British Virtual Reality story from 1990s or early 2000s

Question

The story I am trying to rediscover was set in a future London where virtually everyone had been recreated in a Virtual Reality version of the city, overlaid on the physical city, but there was a small community of old people who had refused to be digitized/scanned but who could participate in the virtual London via (I think) video glasses or something similar. There were a couple of scenes where they opted out of the virtual view and saw London as it really was in physical reality, namely a crumbling, deserted city. Some of the old people deliberately got in the way of the virtual Londoners as a form of protest, and later in the story one of them accidentally got injured down in the deserted underground railway.

Pretty sure it was by a British author and that it appeared from the 1990s to the early 2000s. I read it in an anthology, I remember that much.

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure about this one. I believe it is "Piccadilly Circus" by Chris Beckett, originally published in Interzone magazine May-June 2005 and later in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 23rd Annual Collection, which the author has kindly put online here. The story is a sequel to "The Perimeter" (online here). In the stories the inhabitants of the virtual London haven't been uploaded or digitised - they're actually disembodied brains all stored in a vast building just outside London.

From a review:

A near-future London is the setting, and for Clarissa Fell it is decaying, dark and lifeless. However, for the rest of the population, now uploaded into an Urban Consensual Field, the virtual London which they inhabit, still largely co-terminous with the bricks and mortar reality, is still a vibrant, brightly lit place. Clarissa is determined to visit Picadilly Circus, to see the lights she saw as a child – the real lights – and she is pottering into central London, her Implants enabling her, when she chooses, to be part of the virtual London. Beckett effectively illustrates, as she flicks between the dark, lonely London which she inhabits.