Trends in big cities always move at a zip, but over the past few years it seems that London has become a particularly faddy place. The en vogue trainer of the moment changes like the unpredictable weather (Adidas Gazelles and Sambas appear to have clung on for the moment, but sports shoes by typically uncool brands such as On are waiting to swoop in at any minute).
Styles you thought were long since dead get resurrected overnight (we are living, hellishly, through the boho revival). Where hobbies are concerned, the winds of change breeze by so frequently that it’s common to see your friends suddenly taking up activities that you would never associate with them in a million years.
It was wild swimming a few years ago, when you couldn’t meet up with friends without someone mouthing off about Hampstead ponds or trying to get you to catch E coli with them at “Hackney Beach” (reader, it is not a beach). And for 2024, weather permitting, I believe it will be something else. Recently, I have been hearing a lot about – and I am being serious now – pétanque.
The cool boys appear to be playing a variation of boules, the French sport (and something I previously knew only as something my grandad competed in with a devoted passion in his 60s). They are wearing their little caps branded with the names of their friends’ record labels and independent food magazines, their pairs of Dickies trousers and their orange-lensed sunglasses, and they are trying to get their larger ball (or boule) as close as possible to the target ball. “Yes, yes, mate. You got that so near to the cochonnet. Sick, guy, you know.”
It’s been a good example of how these trends tend to reveal themselves – gradually but with certainty. Out of nowhere in the last couple of weeks, I learned a) what on earth pétanque even is, and b) that there are pétanque courts all over the UK. All of a sudden, within a period of a few days, I started catching my friends posting Instagram Story photos of themselves having a nice little game of pétanque , while a man I was chatting to on Hinge told me that he had spent his Saturday having a game of boules with the fellas.
When I tweeted about this phenomenon, I found that I was not the only one who found myself confronted by Big Boule. Somebody even replied to me noting that they’d been served an Instagram ad for a variant called “Crazy Boules” launching on the South Bank in July. Pétanque, and indeed, boules at large, are suddenly everywhere.
In a way, it makes sense. It’s a chilled-out, non-committal game you can play with your friends on a hot day, and like most of the other London micro-trends we are constantly cycling through, it’s utterly harmless. It is also definitely partly down to the influence of the internet. Generally, London-centric trends like this tend to be intensified by hyperlocal meme culture, essentially proliferated via Instagram pages that publish jokes about areas of London with large, internet-savvy millennial and gen Z populations – places such as Clapton, Peckham and Stoke Newington. It’s accounts such as these that declare “tomatoes” or a particular flavour of crisps as the must-have dinner-party accessory of the moment, though sometimes it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario. The more the people who interact with these pages get into a particular style or activity, the more those styles and activities get posted by the pages.
It all feeds into a sort of London main character syndrome – the internet both serialises and offers tacit approval (often in the very British form of sarcastic self-deprecation) for certain activities, hobbies and lifestyle markers, and then people feel as if they’re part of a particular type of city life if they’re taking part. It’s kind of like the very middle England idea of keeping up with the Joneses, only the Joneses are wearing Salomon trainers and head-to-toe Ganni.
Soon, as is the way of things, a brand will get wise to the fact that the kids (ie. 30-year-olds with no children and lots of disposable income, which they spend in the manner of teenagers) are loving boules, and they will throw a “Pet Nat and Pétanque” party, serving cool fizzy wine and slices of New York-style pizza on a bowling green. There will be a rooftop bar with a pétanque court. A fashion magazine will do an editorial at the clubhouse of a traditional boules team in south-east London and get accused of gentrification and appropriation. “Crazy Boules” will grip the capital. By next summer, people might lament that French sports, man, are just not what they used to be.
By then, however, we’ll be on to something new, wearing slightly different trainers, drinking wine with a different – but equally cute and irreverent – label. That’s just how it works these days: trends hardly have a chance to even blossom before we’re on to the next thing we’re supposed to be doing. In the meantime, however, if you happen to catch me on a pétanque court, please just look the other way.
Lauren O’Neill is a culture writer
