London: what went wrong | Tom Colsy
London is a great city. Great– but not friendly, mentally-healthy, well planned or highly functioning. For a settlement based on Roman, Saxon and medieval design, its current population of almost nine million inhabitants is beginning to prove a swell too substantial for its foundations.
The capital, economically, socially and in particular culturally has become estranged from the rest of the United Kingdom. Among an array of polls which testify similar, in 2013 London was voted the most ‘hated’ city and region of Britain by the rest of the country. Beyond rhetoric, however, what specific phenomena are at play here? What evidence is there for such a claim? Why is London the way it is?
A Cockney exodus
Well, before looking at the evidence we’ll start with a healthy dose of anecdote and a story. My father recalls a time visiting Soho in the late 1960s. It is both needless and inevitable to state that it was a different place. Many of the individuals who once comprised the bulk of the proprietors of its activity, business and population are long since dead. Time has moved on. And that is neither a good nor a bad thing. Yet it is an analysis of how things have changed and what has been lost that allows us a greater understanding of the present. He describes with fondness the unmistakable identity of the place- one which was bustling with market stalls, dodgy businesses and, to clean off any kind of rose tint to the lens of our perspective, simultaneously with not-so-legal activity.
As an example to not view the past in political commentary with any sort of longful nostalgia, the area of London, like many areas of the UK at the time, existed and functioned with a residual afterglow of early 20th century gang culture.
Michael Caine, a former welfare-recipient, former Labour supporter, cultural British icon, and modern day Brexit supporting Tory, is a man who led a wonderfully varied life. Yet, despite serving his country in the Korean War, he is a prime example of someone who partook in such urban gang culture, though by his own admission this was rife and as much for protection than anything else. Now, this is not to smear the great Sir Michael, instead only to demonstrate that neither crime nor gangs are anything new to the city; it is after all the place that birthed such notorious, often romanticised, criminals as the Kray Twins and Charles Bronson. Violence is not a new arrival in the capital. Nor has it ever been a sunny utopia.
Caine belonged to a tribe that is today becoming all-the-more endangered: the Cockney. These traditional working class natives of the city (predominantly from the East side) responsible for its cheeky, endearing, albeit sometimes rough and market-stall swindling character stereotypically caricatured in such televisions series as Only Fools And Horses, Eastenders and movies such as Guy Ritchie’s masterpiece Snatch have for years been vacating the very city defined by this identity in their droves.
Moreover, this unfortunate pattern has been taking place for most of this millennium, starting in the Blair era. In 2013, the BBC reported that while the general population grew by over a million over the same period “something quite remarkable happened… in the first decade of the new millennium. The number of white British people in the capital fell by 620,000 - equivalent to the entire population of Glasgow moving out.” Now, the other thing about this trend is that evidence suggests it is one that has only been increasing in recent times, as the Telegraph reported that a record 340,000 people fled the city in 2018 alone. In losing its historical settlers and families, are the communities of London losing a part of their soul and identity? To anyone who has recently visited it certainly feels the case.
Put simply, this is happening for a multitude of reasons. For one, house prices have driven commuters further and further away from the city in which they work. Secondly, Russian and Chinese money has been buying up property that lines the inner city, artificially driving up prices and leaving both business and residential property entirely vacant. London has become, as Brendan O’Neill so nicely phrases it; a city without citizens (a problem that has recently come to affect all of its residents- regardless of race and background).
This is why I return to my father’s recollection of Soho. Despite being in the centre of the city (today associated with the upmarket and extortionately expensive shops and restaurants that line its streets), he describes it to have existed at the time with a sort of coherent, internal consistency and unique, identifiable character that can no longer rightly be said about it today - largely in thanks to the working class East Londoners who travelled across the city everyday to work there. It may have been beleaguered by petty crime, yet for the purposes of cohesion this was somehow mediated by the fact its inhabitants (of many backgrounds, races and convictions) had roots in their area that ran deep. To most, it was their home, and the home of their immediate ancestors at least. They lived with a sense of internal loyalty towards community and eventually, outward loyalty to the nation.
Loyalties in the city, today, are all the more under strain when nearly the entire population that has always called the place home is vanishing. What then is left behind is merely a shell of a city to be perpetually emptied and refilled with the ever-changing flows of international capital and movements of people. Nothing of history. Nothing of permanence. Nothing meaningful.
Highest foreign-born population in the world
It is worth stating that homogeneity is not necessarily of any ethical good. Native Brit populations are of no higher moral value than any newcomers. This is not to say that every people of every culture do not deserve a homeland but to state that anyone can truly assimilate and contribute to a nation when there is the will, as indeed is the British tradition from Handel to Brunel. That said, with historical perspective, it is entirely abnormal to have a major city in which almost 40% of its residents are born abroad. However, for London this is true. Of all the cities in the world, it has the most foreign-born residents.
This rapid diversification of the city towards a population where increasingly more have no roots in the place whatsoever, where everyone's a stranger to each other, and often don’t even speak the same language (1 in 10 have no functioning ability in English according to recent research), is indisputably a certain barrier to overcome. A settlement is not merely a place of cohabiting, coexistence and commerce – it is a home. When one belongs to a place he treats it with more respect, and views it with longevity rather than mere utility.
Great Conservative leader Benjamin Disreali noticed this. A Jew and a man who had no initial roots in the land, his liberal contemporaries often were confused by his alliance with Tory traditionalists and deep love of olde and traditional rural England. It was something to which he placed efforted roots and wanted to belong (a sentiment so timelessly demonstrated in his books Sybil and Coningsby). He famously noted how while in the villages and small towns you have community; in the cities you have mere ‘aggregation’.
