He’s from Chicago. But nobody loves Bexley more than Ambassador Sparrow

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South Hampstead High School helps students to find balance 

For 150 years, South Hampstead High School GDST has been a leading London school and this year achieved some of the best GCSE and A level results in the country. These academic outcomes are testament to teaching methods that encourage girls to think critically and express themselves with confidence, alongside a deep commitment to student wellbeing. A brand-new state-of-the-art fitness studio and outdoor learning space underline South Hampstead’s holistic approach, which allows students to find balance and flourish. 

 To learn more about South Hampstead – including details of fully-funded, means-tested bursary places – book your place on one of their upcoming Junior School, Senior School or Sixth Form open days

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Michael Gajewski cannot get rid of the sunglasses. They are Privé Revaux, black, boxy and rectangular, and he bought them without giving it much thought. Then he wore them in a video filmed during an England match, in which he noted the normally heaving high street was completely dead; the video did 240,000 views inside a few days. They are now the first thing anyone recognises. "If I'd known the glasses would stick, I'd have picked a way better pair," he told me, raising them onto his forehead to make a point and dropping them again, a man punctuating himself. "These are the douchiest glasses I own."

We met in the beer garden of the Guy Earl of Warwick, on an afternoon in which his 16-week-old puppy worked steadily through my right shoelace. Gajewski is 35 and posts as Ambassador Michael Sparrow, the self-appointed Uninvited American Ambassador to the UK. He had been coming to Bexleyheath for years before he moved here permanently this year. His partner, Chloe, is from the town, as is her family, who took to him readily. He has since become the borough's unlikeliest municipal asset: a Chicagoan talking to camera about Welling with the trembling sincerity of a pilgrim describing the Alhambra.

The videos are mostly him walking. Down a high street, into a pub, past the Wingstop that opened in Bexleyheath and which he has done a great deal to publicise. In between he delivers a pronouncedly American commentary on the quaint realities of daily life here: the healthcare, the manners, the prices. Everything he makes is designed to needle somebody.

He is not a big man, though he talks – and, by his own admission, eats – like one. The hair is a widow's-peaked pompadour, black, pomaded back, silvering at the temples where the light gets in; the sleeve tattoos stay hidden all afternoon under a loose white button-down. He speaks in long swerving paragraphs that take in Voltaire, the Illinois state constitution, the House of Lords and Pulp Fiction without changing gear, breaking off to do impressions. He swears with the fluency of a man raised by a truck driver and a waitress. He has the free and easy candour of a radio host, which is just as well, because he is in discussions with a local station about a weekly show of his own.

And everywhere he goes he gets the same question, which he can perform in a flawless Home Counties drawl: why don't you move to Richmond?