Taking London's vital signs
And why 'pro-rich' doesn't mean the same as 'pro-London'
Note: This was supposed to be last Wednesday’s issue, but then a report came about Boris Johnson, Jennifer Arcuri and how City Hall doles out taxpayer’s money, so you’re getting it today instead.
Almost exactly one year ago (just two months into the post-lockdown period) we published an issue headlined ‘Reports of London’s Death have been greatly exaggerated’. In that issue we looked at how the widely predicted ‘mass exodus’ out of London hadn’t materialised and how the majority of Londoners were pretty optimistic about the city ‘bouncing back’.
Even when we published a slightly less optimistic follow-up three months later, it felt like our biggest problems were the funding of TfL, too many young people leaving London, and the gradual decline of Oxford Street as a major retail destination.
Oh for the days when the biggest thing we had to complain about was the Marble Arch Mound!
We’ve been meaning to check in on London’s post-pandemic recovery for a while now, but every time we start writing it, another economic wrecking ball comes crashing down and we have to reassess everything. This time of course, that wrecking ball came in the form of the ‘mini-Budget’, so today we’re going to see what London’s prognosis looked like as summer came to an end, and then see if that so-called growth plan was as pro-London as many people claimed it was.
💼 Employment
Everyone knows that one of the best ways of making yourself feel better about a shitty situation is to compare yourself to someone who is in an even shittier situation. So, with that in mind, let’s see what the latest Global Cities Survey has to say about how London’s employment numbers compare to those of New York, Paris, Berlin and Hong Kong.
Believe it or not, London is nailing it (or at least it was in the first quarter of this year). Compared to those other major cities, London had the “greatest number of people in work compared to the pre-pandemic benchmark” and our “labour market saw the strongest recovery” from the Covid gut-punch.
That doesn’t mean we’re all rushing back to our desks though. The current estimate is that office occupancy in London is at about a quarter of what it was. Only NYC has fewer office-returners than us. Which means, of course, fewer people on trains and buses…
🚌 Public transport
One of the genuinely good bits of news from the past few weeks was the long-term financing deal for TfL. If that hadn’t happened we would have been truly in the shit by this point.
According to TfL’s Chief Customer Officer, the number of people travelling on the Tube on weekdays is now at about 70% of what it was pre-pandemic. That’s around three million journeys a day. That number’s gone up by around 45% since the start of the year.
As we mentioned in this weekend’s Roundup, passenger numbers on the Elizabeth line have been consistently higher than estimated and regularly go above two million per week (despite people breaking trying to break the doors with their suitcases).
Now it’s back in action, the Night Tube is at around 50% of what it was a few years ago, while bus journeys are around the five million-a-day mark, or 85% of what they were pre-‘vid.
And let’s not forget the bicycles. Santander bikes are being rented in record numbers, with 1.3 million hires in June.
However, the plan to extend the Bakerloo line into Lewisham and Catford is still on ice, with Southwark and Lewisham councils last week calling for the plan to be delivered asap, “if ministers want to avoid £6.4bn in lost economic output”.
🛩️ Airports
At the end of August, the Centre for Cities asked What does London’s air traffic data tell us about the city’s recovery from the pandemic?
The answer: We’ve got some catching up to do.
By the start of this year London’s airport traffic was lagging behind places like Amsterdam and Paris. But the numbers rallied at the start of this year and kept rising until May when they reached levels around 25% of what they were pre-pandemic. Since then though that number has plateaued. Apparently this is a global trend but the ‘airport chaos’ we saw over the summer undoubtedly has something to do with that,
Meanwhile City Airport is in the middle of a consultation that could increase the cap on how many passengers go through the airport from 6.5 million to 9 million in the next ten years; and a public inquiry has begun into London Luton Airport’s expansion plans (yeah, we know it’s not in London).
🏨 Hotels
According to data compiled by the hilariously-named Hotstats, hotel occupancy rates in London over the summer got back up to around the 67% mark, which means they’re better than the rest of the UK for the first time since the pandemic.
On top of that, the money made from the sale of food and drink in hotels has recovered to what it used to be, prompting someone from a consulting group to say that “the city is slowly getting its mojo back”.
Yep, he said ‘mojo’.
This was a few months ago though, and even then those same consultants were warning that “the hotel sector is currently facing a number of headwinds in the form of inflationary pressures, the cost of living crisis and consumer confidence.”
On the flip side, the fact that the dollar now buys you twice the number of Big Ben snow globes it did this time last year (and tax free shopping is now back for tourists) means that US tourists “are flocking to our shores” and will probably continue to do so right up to the coronation next year. Which means we’ll probably continue to see even more luxury hotels going up in the West End over the next few years.
