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| Living in what has now become a world megalopolis, it is hard to remember how
different London was twenty-five years ago. Canary Wharf had cranes and nothing else – certainly no ships. The City was a parochial place of closed markets and long lunches. Doctors and architects lived in Chelsea and it took a year to get a telephone line installed in an office. Taxes were high and memories of rubbish piled in the streets were vivid – though many would say that not much has changed on that count. It has been a remarkable change from basket case to honey pot, from a manufacturing to a financial services sector employer and from an English city to a Babel that is rivalled only by New York. |
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| And it is still changing. Currently over 35% of Londoners, out of a total population of about 7.5 million, were born outside the UK – and that percentage is heading towards an estimated 50% over the next decade as the population heads towards 8.5 million, begging the question of where they are all going to live, as it seems crowded enough already. Surprisingly, London is actually one of the least densely populated of
any major city. Kowloon has 1700 dwellings per hectare, Barcelona 500, Paris 300 and London only 78. Indeed, if London had the same density as Paris, it would have a population of 35 million. We tend to think of choked streets and packed undergrounds but forget the great British love of their own garden that is on view in the smartest crescents and squares as well as on any train-ride into the capital. Also remarkable is the high quality of what was built as working class housing but now is the province of the middle-class economic refugees from Kensington and Chelsea – think of Fulham and Clapham. Think also of the quality of the civic buildings in each 'town' centre – town halls, libraries and schools. |
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| It is this curious provincialism of London that gives it a unique character as a metropolis. Unlike modern Paris it was never centrally planned. Christopher Wren had a go after the Great Fire with a radial plan for a city of wide boulevards – but that got left behind as countless individuals and businesses simply got on with rebuilding on the same footprint – though in stone and brick rather than the combustible wood and plaster that had proved so disastrous. This was, of course, in the City – which was a separate commercial world from the government centre that was based around Westminster and Whitehall but joined by a series of grand houses along the Strand owned by the magnates of the time. One, the Duke of Bedford, decided before the Fire to make some money by developing the grounds of a convent that he owned into town houses for his friends – tall houses round a square with a church at the end which became the model for future London squares. Just the church and part of one side is left in Co(n)vent Garden. His descendants went on to build Bloomsbury and, like their fellow aristocrats, gave the names of their various titles and estates to the squares and streets. Woburns, Tavistocks and Bedfords matched the Grosvenors and Eatons that were developed by the current Duke of Westminster's ancestors. |
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| While the scale of these projects was not small, it reflected the oligarchic government of the time, where power resided in a group of aristocrats in contrast to the more centralised monarchical power that prevailed in France. London never
had a Haussmann who cleared away the old Paris to give us the city of today with its wide avenues and grand vistas. The boulevards look wonderful but they also had a political purpose in that it made the erecting of barricades much more difficult – the English political tradition never made this a consideration. The one exception
was Nash's plan in the early 19th century to link Regent's Park – with its grand stucco houses around the perimeter – with his other work along the Mall in Carlton House Terrace via a grand sweep down Regent Street to Trafalgar Square. In its day, Regent Street was the 'drawing room' of London before the later Victorians decided that shopping was the thing and created the uninspiring medley we have today. |
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| As metropolitan London expanded, it simply absorbed the villages and towns that it found on the way so that these became dormitory suburbs with their own governments and characters. The central governing hand has always been a light one and this explains the current rather emasculated nature of Ken Livingstone's status as mayor. It is hard to imagine heavyweights like Bloomberg or Giuliani being interested in the office of Mayor of New York if the levers of power that they could pull were as flimsy as Livingstone's in London. Livingstone is giving it a go with his 2004 London Plan but the 'form' is not good with such plans as they tend to make assumptions that rarely work out in practice. Those of the '60s and '70s gave us the grim housing estates that are now being cleared. This plan assumes that London will expand eastward and that the millennial high rise will be more desirable than its unlamented cousin of the 1960s. If the jobs end up in the west, what happens then? |
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| London has done rather well out of its rather ramshackle expansion, giving it its own brand of energy. It has thrown up architectural oddities like the Gherkin or the London Eye but has also led to many less impressive buildings, particularly some of the recent blocks of flats on the river which might well have benefited from a latter-day Nash to rescue them from the curse of mediocrity, if not plain ugliness. But adaptability and pragmatism must be one of the secrets of its success over the last thirty years. The City doesn't have the space for large trading floors? Build another one in Canary Wharf. Six hundred thousand jobs lost in manufacturing over the last thirty years – and six hundred thousand created in financial services. |
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| In 2001, the US accounted for 57% of all stock-market flotations at over $1billion. In 2006 the figure was only 16%. No prizes for spotting the lucky winner. In London, 108,000 people earn over £100,000 per annum, with a further 38,000 earning over £200,000 per annum. If you throw in the 'non-dom' mega-money the picture is complete. |
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| When Ken Livingstone was forced to hand over the keys to the Greater London Council to Mrs Thatcher, this sort of success story would have been considered a fantasy and not one that could have been achieved by what has been called 'creative anarchy'. But it was ever thus. London burnt to the ground in the 17th century and commercially dominated the next two centuries. It was bombed – not quite flat – in the 20th century, but has come back fighting in the 21st: not because of government plans and central management but in spite of it. 'Vive l'indifference.' |
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