London: Not exactly liveable, but eminently lovable
Plus cool 'streets', nuclear dawns and screechy tubes
The Economist Intelligence Unit didn’t publish their Global Liveability Index last year, for obvious reasons. But this year they decided to get back to their ranking of 140 cities, using their trademarked “qualitative and quantitative factors.” Those factors are kind of like KFC’s secret recipe, but instead of 11 herbs and spices the EIU has 30 measures split across five categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure.
Of course, the biggest factor in the mix this year was what the EIU describes as “the challenges presented to an individual’s lifestyle in the past year,” and what the rest of us describe as “this seemingly unending nightmare of epic proportions”.
So if your government handled its pandemic response with all the acumen and agility of a Teletubby on a stag do, then your ranking was going to suffer. Or, if like New Zealand, you managed to keep the number of Covid deaths somewhere in the mid-twenties, then it could be argued that your cities are about as ‘liveable’ as it gets right now (literally) .
And so, while Auckland romped into the number one spot, the two UK cities in the study, London and Manchester, stumbled unsteadily into the rankings at 60th and 54th place respectively.
Cue headlines like London fails to register on ranking of world’s most liveable cities from the Standard (it did register, it just registered really really badly), and hastily-penned listicles like Vice’s 26 Reasons Why Living in London Sucks (sample reason: ‘Having to deal with estate agents’ - good job Vice, keep up the cutting-edge satire).
But as New Zealander Elle Hunt pointed out in the Guardian, Auckland is not a very liveable city if you’re trying to buy a house, or if you’re part of the Māori and Pasifika communities who “are disproportionately harmed” by the growing poverty rate there.
So the biggest takeaway from this year’s Global Liveability Index seems to be that the Global Liveability Index isn’t really fit for purpose right now. And we’re not just saying that out of sour grapes (honest).
We’re saying that because the very idea of what a city is; what makes it attractive and interesting, what makes it successful, and what makes it work - all of this has shifted massively in the past 18 months, and it’s still in flux.
Working habits, retail, hospitality, transport… none of these are ever going to to snap back into their pre-pandemic shapes. But it’s the way that a city responds to those transformations, how it rolls with the punches and comes back even better, that will give some true measure of its durability and its strength.
It’s worth noting that, after the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, the city’s ‘liveability’ score went down. But if you so much as glanced at how that city reacted to the tragedy that was inflicted on it then you couldn’t help but understand that a city’s worth can’t be gauged by statistics and graphs alone.
Of course London is flawed, but we’d argue that there’s no other city in the world that can match it for sheer resilience. London has heart and soul in spades, and we’ll take that over a few golden beaches any day (although, Sadiq, if you’re listening, a beach or two wouldn’t go amiss).
Meanwhile, on the positive side…
…London did place third in another global ranking.
Time Out asked “27,000-plus city-dwellers which specific streets they think are the coolest” and South Bank made it into the number three spot (although Time Out got their “editors and experts to weigh up the candidates and make the call,” so let’s take all this with a pinch of salt).
Now, if we were being picky, we might point out that nobody ever described the South Bank as a ‘street’ (it’s not even a road, the clue’s in the name), but fresh off the Global Liveability Index smackdown, we’ll just keep quiet and agree that the “food markets, galleries, pop-ups and more” down there are pretty great, not to mention the continued existence of the Undercroft skatepark.
Meanwhile, GQ magazine has published an entire article arguing that There's still no better place to be young than London. On the downside, the article is written by 67-year-old Brexiteer and Sun columnist Tony Parsons, who spends a lot of the article pining for the “dirt-cheap Central London bedsit” of his youth, before arguing that London needs to return to the “down at heel… hungrier, grittier” 1970s version of itself.
Maybe if we can convince Mr Parsons to move out of London we might get a better ‘liveability’ ranking next year?
And the rest…
A second teenager has been charged with the shooting of the Black Lives Matter activist, Sasha Johnson. Johnson herself remains “in a critical condition in hospital.”
The Museum of the Home opened its doors again on Saturday, and it was met with a protest by “residents, activists and politicians,” calling for the removal of the statue of slave ship owner Robert Geffrye. As artnet explains, the museum does want to relocate the statue, but “the government is preventing the museum from removing it.”
Also opening its doors this last week: the coronavirus-delayed Serpentine Pavilion, designed by South African studio Counterspace. Dezeen has an interview with Counterspace founder Sumayya Vally, explaining how the pavilion “was designed to reference the architecture of London's migrant communities”.
The ‘Nuclear Dawn’ mural on Coldharbour Lane (originally painted “in the 1980s when Britain was in the clutches of the Cold War”) has been lovingly restored. Brixton Buzz has photos and more details.
Shaun Bailey has told the Standard that “Boris has asked me to consider running for mayor again”. What the Prime Minister actually said was, “Commiserations, I hope you don’t feel too badly… You did such a good job, surely you will think about standing again?” Not the same thing really, is it Shaun?
A study has found that Essex and London accents are “deemed less intelligent,” which must have come as a blow to the University of Essex, whose Department of Language and Linguistics ran the research.
The Islington Tribune has been investigating “screechy tube train noise,” which has been frustrating those “living above the Northern and Victoria lines” as well as the people travelling on the trains themselves. Apparently there’s been an awful lot of grinding happening to try and alleviate the problem (“over 17,800 metres of noise and vibration-related rail grinding” has happened in the last six months), but it’s not a permanent solution. That would involve “a complete overhaul” of the lines… and TfL isn’t exactly flush at the moment.
The Met has launched a ‘walk and talk’ scheme in Lambeth and Southwark, designed to show how they’re “determined to put an end to violence against women and girls.” The idea is that female neighbourhood officers ‘buddy up’ with local women “to walk the streets of south London and hear of their experiences, concerns and reflections”. This sounds like more of a PR offensive than anything else, not to mention one that puts the emphasis on women to do all the work.
Meanwhile the Met spent last Thursday cracking down on the scourge of e-scooters. Apparently 25 e-scooters “which were being ridden illegally” in the West End were seized “in a day of enforcement action”. So we can all sleep more easily now.
