Reinventing London. Bridget Rosewell

      Chapter 1

      Introduction

      It seems impossible to be neutral about London. Samuel Johnson opined that when one is tired of London, one is tired of life, but William Cobbett described it as a ‘great wen’ and a ‘monster’. These conflicting opinions are still with us, although possibly not so memorably expressed. Both the current mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and his predecessor, Ken Livingstone, have described it as the greatest city on earth, but perhaps they would say that. Their opinions of their city differ much less than their politics.

      Other views have not always been so positive. Professor Roy Porter published a social history of London in 1994. It ends on a note of pessimism about London’s prospects, fearing that the city might become a museum piece. It was just as well he also pointed out that historians make poor forecasters, as London was even then on the cusp of its own reinvention.

      His last paragraph ends: ‘London is a muddle that works. Will it stay that way?’ The answer would appear to be yes. London and Londoners have rethought their city, its governance and its geography. Only the Rolling Stones appear to be the exception to the rule that change is constant. All great cities need to change. This book looks at how London has been reinvented in the past, and describes the reinvention it is experiencing now. It also asks what is necessary to ensure that this wave of change succeeds and that London continues to prosper.

      I grew up in the outer suburbs, in what used to be called the commuter belt, and I went to school in London in the 1960s, travelling by train and spending winter afternoons warming myself on the coal fire in Surbiton station’s art deco waiting room. I gave in to teachers who said I would be foolish to aim to be a geologist, since women were not allowed on oil rigs and oil was the future for geologists. I went as a teenager to London to gawp at Biba and Mary Quant but couldn’t afford any of the clothes. I made most of my wardrobe on the old Singer sewing machine at home, with designer patterns, trying to live up to the new times. Air conditioning was unheard of, and so were daily showers. Central heating was rare.

      It is important to remind ourselves from time to time about how enormously lifestyles have changed for the better over these past fifty years – change enabled by economic growth and higher incomes. The reinvention of our capital city and its surrounding hinterland has been a crucial part of that change. In the 1970s it was hard to imagine the London of the new millennium. It seemed as if London, and indeed the United Kingdom, was struggling. Successive oil crises in 1974 and 1979 exacerbated the decline of industries saddled with complacent management and disgruntled workforces. London was losing population and losing jobs. The new towns planned around the edge of the city, such as Basingstoke, Stevenage, Harlow and Milton Keynes, seemed destined to be the sources of growth. The swinging sixties had touched far too small a part of London to make more than a small dent in the general feeling of doom and gloom. Yet change did come. In 2002, when I became the first chief economist to the newly formed Greater London Authority (GLA), my initial task was to prepare long-term projections for the city as the basis for a new London Plan. Those forecasts showed expected employment growth of 435,000 between 2001 and 2011, a scale of job creation sceptics said could not be achieved. In the event, 427,000 additional jobs were created. I am glad I stuck to my guns.

      The general thrust of my projections did not change over the following ten years and they continued to be largely accurate. London has even bounced back from the recent post-crisis recession. In the summer of 2013, employment was higher than at the previous peak in 2008, and output was back to 99 per cent of the peak. Short-term indicators are all positive. The doom-mongers of 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, appear to have been mistaken, at least as far as London is concerned. The latest projections from the GLA (not now my responsibility) suggest that, if anything, employment growth has accelerated. Population is now expected to increase by 1.7 million and employment by 850,000 by 2036. The challenge is to provide the conditions in which these projections can be successfully realized, through a further reinvention of London’s economy.

      How can this be brought about? Successful urban reinvention depends on changing, in the right way, four interrelated elements of the economy. These are

      •the structure of output and employment, enabling new activities and jobs to be created;

      •the places people live and the kind of people moving into London, through appropriate planning and building, ensuring there is a suitable workforce;

      •transport links and other infrastructure, so that people can get around easily; and

      •communications, especially international connections, so that trade can continue to grow, London being quintessentially a trading city.

      The rest of this book looks at each element in turn, at the past and at the scope for the

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