How Sama Ansari Pour (@samaspeaks_) Is Preserving London’s Culture

Image credit: Sama Ansari Pour

An anecdote that perhaps best captures just how warm and culturally engaged journalist and content creator Sama Ansari Pour (@samaspeaks_) is begins with a simple lunch recommendation. After finishing her interview with New Wave, she suggested a small deli just across the road, explaining that many of its recipes came from the owner’s Ukrainian grandfather, making sure we knew not just what we would be eating but the rich culture behind the food and the place itself. What makes Sama so distinct within an increasingly saturated content landscape is that the way she captures London is not driven by aesthetics or trends, but by a desire to showcase people’s childhoods and London’s cultural communities, the way she has always seen them. It’s a selfless act motivated by a need to bring people together to celebrate one another, preserving and showcasing places which otherwise might go unnoticed or worse, disappear entirely. Speaking to New Wave, Sama reflected on journalism, gentrification, and the importance of cultural memory in showcasing London’s cultural enclaves.

Your series is called Travelling Around the World Without Leaving London, where did the idea come from? Particularly given your background in journalism, did you feel there was a gap you wanted to fill, or did it come more naturally from just observing the city around you?

It came from two places really. The first is just growing up here, I was raised on the tube, I literally commuted to school as a child, and being surrounded by so many cultures, languages and people just felt completely normal to me. It wasn't until I started my first job in journalism that I realised my perception of London wasn't universal. My editor told me I was the first person she'd ever met who actually went to school in London. She'd been living here five years and didn't even know kids grew up here. That kind of hit me, as the way I saw my city wasn't how most people who'd moved here saw it.

The second part was actually working in journalism itself. I studied Journalism at Sheffield and then World History and Cultures at KCL, and I went in genuinely believing in the public service side of the industry, in holding people to account and telling stories that matter and I thought that was such a meaningful responsibility. But the reality was that every outlet is a business first and I often saw minority voices only amplified during particular months.

Beyond that, the stories I was telling weren't the stories I loved. I wanted to document diaspora communities and show London the way I'd always experienced it. London so often gets portrayed as this soulless, chaotic, expensive, and loud place and of course there’s a degree of truth to that. But that's just never how I saw it, because that's never how I experienced it. And working in media, you see how loud and sure of themselves certain voices can be, and of course they have every right to be – we have freedom of speech, and democracy, as much as I might disagree with them. But I thought, I'm equally allowed to have my own voice.

I very much feel like London is my country and that I belong to London. But one thing about us Londoners is that we don't really talk to each other, we walk past the same places every day and never go in. Through my content, I want to create that small moment of curiosity and exposure for people to really try new things and places. I'm not going to fix anything, I'd never claim that, but if people can understand each other even a little better, perhaps we can all be a bit more tolerant.

Image credit: Sama Ansari Pour

Picking up on what you said about showing a different London, because so much of what gets pushed on social media is this homogenised, ‘transplant’ view of the city which include the same pubs, the same kind of voices, largely delivered by the same faces. How important was it for you to consciously counter that, and do you think those two versions of London can ever meet in the middle?

It was never intentional, genuinely, because the London I grew up in just wasn't gentrified. I remember spending my summers in Hackney Library doing the six-week reading programme, and that was my view of the city. So naturally I was always going to gravitate toward showing community spaces and local places, but it wasn't with the intention of making some conscious mission statement to ‘de-gentrify’ London.

What made my work feel urgent, however, was watching gentrification happen in real time, right in front of me, within months of visiting these places. For my Ecuador episode, I went to Kasama in Brixton Plaza, an Ecuadorian brunch spot that I was recommended by someone on TikTok, and soon after they received an injunction. And then, for Paraguay, I went to the first Paraguayan restaurant in London, run by this really sweet mum whose son did a viral TikTok asking people to come support her – and that closed within three months. Uzbek Corner as well, which is one of my favourite Uzbek restaurants, which featured in my Uzbekistan episode is now being closed as Queensway Market is being shut down to make way for a Whole Foods. I haven’t even been doing this for a year, so within months, these community spaces are either gone or in the process of being gentrified, it feels like we’re really losing the soul of our communities. It’s honestly made me really angry.

Do you feel like you're part of a resistance to gentrification? And is there a frustration that comes with knowing you can't stop it, does the work feel important partly just as documentation, before these places are gone?

I don't see myself as part of a movement or resistance, because it was never the aim, it was always a side effect. But it does feel personal, because through the series I've genuinely got to know these people that run these community spaces. So when their lives get turned upside down, it's personal to me because these people that operate these businesses and spaces are not strangers.

Look, I think it would be naive to think everything stays the same. London in the 1950s looks nothing like London now, and 2000 to 2100 is going to be completely different again. Some places will survive, and I really hope they do, but with technology, politics, society, change is inevitable and there’s going to be so many different iterations of London. What I can do and what I aim to do is document London as I see it, as it is now.

I have this hard drive, which contains almost every street, and certainly every enclave I’ve visited. I find this important because the Paraguayan restaurant in Tooting Market that I featured and mentioned earlier, is closed now and therefore doesn't exist anymore. The footage I have of it is all that remains in a way. There’s an Iranian enclave in Finchley with Farsi shop signs which I photographed in July 2025 – in a couple of decades it might look completely different. I also went to London's only Kazakh restaurant, which is in Welling of all places, and the owner only speaks Russian and Kazakh, I feel like I’ve captured a very specific moment and artefact of the city’s life there.

