Will London’s political settlement serve it well for the years ahead?

More than at any time in recent history, London looks as though its star is waning. Assailed by both a levelling-up agenda that seeks to transfer economic power away from the capital and a pandemic that threatens to hollow out the city, times are tough. But Tony Travers, director of LSE London, believes things could turn out for the best – eventually. “I am an optimist,” he insists. “Over a 20 to 30-year timeframe.” London always comes through in the end, he says. “It’s had its ups and downs, but history suggests central London is always resilient, even if it has difficult shorter-term periods.” That’s the good news takeaway. Now onto the difficult short-term. Travers recently co-authored a study with Arup that showed the West End’s GVA could fall by 97% by 2024. To put that in starker terms, that is a fall from £4.9bn to just £100m. Entire industries could find themselves radically altered, such as theatre. “And that means British theatre and soft power would be affected – that’s an inevitable consequence.” Why is London being hit so hard by this pandemic? The answer is almost a cliche, says Travers. “Social distancing is the enemy of agglomeration, and agglomeration is how big cities prosper and thrive.” And the one and a quarter million people who used to flock to central London every morning show no signs of returning just yet. “If there isn’t a return to work, then it is hard to see the central London economy ever being… quite the same thing in the short to medium term future,” says Travers. There is at least an acknowledgement of this in Whitehall. Chancellor Rishi Sunak said in his autumn statement that the economy would face structural changes. Travers says: “Structurally, things are going to die and things are going to grow – the chancellor hopes – and things are going to be different in the future.” Buried within that idea is that the economy, indeed the very fabric of cities, is going to alter rapidly. And in London in particular. One result could be the tongue-twisting Los Angelesification of London – a city characterised by sprawl. “If there is a dispersal of economic activity from central London, it will most likely be to outer London and to the South East.” This is, after all, the traditional pattern of outwards migration. But the interaction with some of the government’s other policy agendas, such as the planning reforms and housing targets proposed by Robert Jenrick, could have unintended results. “You begin to see the creation of a more sprawling London,” says Travers. The density of the core city begins to break down as the city becomes a doughnut, concentrating more economic activity in what was previously its leafier margins. “So London would still be a kind of city of eight or nine million in a region of 21m-22m, but some of the economic activity will have moved outwards.” If the government’s “levelling-up” agenda continues in this context, and the powers of London’s mayor continue to be curtailed by the transport settlement, this could lead to Britain’s former economic engine running out of gas. Or alternatively, London could become an even bigger city, just more spread out. “The economic activity of the centre will have migrated to Guildford, Milton Keynes, Southend and Brighton, and indeed the countryside.” Travers paints a picture that would make Greta Thunberg reach for the Xanax. There will be more housing on the green belt. “Everything will be more spread out. People will be commuting in and out of the city centre by car and driving around the M25 to meetings rather than using public transport.” The capital’s public transport infrastructure, in this scenario, will have long been hacked back. “We will have to see discussion – the Treasury will demand this – about reducing services and perhaps mothballing parts of systems, and not only in London.” It could be good for outer boroughs as currently run-down 1930s parades begin to capture more retail spending and more people choose to eat out in the suburbs in the evening. And, as with Los Angeles, parts of the centre could become sites of appalling deprivation. “Lower-income households who can’t afford to move out would be left in the city.” But, Travers is an optimist. No, really. He looks to the past to better understand where London is heading in the future. London started as an incredibly dense entity, focused on the Square Mile. Then came the railways, and the inter-war boom, creating an unprecedented sprawl. From the 1950s to the 1980s the centre declined, but that was reversed from 1986 with another wave of re-centralisation. The spreading of London’s economic power “may sound problematic for central London”. But maybe not in the long term. “It could mean, in the long term, that London becomes an even bigger thing.” Travers admits that this may “not necessarily be helpful for the rest of the UK in terms of levelling up”, but argues that central government has to recognise the dangers and realise the opportunity. So far, he notes, there has been no political engagement with this issue, at any level. “But there is an issue of soft power for the UK government in all this.” “Do you want London to be a major world city, particularly post-Brexit, with all the things it offers? Or do you want to risk other cities in other countries stealing a march on this very visible symbol of Britain’s economic, political, social and indeed cultural power?” “That is one for national politicians to think long and hard about.”