The problem with London guilt - why metropolitan hand-wringing about the state of the nation make matters worse

I now have a place on Medium, where I post most of my non-Brockley-related writing, to spare you all. However, since my latest article is about London and a phenomenon I think Brockley suffers from, I thought I would post it here too:

Not the problem the nation faces - Londoners hanging out, self-actualising

“They lined up all the toffs and boffins, the chief executives, tycoons and clever-clogs in the (south of the) land, and asked the nation to pat them on the back. The invitation to a punch in the face was too good to miss.”
- Simon Jenkins

Like many Londoners, I suffer from Londoner’s guilt.

I’ll smile, tight-lipped, when some out-of-towner declares London a disgusting hole. I’ll politely change the conversation when someone tries to tell me that bringing up my children in the capital is tantamount to child abuse. I’ll be overly generous about the virtues of Liverpool’s nightlife or Birmingham’s civic buildings. I will be quick to offer a defence of any provincial dive on the basis of how lovely the nearby countryside is. I support the desire to ‘rebalance’ the economy and tut mournfully about how out of touch the metropolitan elite is with the plight of those in other parts of the country.

I do all of that because I know how lucky I am to live in London and there’s no need to rub it in to anyone who doesn’t.

But the Brexit vote has shown that this is a bad strategy. Londoners’ guilt was a luxury we thought we could afford because we were living through a golden age, but it was storing up problems.

The Leave win wasn’t just a vote to choke immigration, it was an act of nihilism. Voters chose to harm London — to cut down a Gherkin-sized poppy.

It is time Londoners’ stop accepting the blame for every problem the UK faces. London’s ascent is the inevitable result of two long-term economic forces that none of us is responsible for.

The first is agglomeration economics.

Growth is increasingly driven by the convergence of different industries and technologies — and the transfer of knowledge between them. Cities create a network effect, producing serendipitous encounters and making collaboration and exchange much easier. As cities grow, the network effect becomes more powerful.

Elite athletes benefit from training alongside each other, learning from each other and raising the bar each day. So too, companies improve from working side by side. Large cities find it easier to sustain centres of excellence than smaller ones. The ‘Northern Powerhouse’ strategy was based on this phenomenon. The sum of Manchester’s growing clusters of excellence in industries like the media, materials science and sport will be greater than its parts.

Big cities also create a larger potential market for investors and entrepreneurs — they are typically the first places to attract new services and usually the only places that can support major attractions. For example, a restaurant like Bluebird on the Kings Road needs to serve around 100,000 covers a year— which makes it hard for anywhere outside London to support more than a handful of places like this. But business tends to congregate where there are fancy restaurants, hotels and a plethora of support facilities and specialist services.

The second is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

At a recent conference on Sustainable Cities, Director of Global Research for JLL, Rosemary Feenan, argued that as we have become richer, the role that cities play in our lives has fundamentally changed in-line with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

When we were poor, cities were primarily places to look after our basic physiological needs — we fled the countryside in search of the higher incomes offered by industry. A small town could do that job pretty well. As we became richer, we created cities that offered us a sense of belonging, giving birth to an explosion of clubs and civic institutions. But larger towns were typically needed to sustain these.

Today, in an age of relative abundance, we are increasingly driven by the desire for self-actualisation. To be all that we can be. Spending on ‘experiences’ is rising much faster than spending on ‘stuff’.

It is the great cities that offer the richest opportunities to be, to do and to meet — to become. And people are willing to trade square footage for unique and wonderful moments. Not all people of course, but typically the most ambitious, creative and adventurous ones.

Look at them all. Go to Hyde Park or Brick Lane on a sunny day. Get up at 6am and go for a run on the South Bank. Stay out after midnight in Hoxton. The city is teeming with beautiful, talented people doing stuff all the time. Now take a train from Kings Cross (where you’ll trip over people from Google or St Martins making things and making money) to almost any provincial town or city you can think of — the difference is stark. There are fine places. Ever so clean. If you are lucky, in the middle of the day, outside the main train stations of even our biggest cities, there might be a couple of pensioners waiting for a bus. And that’s your lot. Durham is nice, but the opportunities to self-actualise are minimal.

This urge to become (turbo-charged by Instagram and Twitter, which award social cache to those with the most overtly fabulous lives) means that talent will increasingly cluster in the biggest world cities. As Michael Bloomberg observed, the best and brightest want to be where the action is...

For the rest of the article (yes, there's more!), click here.

London schools outperform other English cities

Anyone who's brought up kids in London will have had the lecture at least once: Someone holding forth about how awful it must be to grow up in the capital - that failure to move out when your kids hit primary school is tantamount to child abuse.

Top of the list of London's imagined failings, neck-and-neck with a lack of ready access to farm animals, is usually the state of London's schools. Well, here's a map (courtesy of the excellent CityMetric) of UK cities based on results from last year's GCSE results.

Only Cambridge, Gloucester and York match London's performance - with 20 out of 30 children gaining at least five A*-C grades, including maths and English. In the last two decades, London's schools have been improving rapidly, helped by a combination of a highly-educated population and highly-motivated immigrant communities. CityMetric notes:

The example of London shows that social background should not be as a big factor in educational attainment as it currently is across the country. More than a fifth of pupils in the capital come from disadvantaged backgrounds – yet attainment rates in this group are higher in London than anywhere else in the country, with nearly 1 in 2 disadvantaged students gaining five good GCSEs.

London: The Golden Age

Logan: NO! Don't go in there! You don't have to die! No one has to die at 30! You could live! LIVE! Live, and grow old! I've seen it! She's seen it!
- Logan's Run

Readers, I am not a young man. I have a wife, three kids, the personality of Mark Corrigan and an importantish job (if any job in PR can be considered important, which it can't) working with people several generations more advanced than me. I am middle aged and I can admit it - even if journalists in search of a maudlin headline about the death of London can't. For their purposes, I am young.

Last year, hundreds of articles were written about how young people, priced out of London, are abandoning the city in record numbers, seeking fame and fortune in cities like Birmingham instead. The story was based on figures from the ONS which showed that there was a net outflow of 22,000 people aged 30-39 from the capital.

Not only is 22,000 a vanishingly small number in terms of London's overall population, people in their thirties aren't the young. While the headlines conjured up images of an ossifying capital, deprived of the energy, innovation and joie de vivre of Millennial tribes, the truth behind the numbers is the same old story: People get older, start to settle down and crave space and the chance to give their kids a childhood like the one they remember having.

Real young people are still coming here in droves. As this graph from CityLab, based on ONS figures (2009-2012) shows:

London is sucking up the lifeblood of the rest of the country (and lots of other countries). It's only when people hit thirty that we start spitting them out again, as hollow husks that will haunt provincial towns and villages for the rest of their wretched lives. London is, in essence, a remake of Logan's Run.

We heard this week that London's population has hit an historic high of 8.6 million and is forecast to reach 11 million by 2050. That growth won't be coming from the old or the superrich, but from the young. As The Atlantic writes:

"The London-based think tank Centre for Cities provides compelling evidence that, despite its high cost of living, London continues to draw in more young and productive talent from across the United Kingdom than any other city. And it's London’s continued ability to attract talent, the report concludes, that has been central to its economic growth and to the U.K.’s ongoing economic recovery."

Why do they come here, when Birmingham is cheaper? Because young, ambitious people go where the action is. And the action is in London.

A year ago, as part of my day-job, I sat with our client, who wanted to win hearts and minds in New York City. Our lead researcher, who worked for Mayor Bloomberg and knows every block of city, told them what they really needed to understand: Life in New York is hard. People work long hours, live in tiny apartments and put up with noise, crime and brutal weather, among other things. New Yorkers have to believe that their city is the greatest in the world and they expect the best of everything. They are there to seize every opportunity that life throws at them. Compared to that, a double-fronted garage is an irrelevance.

London is a little greener, softer and quieter. Our winters are milder and our summers less sweaty. Our cockroaches are smaller, our transport is better and we're the city that goes to sleep earlier than a megacity really should. But the attitude you need to enjoy London is the same - and it's the young who have it most of all.

As house prices rise, young people will find new ways to compromise, spending less and less time indoors and more and more time out on the streets, enjoying the city. Whether that makes our city better or worse is a matter of opinion, but I've always believed that more density is not only a necessity but a good thing for London. As this graphic, from the LSE (2011) shows, London (top right) is extraordinarily low-density compared to its peers:

As I argued in my last article on this subject, young people aren't retreating, they are finding new areas to enjoy, new places to settle. It may be unfortunate for them that many places are now out of reach, but it has made the city stronger.

Ironically, the oligarchs and global elites that are helping to depopulate certain streets in the fanciest parts of the city are also, thanks to the economic power they bring to the party, helping to make London even more attractive to the young, which in turn has given a shot in arm to many other parts of the capital.

I am lucky. As well as being middle aged, I have a mortgage and home to bring up a family. Consider my privilege checked. This article is not in any way meant to excuse the failure of planners and house builders to create more and better homes to cope with a growing population.

It remains a travesty that so many people feel they need to leave the city to start a family and young people shouldn't have to squash in to ever smaller and more crowded boxes in order to seek their fortune in London. The cost of living in London is not as expensive by international standards as people often think (it's not even in the top 10 global cities according to the latest Economist Intelligence Unit rankings), but the rent is still too damn high.

Social and intergenerational justice is a good reason to address London's housing problem, but don't worry about London - the young will keep coming and making the best of it. What else are they going to do? Live in Birmingham?

Central Line interchange for ELL could come as part of new Shoreditch terminus

Shoreditch's continued growth as a major employment cluster and the arrival of Crossrail in 2018 could provide the motivation and means for the transport authorities to create a new interchange between the East London Line and the Central Line.

Citymetric reports that Network Rail has proposed a major new rail terminus at Shoreditch - the first new London terminus since 1899 - to enable more people to access the area and take some of the strain off Liverpool Street, which is bursting at the seams.

The new terminus would serve developments like Bishopsgate Goods Yard

With major Shoreditch schemes like the redevelopment of Bishopsgate Goods Yard (pictured) at an advanced stage, new transport capacity is required.

As Citymetric point out, a new terminal served only by the East London Line won't work, so they will need to create an interchange with the Central Line, which many people argued should have been included in the original scheme, but the lack of capacity on the Central Line was a major factor that counted against the idea. Crossrail, however, should address that problem, alleviating the overcrowding.

The ELL is already getting a Crossrail interchange at Whitechapel in 2018. A Central Line interchange in the 2020s would be another useful new connection. But a Terminus at Shoreditch would pose even more questions about the long-term future of the ELL, which is already struggling to meet the demand of South East Londoners for good connections.

More capacity on the ELL and an accelerated Bakerloo Line extension might be needed, to unlock the potential of the City's eastern fringes.

Big Up East London

BC has shared plenty of stats about the Great Inversion, that's taking place in London, shifting prosperity and economic activity from outer to inner London. But as we mentioned, there are actually two great inversions taking place, as London begins to flip on its axis, from West to East.

An interactive map, released recently by the ONS, shows that shift in action. It allows you to chart the change in the relative economic performance of a region, using Gross Value Added as its key metric. In just 15 years (1997-2012) the change for Inner East London (including South East London) was dramatic.

The green bar on the right hand side is the most important thing to look at. The closer it is to the Y axis, the better the per capita GVA of the region, relative to the rest of the UK. Even in 1997, East London was no slouch, but by 2012, it had become one of the most productive parts of the country. Of course, in part, this reflects the growing dominance of London in the UK economy, but while Inner West London retained its dominant position, no other London region enjoyed a comparable shift.

The winning scheme for the Royal Docks

The sheer scale of development taking place along the riverside and docklands from Tower Bridge to North and south Woolwich provides plenty of physical evidence of the shift too. Recent announcements about Wood Wharf, the Royal Docks and Greenwich Peninsula show how much further this trend has to go. The future is ours. Soon(ish), you will be able to insist that your friends come East if they want to see you. And they can travel on the Bakerloo line.

Proposed new homes on the Greenwich Peninsula

Wood Wharf will extend Canary Wharf eastwards

Lewisham house prices rising at 14% annually as Great Inversion accelerates

Lewisham's house prices have risen at an average annualised rate of 14% over the last two quarters, the 8th fastest recorded price rise in London, according to the latest Nationwide House Price Index.

The data, released yesterday, shows an acceleration of the trend we've written about before - in terms of house prices, inner and outer London are diverging as a "great inversion" takes place.

London boroughs ranked in terms of the fastest rising house prices over the last 6 months

As the map shows, all of the fastest-rising boroughs are in London's inner core. By contrast, all of the boroughs with the slowest rates of house price growth are at the city's edges: Kingston Upon Thames, Redbridge and Harrow's prices have hardly risen at all. The City and K&C are excluded on the basis that too few sales are recorded to provide an accurate sample.

The factors driving this (with the exception, possibly, of international investors flooding into central London) are all long-term trends - jobs are increasingly centrally located, people are having families later and the quality of life (air quality, crime, schools, shops and restaurants are all improving in inner London). So the price trends should be similarly sustained.

Lewisham is still fairly affordable by London standards (17th overall in terms of average house prices) but expect the tables to change significantly within a few years. These trends mean (other than in pockets) the end of relatively cheap homes in Lewisham and inner London. The map is being redrawn and the effects over the next decade will be profound.

Croydon Westfield shopping centre approved

Plans to create a new Westfield shopping centre in Croydon, replacing the rather tired Whitgift Centre, have been approved by Croydon Council. It means there will be a new shopping destination at the southern end of the East London Line, but Stratford's already within fairly easy (and cheaper) reach, meaning it's of dubious benefit for this neck of the woods, especially as it will add pressure to the Overground services.

The Croydon Guardian reports:

Westfield and Hammerson's £1bn redevelopment plans for the Whitgift Centre have been unanimously approved by the council's strategic planning committee. 

The scheme, which was first announced in January, has been earmarked as the catalyst for a massive economic boost to Croydon's economy. 

The redevelopment will see both the Whitgift Centre and Centrale replaced with 1.4 million sq ft of shops and leisure facilities, as well as between 400 and 600 new homes. 

Approval by the planning committee is subject to subsequent approval from Mayor of London Boris Johnson and Communities Secretary Eric Pickles.

Blackfriars cluster approved

After Shoreditch and London Bridge comes another new office cluster directly connected to Brockley. Construction Enquirer reports that the Carlyle Group has had its plans for 9 buildings next to the southern exit of Blackfriars Station, comprising "494 homes, 450,000 sq ft of offices, 25,000 sq ft of retail and 18,500 sq ft of cultural space plus a ‘cultural pavilion’" approved.

The development will replace two of the ugliest buildings ever conceived - Ludgate House and this beast, which has blighted South Bank walks for decades.

The Great Inversion

Last month, we posted a map showing how house prices have changed in London the last three years, with Lewisham among an inner core of London boroughs which rose while outer boroughs stagnated. It's one expression of a phenomenon that US demographer Alan Ehrenhalt calls 'The Great Inversion'.

“The late 20th century,” he writes, “was the age of poor inner cities and wealthy suburbs; the 21st century is emerging as an age of affluent inner neighborhoods and immigrants settling on the outside.”

The Economist used the book's title to describe what's happening to London, as illustrated by this map from Savills, which shows the socio-economic changes that have taken place in London between the 2001 and 2011 censuses. Areas in red have moved "upmarket", areas in blue have done the reverse. There are actually two great inversions going on here. Firstly, inner London is rapidly catching up with the outer suburbs in terms of wealth and status. Secondly, London is flipping on its axis, as job creation (see map below) in places like Shoreditch, London Bridge and Canary Wharf fuels the ascendancy of East London:

The Economist explains:

The places that have gone downmarket are in Metroland—the 1920s and 1930s railway suburbs stretching west of Acton and Willesden or around Ilford. These are the middle-class suburbs where commuters move when they have children. But of late, house prices in those parts of suburban London have stagnated, even as inner-London ones have soared ahead. In recent years, the outflow of people to the Home Counties has not been matched by the inflow from inner-London, and so population increases have been sustained by immigration and births...

It attributes this change to three big shifts:

1. Jobs are becoming more focused in central London "at the expense of out-of-town office parks, which look increasingly dilapidated." [Lewisham's lack of job creation is not a unique phenomenon].

2. People are marrying and having kids later, meaning that city-centre lifestyles suit them better for longer. "Today’s 20-somethings are more likely to be university educated and less likely to drive, which makes offices that can be reached quickly by bike, bus or train far more desirable."

3. Structural changes, including falling crime, less pollution and better schools are encouraging families to stay put too, while "gentrification proves self-reinforcing, as new restaurants, bars and other businesses open to serve—and employ—gentrifiers."

So while Lewisham once braced itself for an influx of urban poor, priced out of central London, it seems likely that those people will move further out and our borough might face a very different kind of housing policy choice. The Economist concludes:

In some places, borough councils may be tempted to leverage high property prices to generate cash to redevelop their more run-down parts—turning over their social housing stock to private developers. That however smacks just a little of social cleansing. At the moment, complaints about gentrification in London tends to be limited to carping about the silliness of hipster bars, or the cost of a burger in Brixton village*. But... the politics of gentrification in London could eventually become quite tetchy.

*See all arguments about gentrification on Brockley Central ever.

Westfield unveils £1bn Croydon plan

The Times reports that Westfield - developers of giant malls in White City and Stratford - has released details of its plans to create a third mall in Croydon:

Under the proposal Westfield would create 1.5 million sq ft of shopping space, a multi-screen cinema, a bowling area and a number of bars and restaurants. It wants to create a new streetscape in Croydon...

It said its new scheme could be built within two to three years and it is hoping to attract John Lewis as an anchor tenant. 

However, Hammerson, the UK’s third largest property company, also has plans to redevelop the Whitgift Centre. The specialist retail property developer will unveil its own detailed proposals later this month and wants to create a holistic scheme that links a new scheme at the Whitgift with its Centrale Shopping Centre next door.

Whatever plan proceeds, it seems certain that the Croydon will become the southern counterweight to Brent Cross in the same way East London's Stratford has to West London's White City. With excellent links from this borough to Croydon, it will make it even harder for Lewisham town centre to regenerate through retail.

Elephant & Castle shopping centre to avoid demolition

Plans for the regeneration of the Elephant & Castle, gateway to the south, appear to be unraveling, with the owners of the shopping centre reportedly considering abandoning plans to demolish it.

Despite installing the world's most elaborate roundabout crossing scheme to make the area more pedestrian friendly, plans to make significant changes to the road layout have been scrapped, while new height limits introduced by the Mayor have caused problems for the cluster of tall buildings and related open spaces envisaged by the original master plan.

Despite these setbacks, it appears that Oakmayne Plaza, a mixed use scheme that includes a Bermondsey Square-esque development, including a cinema, hotel and public square, is finally getting underway, having lain as a sad pile of masonry on the New Kent Road for many years.

The South Shall Rise Again: Kidbrooke and Elephant & Castle

In this series, we're documenting some of the biggest and most exciting changes taking place across South East London. From huge new housing projects to investment in the area’s heritage sites, this part of London is subject to many of the capital’s most ambitious plans.

Two of South East London's most inhumane housing developments are being razed to the ground and swapped for something much nicer.

In Kidbrooke, the Ferrier Estate's grey concrete giants have been demolished and are being replaced with a mixture of Housing Design Award-winning, park-view blocks [above] and brilliant pitched roof houses built on more traditional street patterns. The scheme will eventually deliver around 4,000 new homes and a 100 acre park.

Meanwhile, in Elephant & Castle, the canyons of the brutalist Heygate Estate are finally being torn down as part of an ambitious £1.5 billion regeneration scheme that at one point was nearly scuppered by the failure to remodel one of the area's roundabouts. The roundabout is now being sorted and the cash is flowing. There's a lesson there for Lewisham's planners somewhere...

Both projects are likely to take at least another 15 years to be completed and despite the progress, there are fears that both later phases of both of these developments may stall as a result of government changes to housing policy. The Kidbrooke Kite quotes Building.co.uk:

"Housebuilders and the [Chartered Institute of Housing] have expressed concerns about the ability of large estate regeneration projects, such as Elephant & Castle in Southwark, Kidbrooke in Greenwich and Park Hill in Sheffield, to proceed. Previous tenants had been promised new homes at the same rent, but lower government subsidy may make this unviable."

Also in the series:

Cutty Sark Gardens and Ravensbourne College

A blog about nothing

NBC President: So what's the show about?

George: What did you do today?

NBC President: Got up, came to work.

George: That's what the show's about.

Jerry: Maybe something funny happens on your way to work.

George: No! Nothing happens!

We're not sure what we have here. Kate, who sent it to us, wasn't sure whether it was a story. We're not even sure quite which blobs denote Brockley, Crofton Park, et al. But we know it shows commuter journey times to SW1 across London.

Brockley, by the looks of things, does comparatively well but it starkly highlights the poverty of South East London's transport infrastructure overall.

Seinfeld references? Commuter times? All contemptibly bourgeois for Ross, no doubt but then he has his own blog to rail against The Man.

Next stop Croydon

According to today's Guardian Brockley-residents will soon have a new reason to head south.

Croydon has unveiled plans to emulate the success of cities like Barcelona, with a radical transformation that according to Will Alsop, the master planner, will: hack back "a forest of car parks" choking the town centre, shut eight-lane highways to through traffic and build a pedestrian-friendly "emerald necklace" of parks.

Removing cars from the pavements? Remodelling traffic systems in favour of the pedestrian? Creating new green spaces? Sounds like a familiar agenda. Although so far, the new developments in Croydon are more like this effort, which doesn't exactly wear its Gaudi influences on its sleeve.

So, until we can all enjoy days out on the East London Line to see Croydon's answer to the Sagrada Familia, what are the best reasons for taking the train south?

We'd like to nominate the wonderful Horniman Museum and the slightly forlorn dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park, for whom the march of paleontology has not been kind.

What are your recommendations?