving breakfast at 11am so he can start selling spatchcock guinea fowl, and closes for 38 days at Christmas to visit his parents in Juan-les-Pins.

Abstractionists

Find them in a Seven Sisters studio

Priced out of Shoreditch, then Dalston, then Clapton, artist Frank C now makes his home in Seven Sisters, where the rent on a vast unheated warehouse space is still ‘reasonable’, even if he and his artist chums have to share the condemned building with crack addicts and rats. Frank is currently taking a decommissioned Sherman tank to pieces with a junior hacksaw, painting some bits teal and filming himself throwing others out the window. His parents aren’t sure whether this is ‘genius that could win the Turner’ or ‘actual mental illness’ but it’s comforting to know that Frank has a whole lot of friends exactly like him. Some have even produced art they can understand, even if it is sometimes daubed in bodily fluids. Frank and his girlfriend Pip (currently making Vladimir Putin’s face out of coathangers) sleep in the corner of his studio on a futon, and live on chicken tikka pitta pockets from the local newsagent and cans of guava Rubicon. Frank and his ilk claim not to care or covet money – until they earn masses of it, realise it’s bloody lovely and move to Spitalfields.

W11 literati

Find them at The Tabernacle for 5x15

Charles and Emma are better read than you and me. In fact, they’re better read than everyone at ‘Wordgasm’, their monthly ‘party for the mind’, where the hottest names in literature give readings, sign books and chat up nubile groupies. Charles once wrote a book himself, The Destitute Forest, which sold exactly 675 copies but was reviewed in every broadsheet, thanks to knowing several editors from his Oxford days. He’s since become a regular on The Review Show, where he sits at the right hand of Kirsty Wark and pontificates about Jeremy Deller and the new John Lanchester, wearing the expression of ‘a man who knows’. Charles and Emma throw ferociously clever dinner parties/salons to discuss the ‘hot topics’ of the day that frequently end with hot political nerd boys in a punch-up over Israel or Catholicism, which all the girls find wildly erotic. They also arrange costly creative writing courses and ‘how to read better’ weekends for the public on obscure Greek islands where mobile reception is low and bed-hopping rife. Charles loves to send name-dropping tweets about Salman, Hanif, Jeanette, and the book prizes he’s judging. He is often to be found in the British Library waiting for the muse to strike and perving on students in the meantime.

Lifestyle lovelies

Find them on Chamberlayne Road

Party girl Esme and globetrotting DJ and producer Lars used to rule Queen’s Park, but once wed they were swiftly mortgaged to the hilt with a £1 million Kensal Rise townhouse. Esme quickly had it blasted out of all recognition, burrowed under, extended upwards and painted Farrow & Ball Wimborne White. She and her clique of media and music industry WAGS spend their days frittering their vast BBC and C4 retainers on granite kitchen surfaces, imported tiles and therapy. Esme frequently appears in dreamy lifestyle shoots for Living Etc and House Beautiful, sat whimsically beside a large bowl of plums, reading Proust in a Whistles dress while her children, Noah and Beer, play with Scandic wooden trains with expressions of rapt wonder. Esme has a trainer, Lars has a trainer, the children have a Taekwondo trainer. The beautiful Weimaraner, Marvin, is on a low-fat Iams diet. Once a year Esme has some girl-time in Ibiza with the other WAGS, which is invariably followed by a terrible cold and a bout of inexplicable depression.

TOWIE on tour

Find them sulking in Shoreditch

At weekends, Shoreditch’s edgy, wise and aloof run for cover as boisterous Essex-based fun-seekers arrive at Liverpool Street station for a night of preening, pulling and puking. Joe and Andy wear gonad-skimming drainpipe trousers, no socks and loose-fitting cardigans with their waxed chests, spray tans and homekit-bleached teeth. The women often arrive by white limo (what with it being Casey’s 30th/hen/divorce pity party), in Lipsy dresses, 120mm Louboutin heels, glistening body butter and false lashes. They all converge at Lounge Bohemia and McQueen to perform a mating ritual that typically ends with at least one woman weeping on Tabernacle Street, while three near-naked Epping Mini-Mes comfort her, conspiring openly about the higher standard of man in Marbella. The menfolk roam in large packs talking about ‘training’ and bonuses while bashing out the same ‘come and get it’ BBM to ten different girls. All nights for this tribe include a long argument with the doorstaff at Shoreditch House, and some bragging that they’re on the back-up list for the next series of TOWIE.

Nightshifters

Find them in your office at 6am

Silent, nocturnal and habitually unacknowledged, Florenta and the rest of the nightshifters arrive by bus in Trafalgar Square at 2am, dispersing into offices to lug binbags and push Henry vacuum cleaners. You’ve probably never seen her but she’s the lady who removes the bearded Müller Light from the shared fridge, tidies away the well-thumbed magazines from the toilet stalls and scrubs the cupcake icing off the meeting-room carpet. She does this for £6-an-hour PAYE, while her husband looks after the babies. She dresses for comfort, practicality and night-travel drunken weirdo invisibility: fake Juicy Couture tracksuit, anorak, hair pulled back and an expression of stalwart determination. She is invariably snubbed by the early-bird workers she bumps into, who still think that the office is cleaned by magic pixies. Florenta tries not to fall asleep with her Egg McMuffin on the Central Line home to Leyton but frequently wakes up at Newbury Park. She misses Romania but somehow all this is still better than being at home.