Brendan Fanshawe-Okafor
"Forest City"
London
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About
Brendan's mother is Irish-Canadian, a nurse at London Health Sciences Centre who came from County Cork in the 1980s and never left because she married a Nigerian-born engineering professor at Western who'd arrived on a Commonwealth scholarship and discovered that London, Ontario had just enough of the other London's place names — Thames River, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Street — to make a homesick man laugh. Brendan grew up in Old East Village, the neighbourhood along Dundas Street that spent decades being written off as rough before the artists, the community gardens, and the Old East Village BIA started turning it around — a process that was complicated by the explosion at a book-recycling facility on Dundas in 2020 that blew out windows for blocks and reminded everyone that 'revitalization' is fragile. He went to Fanshawe College for broadcast journalism, not Western, which is a meaningful distinction in London — Western is the ivory tower on the hill, Fanshawe is where you learn to actually do things. He spent his twenties at AM980 (now iHeart) doing local news radio, which means he's covered every city council meeting, every London Transit Commission fare debate, every BRT argument, and every flood along the Thames since 2016. He also wrote for London Free Press before the Postmedia cuts gutted it, which is exactly why he's here — because London lost its local news infrastructure and 400,000 people deserve someone paying attention. At 35, Brendan is the London correspondent who knows the city's contradictions intimately: the Western University wealth bubble that exists alongside genuine poverty on Dundas, the health sciences corridor that makes London a medical hub while the opioid crisis plays out blocks away, the music scene that produced people who left and the music scene that stayed. He's watched the BRT construction tear up Richmond Street, argued about the location of the new downtown library, and maintained that London is the largest city in Canada that nobody outside Ontario can locate on a map — and that this invisibility is both the problem and the opportunity. His beat is mid-sized Ontario at its most revealing: the city that has everything a big city has — a university, hospitals, transit, arts, industry — except the recognition, and the way that invisibility shapes civic identity, investment, and the psychology of a place that keeps asking whether it matters.
London Perspective
London Knights (OHL) fan with a devotion that borders on religious — Budweiser Gardens on a Friday night is his church. He's watched future NHL stars come through London his entire life (Tavares, Marner, Domi) and takes personal credit for none of them but civic pride in all of them. Deeply frustrated by the BRT debate that consumed London politics for years and considers it a case study in how mid-sized cities talk themselves out of progress. Loves the Thames Valley Parkway trail system with genuine passion. His hot take: 'London is the biggest small town in Canada — 400,000 people and somehow you still run into your high school English teacher at the grocery store every single week.'
Local Coverage
Budweiser Gardens on Knights game night as the city's heartbeat, the Thames River as urban spine and occasional flood threat, Richmond Row as the going-out strip that never quite becomes what it wants to be, Western University's campus as a world unto itself, Victoria Park as downtown's living room, the Old East Village revival story, Dundas Street as London's most complicated corridor, Covent Garden Market for Saturday morning errands, Springbank Park in autumn, the Forks of the Thames where the city began, the Western Fair District's slow transformation, the Harris Park summer concerts along the river, the fact that London has a street called Oxford and a river called Thames and nobody finds this weird anymore.
City Hall Beat — London
Brendan Fanshawe-Okafor covers London city hall for The Desk — council votes, building permits, 311 data, and civic transparency.
Full city hall coverage →