🛍️ The West End
Finally, a quick look at theatres and shopping. Over the summer a YouGov survey found that 28% of Londoners had “been to the theatre to see a play or musical in the past three months”. That number was just one percent higher back March 2020.
And a few months ago The New West End Company (the business partnership which represents shops, restaurant, hotels etc around Oxford, Regent and Bond streets) was reporting that footfall was at about 80% of what it used to be and predicting a return to pre-pandemic turnover levels of “10 billion pounds within the next two years”.
Meanwhile there’s a lot of pressure on Westminster Council to come good on their promise to do something about the plague of ‘candy stores’ and even more pressure on Ikea to help revive the whole area when it opens in the old Topshop building next year.
Coming up on Wednesday 🕵♂️
We speak to the artist and author Huw Lemmey about his new film, Ungentle, creating a sexual psychogeography of London using Grindr, and how the various ‘secret worlds’ of London overlap.
If you subscribe to LiB that will be in your inbox first thing Wednesday, plus you’ll get access to our ever-growing archive of writing about London:
Mini budget, massive impact
When people describe Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-Budget as ‘pro-London’ what they really mean is that it was ‘pro-rich people’.
It’s undoubtedly true that the largest number of high-wealth families live in the south-east and a recent Resolution Foundation report into the UK’s wealth distribution said that almost a quarter of families with a per-adult wealth above £2 million live in London. That’s why, the day after the budget, The Guardian ran an article with the headline Mini-budget benefits London and south-east England, study shows, which quoted another Resolution Foundation finding that “households in London and the south-east could gain an average of £1,600 next year from Friday’s fiscal statement”.
But, at the same time, wealth in London is just as unequally distributed as it is across the rest of the country. The Trust for London’s most recent calculations show that London’s 10% wealthiest people hold 44.3% of London’s total net wealth.
On top of that, Covid hit London harder than any other UK city (financially speaking) and that’s meant an 8% drop on ‘median total household wealth’ in the last few years, and our rates of home ownership and pension participation have also suffered. (Let’s not forget too that Londoners pay more for electricity than the rest of the country).
While the Treasury were very keen to show that their ’Growth Plan’ would help ordinary Londoners, the maths didn’t really stack up. For example, here’s FullFact.org explaining why the government’s claims that “a typical first-time buyer in London” would save money on stamp duty and household bills had more faults in it than Hammersmith Bridge.
There were a lot of headlines following the mini-Budget that suggested this was the end of ‘levelling up’ and they may be right as far as that policy is concerned. But that doesn’t mean the government is ready to invest in the housing, infrastructure, small businesses and cost of living support that London needs. That’s a big problem if the scrapping of ‘levelling up’ means the rest of the country is more reliant on its capital to deliver economic prosperity, as Nick Bowes of the Centre for London points out in this Twitter thread.
On the day of the mini-Budget, On London’s Dave Hill wrote that the statement meant that the “UK’s dependency on London seems unlikely to reduce”. He then went on to wonder what might happen if things didn’t go as planned. Would “millions of Londoners” suffer, Dave wondered, if the capital’s economy “stalls rather than soars”.
Some people might have dismissed that as doom-mongering at the time. But right now we’d take ‘stalled’ over ‘death spiral’.
5 little bits
The GLA released its second Survey of Londoners last week, in which 8,630 Londoners are asked about the impact of COVID-19 on their lives. Unfortunately the survey was done before the cost of living crisis kicked in, so it feels a little out-of-date already. Despite that, there are some interesting bits in there that relate to what we’ve been talking about today. For example, “a quarter of Londoners did not have at least £1,500 in savings” and “13% of Londoners aged 16 and over said they were not able to keep their home warm enough in winter.”
After the pound took a nosedive, a lot of people decided to put their money into dependable old gold instead, which means that gold dealers in places like Hatton Garden have been selling out of gold coins and gold bars.
Last week we told you that Sadiq definitely wasn’t in favour of a statue of the Queen in Trafalgar Square. But it turns out that Telegraph headline was flat out “wrong” and the mayor is “ready to support the wishes of the Royal Family whatever they are and will ensure our capital has a fitting tribute to our longest serving monarch”.
Yesterday the White Pube website published a Museum Shitpost Statement in response to recent statements from “big galleries and museums… circling back to the Black Lives Matter statements posted back in June 2020.”
The deers are rutting in Richmond Park so the authorities would like to remind you that getting in-between them to take selfies is not a good idea.