Bangkok Pat and the city that changed while he was away

In 2003, Pat’s rent was 3,400 baht a month. The room sat above an internet shop in Khlong Tan, off Phetchaburi Road, a long way from anywhere expats lived, with a Foodland nearby and about ten bus routes passing the door. He’d arrived the year before with a bag of records, hoping for DJ gigs.

“I was thinking, God, this is like the third world. I’ve moved to the third world. But I absolutely love it.”

— Pat

Today he is Bangkok Pat, and his channel is one of the few that treats the city’s history as the story: the canals, the old districts and the backstories behind places most people walk past. He’s half Thai and grew up in London. Because he lived here from 2002, left in 2009 and came back for good in 2016–17, he saw Bangkok’s biggest transformation in two jumps rather than day by day. That makes him a rare witness to how much the city has changed, and a useful guide for anyone deciding whether to move here now.

The city he came back to

While he was away, the skyline “changed every year”. The Skytrain crossed the river in 2009, the roads improved and the malls arrived; the subway followed it under the river a few years after he came back. Thais themselves, he says, became far more internationally minded.

Some of the old city went with it.

• The street life on Sukhumvit. From Asok to Phrom Phong there used to be food stalls, pop-up bars with plastic tables and soi dogs outside nearly every 7-Eleven. The pop-ups were winding down by about 2015, the dogs were cleared from the main roads around 2013, and Covid, he says, was “the nail in the coffin” for many of the stalls.
• The crossing. He remembers standing at Sukhumvit Road unable to get across, with almost no crossings and nobody stopping.
• The late nights. Soon after the 2001 election, venues in many zones had to close early. He’d expected a city that never slept and found his gigs finishing at midnight or 1am.

The 2003 numbers

• Rent: that 3,400-baht room in Khlong Tan.
• Income: roughly 35,000–40,000 baht a month from DJing and teaching, plus a little rent from a room back in London.
• Getting around: mostly buses. The BTS was cheap but “never went that far”, and his teaching jobs were in Samrong and Min Buri, hours away.
• Work: a weekly DJ slot at a Sukhumvit club, then English teaching found through a classified ad on Pantip. With no lesson plans online, he photocopied workbooks from a teachers’ bookshop.

In the early 2000s it was hard for a foreigner to earn here doing anything except teaching English. Being half Thai helped once: he was spotted in a mall for looking like Mr Bean and paid 30,000 baht for a weekend shooting a TV commercial.

Travel itself was slower. There was no Google Maps and no phone camera. He researched Bangkok in a London travel bookshop and carried a paper map of the bus routes. “We were more laid back in those days,” he says. “We just took the adventure as it came.”

Why he came at all

Pat is half Thai but grew up in London and never visited as a child. In his late teens he took a job at a Thai restaurant in London run by family friends, and kept hearing customers talk about Thailand.

“For about a year, I was bluffing. I thought I better go because someone’s going to catch me out.”

— Pat, on telling customers he’d already been

That first trip, in 1999, felt like “a missing piece of jigsaw”. Three years later he packed the records.

From the classroom to the camera

By 2020 he was teaching hotel front-office operations at a hospitality college and at a cabin-crew school. Covid wiped out both jobs. He looked at YouTube, saw that “no one does history”, and bought a used Sony camera for 3,000 baht from someone selling up on Facebook Marketplace. The first video took six weeks to make.

“I always try to be different to everyone else,” he says. “I love the history. I love the research.”

He has watched the creator scene turn over. Many channels stopped during Covid and never came back, and a new wave arrived with the digital nomads in 2022–23. Plenty of would-be influencers move here to film their own lives. Most never make a living from it, and the people selling courses on how to do it rarely say so. The best advice Pat got came from another creator early on: “You’ve got to enjoy what you do. Otherwise it becomes a drag,” especially in the long stretch before it pays anything.

If you’re thinking of moving

Pat now runs small tours for people considering a move, taking them round three or four neighbourhoods and explaining rents and costs. The question he hears most is where to live with fewer foreigners. For comparing neighbourhoods today, try the free Move Planner or where to stay in Bangkok. Pat’s answers:

• Spend two months here first, in hotels in different parts of the city.
• Watch walking videos to get a feel for a neighbourhood’s layout before you go.
• Take a canal or river boat and get off halfway to see a local neighbourhood.
• Expect things to go wrong, and treat it as part of the adventure.

“If you arrive in Bangkok and you don’t know it, it can be a big, chaotic, unfriendly city… Go out of your comfort zone. Go and explore some obscure district.”

— Pat