Pubs, kebabs and night buses: a guide to Taylor Swift's London

Typically, celebrity London and civilian London are wildly dissimilar.

Granted, the bare bones of the city persist, but celebrities see them from behind tinted windows, while we watch them stagger into view from the top of crowded buses, condensation pooling in the windows.

We spend evenings in sticky pubs, they while theirs away in members’ clubs and the penthouse suites of gilded hotels. Fantasy and reality rarely intersect.

So praise be to Taylor Swift, who is teaching the world — A-list included — a democratising lesson about what London is really like.

Swift was in the capital over the weekend to film a music video for an upcoming single, and her London was not the ersatz version presented in postcards, nor the glitzy London of the A-list (as seen in her previous video for I Don’t Want To Live Forever, shot in a £2,500-a-night suite at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel), but an authentic, recognisable version of the city.

For a start it involved a night bus. After inviting dedicated fans to a sumptuous London home (gloss over that bit — it probably doesn’t look like your house), Swift was spotted cavorting with a gaggle of mates on the top deck of a red bus, as it circled Piccadilly, which looks like the start and end of many London nights out.

She wore sequins, but wrapped up in oversized coat — the uniform of the pragmatic London party girl. Missing was the water bottle filled with gin and a bright orange mixer, though Swift might have kept her “party juice” out of shot for propriety’s sake.

Other locations for the night shoot reportedly included a north London kebab shop, Kentish Delight, on Kentish Town Road, which has a 4/5 food hygiene rating (“good”), and where you can get a chicken shish, served with onions and green peppers and grilled over charcoal, for £7. Swift will get points if the video pans to her with oil sluiced down her chin, waving a kebab skewer with purpose.

Reportedly, the singer also shot scenes from inside a bog standard London pub and cycled over the Millennium Bridge, passing in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. The only false note was a journey in a black cab — the verisimilitude would have been stronger were Swift to have shot a scene on a rowdy Night Tube shuttling out of Brixton, perhaps falling asleep on a companion’s shoulder.

Swift has spent a lot of time in the capital recently, chiefly to spend time with her actor boyfriend Joe Alwyn. Alwyn is a Crouch End boy — rumours that she was renting a home in N8 had the locals abuzz this summer — although last time she was in the capital, she reportedly holed up in her friend Cara Delevingne’s house in Chiswick.

“Obviously Taylor can stay at the world’s swankiest hotels but that’s not really her bag,” a “friend” told The Sun in September.

London is open: give it a few more late-night kebab pilgrimages and Swift will be one of us.