Inside the Tik Tok influencer wars which show just how divided London really is

London’s a funny old place”, as Moses Combe puts it.

On TikTok, a video mapping out the perfect north London Saturday has been doing the rounds. According to the narrator – a 20-something woman strolling up a very nice, very leafy street – this is what “north London girlies” are doing with their weekends: pastries at Jolene, a wander round the Dalston carboot, coffee at Gail’s and a stop at De Beauvoir Deli for the essentials.

It’s all very soft lighting and laminated croissants – the kind of day that looks expensive without ever quite mentioning how much any of it costs. Then the video cuts. “My north London?????” Combe says, incredulous as he frowns at the camera. “Of all the years that I’ve been living in north London, never have I ever heard of Jolene. What is that?!”

Combe – a 21-year-old creator whose videos focus on chicken shops, shawarma spots and what he calls “the Endz Department for Research” – decides to try these places for himself. What is this north London that he knows nothing of, despite having lived there his whole life?

The first stop is Jolene, a bakery-cum-restaurant on Hornsey Road, Islington. First opened in Newington Green in 2018, the Hornsey site – “Big Jo” – arrived during the pandemic with two mills, a bread oven, a pizza oven, a fermentation lab and a philosophy that includes phrases like “regenerative farming” and “grain economy”.

“If this is where all the north London girlies come in the morning, I’d be a bit surprised,” says Combe. Because of “the location. The fact that it’s right next to Andover Estate and Holloway police station”.

He is not wrong. This Jolene is in “the endz”: opposite a boarded-up shopfront, next to Yeshi Ethiopian Cuisine, with local authority housing rising above it. Not the kind of place you’d expect to find a £4.20 cinnamon bun. Inside, the tone shifts. “This is giving Gail’s Pro Max,” says Combe. “I was gonna get a sandwich, but I saw the price. £11 for a sandwich?! If that sandwich does not take me to heaven, bro…”

He orders anyway: a hot chocolate, a sausage roll, a tiramisu cake. £14.20. “Not quite Gregg’s. Have I been jugged or what?”

There is a moment where the joke slips slightly. Combe looks around, weighing up whether to stay. “They do have the option to sit inside, but in there I feel very much like the odd one out.”

Instead, he leaves, finding a bench on the neighbouring Andover Estate, Jolene bags in hand, the contrast doing most of the talking.

The Andover Estate has long been shorthand for everything that goes wrong in London’s housing system – underfunding, deprivation, cycles of neglect. In 2007, the former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe spent three days living there for an ITV documentary, later describing it as a “dump” and “very nasty, very threatening” – comments that prompted backlash from residents, who accused the programme of sensationalising their community.

Nearly two decades on, the contrast feels less like a caricature and more like a collision. On one side of the road: sourdough, small plates, £4.80 hot chocolate. On the other: an estate still associated with the kinds of social issues that rarely make it into lifestyle North London ‘Girly’ TikToks. See too the much lauded De Beauvoir Deli that he decides to visit, which is serving up a £20-plus breakfast right next to the De Beauvoir estate infamous for being the real-life inspiration for the crime-ridden Hackney council estate imagined in the drama Top Boy: Summerhouse.

Combe sits between the two contrasting scenes, tiramisu cake in hand. The sausage roll is “pretty decent”. The tiramisu, “beautiful”. The hot chocolate, less so: “It just tastes like they’ve put some regular [sic] degular powder in it and mixed it with hot water. I mean, £4.80…”

What lingers is something harder to pin down. Not just the price, but the sense of being out of place in a postcode you were born in.

If this is where all the north London girlies come in the morning, I’d be a bit surprised [because of] the location. The fact that it’s right next to Andover Estate and Holloway police station

Afterwards, he heads to the corner shop for a bottle of KA and sums it up simply: “Back to my roots. Back to reality. Back to Izzy.”

Nowhere captures the two sides of the tracks in the same postcode more neatly than Izzy, AKA Islington. With a population of around 216,000, it is one of the most densely populated areas in England, characterised by what the council describes as “stark contrasts” – pockets of “great wealth” alongside high deprivation.

Around one in three residents lives in poverty, even as the borough attracts young professionals, creatives and renters in their twenties. Nearly 38 per cent of residents are from minority ethnic backgrounds, making it more diverse than England as a whole.

That tension is not new. Like many London boroughs, Islington has long cycled between wealth and decline: once a rural retreat for the affluent, later associated with overcrowding and poverty, then reshaped again from the 1960s onwards as middle-class families moved in and restored its Georgian housing stock.

What is new is the visibility. The sense that those parallel versions of the same place are now being mapped, compared and contested in real time on social media. It is here where the different protagonists are laying claim to the real neighbourhood and where their realities part ways. North London influencer incomers (or Dorset Emilys as they are often dubbed) who give an insiders guide to the places to go that are unrecognisable and baffling to those who have lived there all their lives.

Combe’s next stop is Gail’s in nearby Archway – “Archie” – a chain that has become shorthand for a certain kind of gentrification.

This time, he is with “the mandem” – two friends who immediately clock the change. This used to be a corner shop, they say, where they’d buy Jalitos and Milky Bars, with a Subway next door you could cut through. Inside, the prices land just as heavily. “£8.30 for that?!” They buy their food, but, as before, take it straight outside.

“Welcome to the Elthorne Estate, man!” Combe declares. The estate itself has seen change of its own in recent years, with additional funding used to convert new homes from private sale to social rent, increasing the supply of genuinely affordable housing for local residents. It is, in other words, a quieter, less Instagrammable version of regeneration, but no less significant.

Here, though, the focus is simpler. “We’ve got the munch… then you’ve got this sad excuse of a flipping hot chocolate.” Afterwards, he visits Morley’s – the south London-born fried chicken chain that has become a cultural institution across the city – and shows the contents of the bag. More food, more volume, less money. “I had to go back to my roots. Quick Morley’s, they get me. Arguably better bang for your buck as well.”

Combe is not trying to be the next TikTok restaurant critic. What he is doing is something closer to cultural mapping and he is getting a huge following because of it

His reference points – D’s Kitchen, Dubai Shawarma, PFC, the Arsenal stadium – chart a different version of north London to the one found in “north London girlies” guides. Same borough, same streets, entirely different shorthand for what matters. His videos capture not just a difference in taste, but a difference in experience – who feels comfortable, and where.

The reverse is true, too. Not every “north London girlie” is making a weekly pilgrimage to Jolene, Gail’s and De Beauvoir Deli. That’s the Instagram version. The reality is messier. The same people buying croissants on a Saturday morning might be picking up a Morley’s later that night, or grabbing a KA from the corner shop on the way home.

What Combe is calling out is real – a version of north London that doesn’t quite recognise the one he grew up in. But that doesn’t make it false. The croissants, the carboots, the deli counters: they exist too. They are just not the whole picture.

The “north London girlies” and the “mandem” are moving through the same streets, sometimes even the same shops, but not always with the same ease. One documents the city as it is marketed; the other, as it is lived.

London is a funny old place.