I'd love to donate my hard drive to a museum one day, so someone doing research in fifty years about this period and this city can have access to this. When I did my dissertation on 1950s media, my best sources came from someone who'd just obsessively archived digital material from that era, I want to be that but for the future. I want this to live on after I'm gone, for future generations I'll never meet, so they know what this city was like when I lived in it. In a way, I consider this to be a time capsule of the real London.

Image credit: Sama Ansari Pour

There are a lot of conversations right now about contested territories and cultures with complicated or oppressive political histories. Do you plan on exploring those, and how do you navigate separating a culture from its politics, particularly given what you've witnessed with these communities already facing erasure closer to home?

For me the most important thing is always separating culture from politics, and I can do that quite naturally being Iranian. I have such a beautiful culture, but such a monstrous government that has caused so much oppression, not only to ethnic Persians but also to other ethnic groups as well. So I come from a place where I understand that distinction viscerally, I also try to be specific about what I'm actually exploring. It's always a Londoner culture like Belarusian Londoner culture, or Greek Londoner culture. And where it's necessary, I don't shy away from talking what's happening politically in the country that my content is focusing on.

With some countries though, it's more about timing. I love Russian culture, I speak Russian, and I have Russian friends who are very much against Putin, there's also such a rich history of Russian culture in London that genuinely deserves exploring. But it feels more appropriate to come to certain countries further down the line, and to do them properly when I do. China is a good example, that took the most research I've ever done, and I only did it last month. I do plan on doing every single country eventually, it'll just take a few years.

In terms of taking responsibility for telling these stories, how do you navigate coming from a different cultural background yourself? Are you always bringing a piece of yourself to each story, or are you more of an observer?

There are a few things happening at once really. The first is that even when I'm in a completely different cultural space, I still see those people as my people, because at the end of the day, we're all Londoners. Maybe you're Somali or Bangladeshi, but we have the same childhood in a way. So even when I went to Coffee Origins Roastery in Finsbury Park, which is an Ethiopian coffee roastery I'd never been to before, and I was with the owner, I felt completely at home.

The second thing is this constant bittersweet comparison to my own community. The Iranian diaspora is very divided with a lot of infighting, political and religious separation, and trauma. Growing up I didn't really have Iranian friends, I had friends from everywhere but my own country. And then I'd go to something like a Chilean national celebration in the park where Chileans came from all over England just to be together in this beautiful eruption of music and dance and food. I even got up and joined a Chilean dance circle, and I really try to integrate fully, but I left nearly in tears. Because it was so beautiful, and I was so happy for them, but there was this sadness of why couldn't I have had that?

And honestly, I think the biggest thing I've taken from this whole process is to talk to strangers. Which sounds simple, but two or three years ago I had really bad PTSD and there was a point I was too scared to leave my own room. I'm not ashamed of it, and it's part of me, but I was very much confined to my comfort zones, and this series forced me out of that because if I don't go there, if I don't talk to them, I simply don't have a story. And not only did that help me get to a much better place with my PTSD, it completely transformed my social life. I longed for friendship from 20 to 25, and it was actually by going to people, meeting them where they are, where I've really made friends across ethnicities, across ages, in a way I never have before.

This is actually why I'm launching a community club called Dance Around the World Without Leaving London, a dance social where the whole idea is to replicate that experience for other people. I've literally recruited ten of my friends whose job on these nights is just to go and talk to people, because how do you even make friends in London otherwise? I want my audience to know each other and I want friendships and even love to come from this. This series changed everything for me, but I had the luxury of making it my job which not everyone has, so I want to create a space where that same thing can happen for other people too.

Image credit: Sama Ansari Pour

What was the shift in thinking that prompted you to move from documenting community to actually creating it? And do you see all of this as part of a journalistic practice, or something entirely separate?

The series itself I absolutely view as journalism, just a different form of it. I research everything thoroughly, I source everything, and I speak to people. I think journalism is far more fluid than people give it credit for. It doesn't have to be a newsroom and at its core, journalism is fundamentally just telling a story.

The events are different though and they come from two places. The first is 20 year-old me, who was desperate for friends and community and wished she had somewhere inclusive and accessible to go. The second part came directly from the series. I started going to cultural club nights alone, and these spaces were where I made some of my closest friends. There's something about dancing together that opens a community up in a way that's almost impossible to replicate otherwise.

So I want to bring that to people on a wider scale and every event will have DJs from the communities themselves. This in particular is really important to me, because ultimately what I do is go into a space and let someone share their culture, and even bits of their childhood with me. I want to replicate this in a room full of people, as everyone in this room has one thing in common: a genuine curiosity about the world and other cultures.

To finish off, what are some London spots or experiences you’d recommend right now?

For a café, I’d recommend an Algerian bakery called La Princesse on Blackstock Road that I found completely by accident while filming an episode about Algerian enclaves in London. I had the best baklava of my life there, they do almond baklava rather than pistachio or walnut, and it’s incredibly affordable. Everyone there is Algerian, the staff are really friendly, and it feels very community-led.

For restaurants, I recently went to a Brazilian place called Trem de Minas in Wandsworth. I’ve been learning more about Brazilian culture, and apparently Minas is considered Brazil’s big foodie state. Their pasteles and açaí felt really authentic, especially compared to how commercialised açaí has become elsewhere.

In terms of cultural activities, I honestly think going clubbing is underrated, especially cultural club nights. I don’t drink, so for me it’s never been about that. Places like Lebanese or Iranian club nights are really intergenerational and you’ll see people in their 20s alongside people in their 40s and 50s, they really become spaces where diaspora communities connect through music and dance. That’s where I’ve met so many people and learned about different cultures. I think ultimately that sometimes you just have to go to things alone and be open to experiences instead of waiting for someone else to come with you.

Image credit: Sama Ansari Pour