When you have no trust, desire for any relations, or commonalities with your neighbour it becomes no wonder that crime rises and mental illness becomes more pervasive. This is the case for London. Social cohesion (customarily measured by the metric of social capital), mental health, and safety on the streets have all continued to nosedive. Even compared with other cities, London performs badly.
Ancient Rome excelled for its ability to assimilate and integrate different peoples and cultures, be them Etruscan, Illyrian, Greek, Phoenician, Gallic, Egyptian or any of the others. In fact, much of its military force was comprised of foreign, barbarian auxilia that earned citizenship through service. The crucial point about this was that it was a slow and gradual process, taking centuries. In the case of London, centuries have not been given for the easing of such enormous demographic shifts. Rather, the population was significantly changed in mere decades.
Assimilation for the purpose of establishing harmony and civility (suitable for a home) is a task that is extremely difficult for a city becoming segregated, with gated communities that often don’t get on. Whereas, Rome thrived precisely thanks to its ability to form a strong unified whole from disparate, somewhat cosmopolitan material and its unrivaled ability to assimilate and integrate- it ultimately fell due to its inability to find a home for the vast numbers of Germanic Goths. And that led to the city’s eventual sacking and the empire’s collapse. It is needless to say London is not ancient Rome. And Britain no longer has an empire, but it does serve to show that even in history there is such a thing as too many, too quickly.
The city is undeniably overwhelmed. Be it in the forcible squeezing of all pedestrians, of commuters, of residents and of tourists alike into the overcrowded metal tubes that crawl underneath the city where they enjoy air quality 30 times worse than that of the surface - which is already bad. Or the fact it has the lowest social capital and thus the poorest functioning communities in the United Kingdom, with London men also showing the poorest mental health. Or indeed the fact that any segregation that exists in the city is only worsening. On top of all of this, violent crime is making a vengeful return.
These are all preventable problems, but to an extent inevitabilities with postmodern mass urbanism, which London has long selected as its standard.
The selling of its architectural soul
I can be fair with London; it has for a long time been a semi-industrial and globally trading city. Its position on the Thames, leading out to a large and accessible estuary between Kent and Essex made it ideal for these purposes. Yet this does not excuse the vulgarisation of its deeply historical streets.
It also sustained much damage during the Blitz, a period in which Londoners’ grit and resilience proved their love of country. So, in the aftermath of such devastation, much was needed to be rebuilt quickly and cheaply. It’s not perhaps too great a mystery that the romantic classical and renaissance built streets of Paris are of greater beauty- not least when factoring in the Great Fire of the 17th century that obliterated London’s Roman quarter.
However, after the war, London was far from the only city which suffered great damage. The soulless route that was pursued to rebuild it stands in stark contrast to that of Prague (today widely recognised as one of Europe’s most beautiful cities), Munich, and the elegantly traditional and entirely rebuilt city centre of Warsaw.
Take, for a single example, the absolute transformation of the once-picturesque streets surrounding Holborn Viaduct:
This trigger-happy demolition of history is far from an isolated occurrence, on an isolated street. Look at the ‘Shard’, the notably phallic ‘Gherkin’ and the ‘20 Fenchurch Street’ skyscrapers, the latter of which was given a green light by authorities, even after protests and a public inquiry into its nature due to its position that risked concealing and overshadowing the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral. London’s buildings really do resemble soulless, prideful and meaningless ‘fists into the sky’ as Roger Scruton so aptly put it. Every one of them gleefully desecrates the charm and order of the environment that came before it, grasping for attention, and each one screaming “me”. And by rebelling against the beauty of British tradition, they also spit on its culture. Meandering through the shadows cast, occasionally glancing up toward the peak of these towering boxes of metal and glass that claim their undeserved places as the new overlords of the skyline, the everyday Londoner, consciously or subconsciously, reads this message on a daily basis. Loud and clear.
This architectural masochism is not explained so easily by justifications of a mere lack of resources, as Soviet satellite regimes in Eastern Europe extracted most wealth back to motherland Russia, yet building with the preservation of national heritage was still an aim upheld over there. But not, it would seem, one that ever attained much priority in postwar Britain.
What happened to this once-beautiful city falls in line with an increase in prevalence of decolonisation, materialism and a general loss of national self-belief. The replacement of a quintessentially British culture with one of self-hatred and self-deprecation. Its waning appreciation of beauty chancedly correlates with its gradual irreligiosity. Demonstrated, rather fittingly, when the Economist shockingly reported in 2016 that over 500 of the capital’s churches had been sold and turned into luxury accommodation in only a few years.
Yet the real fall of London is further personified in its visible choice of financial interests over that of the homestead and culture. It remains one of the least pedestrianised capitals on the continent. Only the very popular Covent Garden enjoys vehicle-free streets, while in the rest of the city the tyranny of the car and lorry reigns free. For, in London, it is plain for any poor, wandering, suffocated pedestrian to see that when it comes to planning, the movements of commerce take priority over pretty much all else.
England’s capital is far from a Hellish dystopia. It is, however, a city that chose the vulgar over the beautiful for economic benefit, spat on its rich array of national tradition and culture, and is day-by-day less representative of the country it represents - in character, culture, architecture, or population. It is for the most part, as Benjamin Disraeli would say, a place of modern ‘aggregation’. A shell of a city. A warm and welcome home for no one, but a mere stopping point for the temporary collection of workers and international capital- with increasingly little underneath. London has chosen its path.
All the conservative can do is observe and work to ensure that what remains still beautiful and remains somewhat functioning of the urban UK does not follow suit. Architectural heritage must be preserved. Flows of migration must be at a rate conducive to harmonious suburbs and integration. And we must not prioritise the soulless activities of commerce above all else.
