Reports of London's death have been greatly exaggerated
Plus hot tubes, Fresh Princes and sinkholes
Back at the end of June we took a look at some ‘research’ that predicted over 800,000 workers were “at risk of leaving central London.”
That was, of course, complete guff; but that hasn’t stopped others predicting the dramatic decline of London in some way or other. Whether it’s the death of the high street, the square mile becoming a ‘ghost town’, or just the very concept of ‘the city’ being eroded.
Now, as we look forward to a winter of food and fuel shortages (alongside the continued presence of COVID-19), it might not feel like the time to get optimistic; but there is some evidence that not everything is going to hell in a handcart.
‘Mass exodus’ not as massive as first reported
Earlier this month King’s College London and the Université de Paris produced a report called Capitals and Covid: how Londoners and Parisians see their cities in light of the pandemic, which gives us a good idea of how people feel about living in London (and lets us compare ourselves to the French, which, let’s face it, we love doing).
The report’s findings (which are based on polling of around 1,000 adults in both cities in April and May this year) found that “there is little sign of a mass exodus from either city as a result of Covid,” with 43% of Londoners saying they’re likely to leave in the next five years. That’s just a slight increase from the 37% who said the same in 2019. The biggest reason given by both cities for moving out is “better quality of life”, but second on Londoner’s list of priorities is “cost of living”. So no change there then.
When it comes to how well we’re going to bounce back from the pandemic, Londoners are pretty buoyant. 66% “think it’s likely that their city will recover from the Covid crisis”, versus 57% of Parisians. Just one in nine people in Greater London “think their city will never fully recover from the crisis”.
People are generally confident that London’s standard of living will improve in the next five years, with 37% saying it will get better (versus 31% who said the same in 2019), and just 21% saying it will get worse. Another thing that’s improved over the last two years is satisfaction with local services. 56% of Londoners are satisfied with services like schools, transport and police, an increase from the 37% recorded in 2019.
But we have bigger problems than COVID
Some of the most interesting parts of the survey have nothing to do with COVID. For example, the section on Immigration and Social Cohesion concludes that “people in Greater London are twice as likely as their Parisian counterparts to say that immigration from outside of the country has had a positive impact on their capital,” with 74% of Londoners saying “people of different backgrounds get on well together in their local area”.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the section entitled Safety where everything kind of goes to shit for London:
On average, women in Greater London say they’ve been stared at inappropriately 15.1 times during the time they’ve lived in the city, while the equivalent figure for women in Greater Paris is 10.1 times. There is an even bigger gap when it comes to inappropriate jokes or sexual comments, with London women saying they’ve experienced this an average of 13.3 times, compared with five times for women in Greater Paris. Unwanted touching of women appears to be a bigger problem in London than Greater Paris, too.
41% of women in London said they ‘feel unsafe after dark’, but remember this survey was taken in May. We would bet good money that number has risen considerably in the last three or four months.
Reasons to be cheerful…
It’s all well and good to tell a researcher from King’s College that you believe in London’s ability to bounce back, but is it actually going to happen?
City AM certainly seems to think so. It published a punchy editorial to mark the return of the print edition last week, and after quoting The Clash’s London Calling they went full Churchill, claiming that “In the darkest of times, the ingenuity of the City of London and the capital at large shone bright”. To back this up they cite the fact that, during lockdown “start-ups and scale-ups brought in record amounts of investment, established financial institutions embraced the new worlds of green finance and ESG, and even the most traditional of our dining establishments began take-out service.”
N.B. For a slightly more balanced editorial from City AM, try I love London but I need it to embrace diversity and love me back by Kike Oniwinde (the founder of the Black Young Professionals Network).
Last week figures were released showing that tech start-ups in London “raised nearly as much in the first six months of 2021 as they did in the whole of last year,” which means that London now holds joint second place with New York as the top location for start-ups” (with Silicon Valley being number one, obviously).
Meanwhile, Bloomberg has been keeping its eye on the Square Mile, where “a turning point has been reached” it says, with trains “at their busiest since the pandemic broke out,” while the “streets have been thronged with workers again.” Foot traffic in the city is around “39% of the pre-pandemic norm” now, while over at the Pret Index “sales at Pret stores in London’s West End theatre and shopping district also set a new pandemic high and are now almost completely back to normal.”
Finally, the latest Time Out Index was just announced, and “London was voted number one for discovering new and surprising things and number two for being exciting.”
Taking succour at being voted second in the world for “being exciting” does make us feel a bit like the kid accepting their ‘participation medal’ at the school sports day. But, honestly, we’ll take whatever we can get right now.
And the rest…
Another thing to be happy about: A 49-year-old man from Edmonton “who carried out an anti-Semitic graffiti campaign in London” has been found guilty of stirring up racial hatred. Nicholas Lalchan, used marker pens to write on bus stops, calling Jewish and gay people “gray aliens” . He’ll be sentenced in December.
Another thing to get depressed about: A study by the University of Oxford suggests that there could be up to 29 days by 2030 when “external temperatures will exceed 27°C and make it uncomfortably hot for passengers on the Tube network.”
From this week you no longer need to buy a weekly travelcard because, as Ian Visits explains, the weekly price-cap on Oyster pay-as-you-go fares now applies to all rail and tube travel.
In utterly unsurprising news, it looks like Crossrail won’t be open in early 2022 after all. A report by Crossrail watchdog Jacobs, has put the launch date back to the “latter part …of the first six months of 2022” due to “concerns about its trains and stations”.
Will Smith is coming to the West End for just one night in November. His Will: An Evening of Stories with Friends (in which the Fresh Prince reflects “on his life, his career and his inner happiness”) is on at the Savoy Theatre on 18 November. You can get tickets from 3pm on Friday.
The Grocer has been to visit coffee brand Lavazza’s new flagship store on Great Marlborough Street. Apparently it’s “an immersive coffee experience” and visitors will be able to have tasting sessions with a ‘coffelier’ “a sommelier of the coffee world.” Dear god.
How many more chicken restaurants does London need? American fried chicken giant Popeyes obviously thinks we need more as it just picked Westfield Stratford for its flagship London restaurant. London Eater has all the details.
One bad thing about theatre coming back to London? The ticket prices are back too. The Telegraph (paywall alert) thinks that paying £135 to see Ralph Fiennes performing TS Eliot is an insult and that Theatreland needs to “wake up”.
The Economist has reviewed Tom Chivers’ new book London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City which “delves into the capital’s streets” to uncover stories of lost rivers, sinkholes and abandoned Tube stations.
Jack White played a surprise gig on a Beak Street rooftop this weekend to celebrate the opening of his Third Man Records store on Marshall Street:
