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Richard Brown: How much working from home is here to stay in London’s office economy?

With occupancy levels rising and Tube use continuing to recover, a post-Covid "new normal" has yet to be established
Richard Brown

After the turbulence of recent months, many Londoners will be hoping for a return to normality, albeit under the shadow of a cost-of-living crisis and a looming recession. But is the city’s office economy returning to pre-pandemic patterns of commuting and working, or have we settled into a “new normal” of hybrid working, empty office blocks and diminished city centre businesses?

London’s streets certainly seem busier, and on the days that they are running, so do London’s tube trains. This is borne out by Transport for London data: trip volumes have been increasing since the summer and now average around 80% of pre-pandemic levels. There are some spikes and dips to this trend, (such as Jubilee celebrations and bank holidays elevating usage, and strikes and heat waves reducing it), but Tube use is now just 20% below pre-pandemic levels.

Screenshot 2022 11 13 at 22.06.03

There is a persistent rhythm emerging too. Weekends are still busiest, with nearly 90% of pre-pandemic trips. Monday, Tuesdays and Fridays are quieter with averages of 65-70%, and Wednesdays and Thursdays slightly busier with averages of 70-75%. However, since the beginning of September, the recovery in trip numbers has been particularly sharp around the City of London and Canary Wharf, suggesting that an increasing proportion of passengers are office workers, as opposed to leisure visitors or workers in other sectors.

Other figures confirm the impression of a gradual return to offices. Remit Consulting have been collecting data on office occupancy throughout the pandemic, based on access control systems (swipe cards and so on) from a sample of around 150 large office buildings in the UK. After advice to work from home was lifted at the end of January, office occupancy figures rose quickly to around 25% and stayed at that level throughout the summer, but since the beginning of October have climbed above 30%.

Screenshot 2022 11 13 at 22.08.27

Remit estimate that “normal” office occupancy levels were 60-80 % before the pandemic, so 30% occupancy in fact equates to offices being around “half full” on the average day. Remit also have a more detailed breakdown by London office ‘submarket’ which shows West End offices back to around 42% average occupancy in October, with City and Docklands offices lagging behind.

Further west, in the SW1 corridors of power, offices are busier. When Jacob Rees-Mogg told civil servants to return to their desks in April, there was an immediate, but amusingly short-lived, effect on behaviour. Office occupancy leapt up from a departmental average of less than 50% of capacity, hitting 65% in mid-May, but had fallen back again by the end of that month.

Jubilee celebrations, summer holidays and industrial action kept numbers low over the summer, but occupancy has been back above 65% since the beginning of October. This is not far off pre-pandemic levels – though to be fair there have been an awful lot of ministers to clap in and out of Whitehall offices over the past few weeks.

While the higher levels of civil service return may reflect a tougher line from ministers, it seems that the return to offices has in fact gathered pace just as politicians and newspapers stopped demanding it. But it remains a trickle rather than a surge. Where do we go from here?

Many workers welcomed more flexible working, and are keen to retain its benefits. The survey commissioned by Kings College London this spring as part of their Work/Place project (on which I worked) found London workers embracing hybrid working patterns enthusiastically: 61% reported hybrid working, defined as working from home at least one day a week (compared to less than 20% before the pandemic). A further 13% worked only from home.

Workers expected the changes to stick too: 75% said they were “never going back” to a five-day week in the workplace, with three days a week at home the most popular option. The results of a second phase of the King’s survey (undertaken in the summer) are due to be launched at a joint event with Central London Forward next week, so we will have some idea of whether these views have shifted over time.

But there is a big difference between these workers’ expectations and those of employers. The UK-wide Business Insights and Conditions Survey found that the proportion of employers (weighted by employee numbers) planning to use home-working as a permanent part of their business model rose from 16% in October 2021 to 24% in May 2022. It was much higher in the ‘office-based’ sectors (professional, scientific and technical services, and information and communications) that account for around one in five London jobs.

However, in the latest wave of the survey (August 2022) that proportion appears to have started to fall across the board, suggesting that bosses may be becoming cooler about long-term home-working (a finding which seems to be mirrored in trends tracked by the WFH Project, a consortium of north American universities).

Screenshot 2022 11 13 at 22.10.53

This gap between employer and employee expectations suggests that we have not yet reached equilibrium. Hybrid working certainly poses challenges – both for planned communication within and between organisations, and the “watercooler moments” of serendipity and casual interaction that form the foundations for corporate culture. Mixing digital and real-life interaction is tougher in many ways than the world of universal home-working during the pandemic.

Over time, new ways of working may diminish or overcome these challenges – through enhanced technology, or changes in culture or behaviour. Managers may tighten rules to ensure that teams can meet effectively and to prevent working from home becoming a perk for those with the privilege of controlling their own workflow (at the moment, it is overwhelmingly concentrated in more senior managerial and professional roles), or conversely to prevent a culture of office attendance and preferential treatment for those (mainly male) workers without caring responsibilities.

But as the recession bites, employers may feel emboldened to push for more presence in the office. There are already stories of companies such as Meta (formerly known as Facebook) retreating from the highly permissive approach they took during the pandemic, and some bosses may share Elon Musk’s views about home-working if not his cack-handed approach to employee relations. Even if returning to the office is not mandated, the threat of redundancy may boost presenteeism although, alternatively, tighter economic times may push employers to seek savings on property costs.

There may also be some polarisation: primarily remote working may become the norm in some sectors or companies, while being in the office becomes more established in others. The King’s College research showed that the biggest increase in home-working was among those who were already working from home at least one day a week before the pandemic.

Where more people are in the office, “fear of missing out” – on advancement, on collaboration, on gossip – may draw even more people in. Conversely, where online meeting and collaboration tools are the norm (perhaps augmented by periodic spells of intense in-person collaboration), employees will respond accordingly – not just in their daily habits, but in long-term decisions about where they live.

London’s office economy has not yet returned to its pre-pandemic state, but nor do I think it has settled into a “new normal”. Huge challenges for the real estate sector and the ecosystem of city-serving businesses remain, and some of these will be discussed at the King’s College/CLF event next week. But the future looks less bleak than it did during the pandemic, and any case for stripping back transport seems much weaker than it might have done even a few months ago. The debate about Crossrail 2 even seems to have restarted. Reports of London’s demise look to have been premature at best.

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Categories: Analysis
Tags: Central London Forward, coronavirus, COVID-19 London, employment, King's College, Transport for London

Vic Keegan: Leadenhall Market’s Roman foundation – in a barber’s basement

Sir Horace Jones's beautiful 19th century creation is positively youthful compared with an artefact from a previous structure on the site
Victor Keegan

If pictures could talk, the montage at the top of this article would have a tale to tell about 2,000 or more years of a historic part of London. The skyscrapers oiling the wheels of the City of London’s prosperity today stand behind the beautiful Leadenhall Market.

The market’s current form was designed in 1881 by Sir Horace Jones, who also gave the capital many other buildings, including the original Billingsgate Market and Tower Bridge. But a market has been on this site in one form or another since at least the 14th century, when it belonged to city dignitary Sir Hugh Neville.

In 1411 it was acquired by the City of London Corporation with the help of one Richard Whittington. According to Walter Thornbury’s 1878 Old and New London, Volume 2, reproduced at British History Online, when Don Pedro de Ronquillo, the Spanish ambassador, visited Leadenhall in the 1600s he told Charles II he believed there was more meat sold there than in all the kingdom of Spain in a whole year.

Occupying much of the land between Gracechurch Street and Leadenhall Street, the market used to be so large that in the 1720s a part of its land accommodated the headquarters of the East India Company, the biggest corporation in the world, as the map below shows.

Screenshot 2022 11 12 at 12.34.43

And the age of today’s market buildings is as nothing compared with that of a piece of masonry found by archaeologists in the 1880s when Leadenhall was being reconstructed to Jones’ plan. Today, believe it or not, it is located in the basement of a barber’s shop where the market meets Gracechurch Street. The staff were amazingly friendly when I dropped by unexpectedly for a peek. It is down two flights of stairs and protected by a glass partition.

Screenshot 2022 11 12 at 12.32.10

This unique artefact is a base of an arch that formed part of a basilica – a law court or assembly room – dating back to the year AD70. The basilica was the largest Roman building north of the Alps and the centre of Roman London, from where most roads to the rest of the country started. It is said to have been as tall as St Paul’s.

It was constructed on a five-acre site where the foundations of many rooms have been uncovered and recorded by archaeologists before being buried forever under new constructions. It stood along one side of a forum – a market place and a public space where citizens could meet and exchange ideas. Though much larger, the forum was not unlike Leadenhall today – a location where merchants, residents and visitors trade and party.

The basilica and forum lasted for over 200 years until they were destroyed, not by an alien force but by Rome itself as punishment for London supporting the rule of the “rogue emperor” Carausius.

In the medieval period that followed, Leadenhall was the most important market in London, especially for meat and poultry and also butter, cheese, wool and cutlery. As now, it would have been a hive of noisy activities, though much more smelly.

Today you still get a sense of the medieval as you emerge from narrow alleys into the magnificence of Jones’s marketplace. It is easy to see why it has found its way into films, including Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Leadenhall invites comparison with the even older Borough market on the other side of the Thames, which began at least as early as 1014. It has more sculpted charm than Borough, but is heavily dependent on commuting City workers. This ensures a lot of spending during the week, but Leadenhall almost goes to sleep at weekends.

That is a problem but also an opportunity. The City Corporation and the EC BID are seeking to attract more visitors from home and abroad. The infrastructure is already there and a huge reservoir of history remains to be fully exploited – from its Roman foundations upwards.

This is the sixth article in a series of 20 by Vic Keegan about locations of historical interest in the Eastern City part of the City of London, kindly supported by the EC BID, which serves that area. On London’s policy on “supported content” can be read here.

Categories: Culture, EC BID supported series
Tags: City of London Corporation, EC BID, Gracechurch Street, Leadenhall Market, Leadenhall Street

Kingston: Residents’ group wins council by-election amid claims of ‘dirty’ tactics

The localist campaigners have doubled their representation on the Lib Dem-run south west London council
Lewis Baston

Green Lane & St James is an elaborate name for a new electoral ward that would be more identifiable to non-locals if it had the name New Malden West – because that is where it is. Built from parts of the now-extinguished St James and Beverley wards under boundary changes that came into effect at the full borough elections in May of this year, it is composed of 1930s suburban avenues lying north west of the A3 Kingston by-pass and, for the most part, south east of the main railway line out of Waterloo as it passes between New Malden and Berrylands stations. The main thoroughfare, stretching from one end of the ward to the other, is South Lane.

The Green Lane of the ward’s name reaches down towards the Hogsmill River which divides New Malden from Berrylands and Surbiton. Although the A3 is not a very good neighbour, it is a pleasant area – the houses are large and have gardens, there is open space along the waterfront, and it is convenient for commuters. Like most of suburban London it has become more ethnically diverse in the last couple of decades. New Malden’s most distinctive community is London’s Koreans: there is a Korean church within the Green Lane & St James boundaries.

The Conservatives won in ward’s area in the 2014 borough elections – it was their best recent year in Kingston – but the Liberal Democrats swept the board in 2018 when they regained control of the council. In most of Kingston they did even better in May, winning a landslide with of 44 councillors in a council of 48.

However, Green Lane & St James was their principal disappointment, as they failed to win a seat which would have been notionally theirs on 2018 numbers. The two members elected in May were Tim Cobbett of the Lib Dems and James Giles who was representing a local political party, the Kingston Independent Residents’ Group (KIRG). Councillor Cobbett resigned because he had become unable to afford to live in New Malden and continue his public service there.

The by-election was unwelcome for the Lib Dem administration, not just because Green Lane & St James is a marginal ward, but because they were facing KIRG rather than the Conservatives, weighed down by the national government’s popularity, or by Labour, whose vote the Lib Dems have expertly squeezed for years.

In some ways KIRG is a classic localist party, trading on the rhetoric of being the authentic voice of the a community against the Westminster parties and picking up anti-Town Hall issues from every direction. But it is a bit different from others nearby, such as the long-established Merton Park residents or the Residents’ Association that runs Epsom & Ewell across the border in Surrey, which has a rather cuddly, even staid public image.

During May’s elections the KIRG attracted criticism for an aggressive populist approach to campaigning. Giles, a journalist, was manager of George Galloway’s rumbustious parliamentary by-election campaign in Batley & Spen in summer 2021 and has appeared on Galloway’s Sputnik programme on Russia Today (although he stressed to the Kingston Courier that he does not agree with Galloway’s anti-NATO views on Ukraine).

KIRG’s candidate in yesterday’s by-election was Yvonne Tracey, formerly deputy manager of the New Malden Post Office. Tracey stood in St James in the 2018 elections, finishing fourth, and contested the new two-member ward in May. Defending for the Lib Dems was Mahmood Rafiq. Suniya Qureshi, who had been one of the Conservative candidates for the ward in May, tried again. Labour’s candidate was Nick Draper, an experienced former Merton councillor – from 1994 to 2018 – who in May stood in the splendidly-named Kingston ward of King George’s & Sunray.

The Green Lane & St James contest was easily distinguished from a ray of sunshine. On 30 October the Labour and Lib Dem campaigns issued a statement criticising what they called divisive campaign tactics, referring to a leaflet circulated by KIRG’s councillor Giles making allegations about Rafiq in his capacity as external affairs officer of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. The Conservative and local Green parties associated themselves with this denunciation.

The Ahmadiyya are a minority strand of Islam, who are targets both of Islamophobia from non-Muslims and denunciation from some Muslim bodies as not being properly Islamic. They are a familiar presence in south west London, being active in promoting the Quran to people in the streets.

The impact of this sharp disagreement – Giles claimed he was opposing homophobia, while all the other parties believed it was “dirty” tactics – on the election campaign is uncertain and will remain a matter for discussion. There were also a number of local concerns, including cycle paths and green spaces, and lingering ill-will about the council’s closure of the Kingfisher Leisure Centre. It was difficult for Lib Dems to make the argument that Kingston needed a 44th councillor from their ranks in preference to one with an exclusively localist approach.

When the votes were counted KIRG had gained the seat: Tracey received 855 votes (46%) and Rafiq 647 (35%). Labour’s Draper was third (265 votes, 14%) and Qureshi brought up the rear, scoring a disappointing 78 votes (4%) in an affluent suburb.

Compared to May, the Lib Dem percentage share was down four points and Labour’s up three. The Conservatives were down eight and KIRG up nine. The turnout, at 40%, was high for a by-election. KIRG now becomes a full group on the council, although not the official opposition, as the three Conservative Kingston councillors still hold that position.

The election left a bitter taste in the mouth for most people involved in Kingston local politics, although Tracey, who had pledged to give her £8,800 a year councillor allowance to charity, and Giles were understandably delighted with the result. Whether the onward march of populism is a good thing for the ward, or for Kingston as a whole, we will have to wait and see.

Photo from Yvonne Tracey’s Twitter feed.

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Categories: Analysis
Tags: James Giles, Kingston Council, Kingston Independent Residents' Group, Liberal Democrats, New Malden, Tracey Young

Jon Tabbush: If things don’t change, inner London will be a place with few children

High housing costs have been the main driver behind a significant demographic change through this century
Jon Tabbush

An inner London without children? That was the stark warning set out at Centre for London’s recent London Conference. Katherine Hill, strategic project manager at child poverty charity 4in10, warned that increasing costs of living in the capital were making the centre of London into a “child-free” area. Munira Wilson, MP for Twickenham, spoke of schools under threat of closure in inner London due to falling attendance figures.

Recently released Census figures from early 2021 show that these concerns are not unwarranted. Although central London is by no means “child-free”, households with at least one dependent child  – defined as aged under 16 or up to 18 and in full-time education – are becoming increasingly rare and the contrast with outer London is becoming increasingly marked.

This is shown by the changes apparent from the previous two ten-yearly Censuses. In 2001, Westminster and the City of London stood out for having the lowest proportion of households with children – only 13 and 10 per cent respectively.

This is unsurprising, given the concentration of highly-paid professionals living in private rented accommodation that has persisted in both boroughs, and the relatively small proportion of family homes in their housing stock.

But other inner London boroughs, such as Tower Hamlets and Southwark, still had comparable figures to outer London boroughs in 2001. In both Tower Hamlets and Enfield, for example, 30 per cent of households had dependent children.

By 2011 the differences between inner and outer London began to become more apparent. In Outer London, Harrow went from 30 per cent in 2001 to 36 per cent in 2011. But in inner London Camden dropped from 32 per cent to 22 per cent. By last year, 2021, the comparison was even starker.

The map below show the full picture of changes between 2001 and 2021. We see a sharp reduction in households with dependent children in central London and significant shifts in the other direction in outer London.

Screenshot 2022 11 11 at 06.19.28

There are particular stories within this trend. Barking & Dagenham, for example, saw a 34 per cent increase over the period, spurred by low land prices and an enormous programme of housebuilding that has seen the borough’s population grow by almost 20 per cent over the 2010s, the second largest increase in London.

These numbers show a big change. But there may be more to the picture. They don’t take into account what analysts call “suppressed household formation” when adults are prevented from forming new households, in this case by having children, and so continue living with their parents or in flatshares with friends.

As a Greater London Authority analyst has noticed, during the 2010s London saw by far the largest increase in households with non-dependent – or grown up – children in the country, defined as children aged over 16, or over 19 if still in full-time education. This reflects the growth in young people unable to leave their family home due to high housing costs.

And the percentage of households with children is also affected by overall population levels. In an imaginary borough where no one with children left but lots more childless people moved in, the proportion of households with children would fall without any families being displaced. In reality, of course, we have to take into account the families with young children that would have been formed if conditions had been different.

Why, then, has it become so hard to raise a child in inner London? Although part of this phenomenon can be explained by parents choosing voluntarily to move to the suburbs and exurbs in search of larger houses with gardens, cost pressures seem key.

Childcare in inner London is more expensive than anywhere else in the country – nearly a fifth higher than in outer London. Housing, however, is likely most important. The graph below shows the staggering divergence that has formed between average house prices in inner London, outer London, and the English average, pricing many young families out of the centre of the city.

Screenshot 2022 11 11 at 06.21.01

If we want to reverse this trend and make inner London a place where less affluent young families can live again, we will have to tackle our housing problem.

This would require:

  • Ending ‘”Right to Buy” in England. Over 300,000 council homes have been sold in London under Right to Buy, many of which are now rented out at extortionate rates on the private rental market.
  • A very large increase in the building of social housing in the inner city, which will require a step-change in funding from central government.
  • An expansion in private homebuilding, made possible by rationalising the planning system to reduce uncertainty and promote the building of new, low-carbon homes, particularly surrounding public transport.

These are big asks. But if we don’t change things, a child-free inner London may be our future.

Jon Tabbush is senior researcher at think tank Centre for London. This article is a slightly adapted version of Jon’s original, which can be found on Centre for London’s website. Follow Jon on Twitter.

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Categories: Analysis
Tags: 2021 Census, childcare, Inner London, Outer London, social housing

Seán Carey: Brick Lane, curry and the delivery economy

Companies such as Deliveroo might be more of a problem than a solution for many in east London's dining sector
Seán Carey

It’s nearly 3pm on a Monday and Brick Lane is mostly deserted. However, near the mosque, there is a flurry of activity. Nine young men on ebikes, six of whom are students from Bangladesh while three come from war zones in the Horn of Africa, wait patiently outside a former curry house that, even before the pandemic, had reinvented itself as a “dark” (or “ghost”) kitchen producing pizzas. When the orders are ready, the delivery riders enter the premises and reappear moments later clutching one or more cardboard boxes, which they load into distinctive green Deliveroo backpacks.

Inside the pizza kitchen, which operates from noon until 10pm seven days a week, a lone, middle-aged British Bangladeshi chef, standing next to a flaming oven, is going about his numerous tasks – rolling out dough, adding toppings and boxing the finished pizzas. The owner, Ali, also a British Bangladeshi, tells me that, unlike other dark kitchens in the neighbourhood that produce a variety of dishes, such as burgers, peri-peri chicken and sushi, his focus is exclusively on pizzas. How does he manage to compete with powerful, locally represented brands, like Domino’s, Papa John’s and Pizza Pilgrims?

“We have a contract with Deliveroo, which is a great help,” he explains. “If people like what we offer, that’s good because they’ll reorder. If they don’t, well that’s bad for us, and we just have to try that little bit harder.”

Our conversation is briefly interrupted by the arrival of a rider, squinting at his phone’s app to figure out where he is going next. A major criticism levelled at delivery platforms such as Deliveroo is that vital information, such as customers’ names, contact details and locations as well as their meal preferences, are effectively hidden from business owners, preventing them forming direct long-term relationships with customers and collecting and analysing market data.

“The people who order our pizza live somewhere in Tower Hamlets, in houses, flats, and even the riverboats in Docklands – I don’t know exactly where,” Ali says with a smile after the order clears. Is that a problem for him? “It doesn’t bother me one bit,” he replies. Ali clearly believes he is succeeding: he earns enough money to support himself and his young family.

His optimism stems from his entrepreneurial perception of time. Ali believes that if the immediate future in terms of turnover and profitability resembles the present and recent past, everything will be fine. He might be right, he might be wrong. If it is the latter, he will almost certainly move on to another venture.

The UK’s online restaurant-to-consumer delivery market is estimated to be worth £6.3 billion. Its size reflects the global trend for economic growth through services and value generated through “dematerialisation” or “weightlessness” – intangibles such as branding, design and the building of marketing relationships.

It’s not surprising, then, that companies such as Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo, the last of which is unquestionably the dominant player in this densely populated area of east London, do not see themselves as traditional ready-to-eat delivery companies, but as tech platforms using increasingly sophisticated software that produces ever faster delivery times.

Screenshot 2022 11 09 at 17.57.01

Such businesses, of course, benefited greatly during the lockdown phase of the pandemic from March 2020. Indeed, ecommerce was critical in supporting the UK economy during that time. The downturn would have been worse without algorithms.

Some British Indian-owned restaurants in the capital, such as the Parsee-themed Dishoom chain and Michelin-starred Gymkhana, discovered that partnering with delivery platforms and introducing new products and packaging (meal kits, for example) allowed them to maintain brand awareness while retaining highly-valued employees. That was not an option for Brick Lane restaurant owners, whose businesses had long depended on dine-in out-of-town City workers and international tourists.

Takeout has traditionally accounted for only one to five per cent of a restaurant’s total revenue. What’s more, if local Bangladeshis, who make up at least a third of Tower Hamlets’ population, want to eat chilli-infused cuisine outside their homes, they go to the Bangladeshi cafés on Bethnal Green Road, Mile End Road and Whitechapel Road.

Even during the lockdown, when most of those establishments were closed, comfort food, such as snacks and biryanis, could still be purchased from the growing number of Bangladeshi home kitchens. Significantly, such transactions were facilitated by WhatsApp, the free-to-use messaging platform, rather than operating on revenue-deducting delivery platforms like Deliveroo.

Despite early attempts by several family-run Brick Lane restaurants to enter the home delivery market, all eventually closed and only reopened after lockdown restrictions eased. Some restaurateurs reported that, aside from the much-needed government assistance package, they struggled to get mainstream credit. As a result, they frequently relied on their savings, or those of other family members, to survive. However, that only a couple of eateries (one restaurant and one cafe) closed in the aftermath of the pandemic speaks volumes about the resilience of the Bangladeshi-dominated curry sector. Seventeen restaurants and three cafes remain open on the Lane.

It would, of course, be incorrect to conclude that just because food delivery platforms captured a sizeable market during the pandemic and some restaurants closed down (14 per cent in the City of London), the dining-out market is permanently diminished. The food market in London (and other cities) is constantly changing. It operates in a number of multiple, hierarchically organised segments, with consumption influenced by geographical accessibility, social class and disposable income, and brand value and experience. While the pandemic blurred the boundary between eating take-out and dining out, this is no longer the case.

Despite the impact of “disruptive” delivery platforms that have shaped and continue to reshape contemporary capitalism, many food delivery platforms have yet to turn a profit. The hope of large players, backed by venture capitalists, is to gain market share, acquire smaller competitors, and then leverage profitability in the medium and long term. Regardless of ambition, if cash flow significantly decreases as the economy takes a turn for the worse, these small-margin, large-scale digital businesses may face difficulties.

Back on Brick Lane, a street teeming with hospitality venues that require far more creative digital marketing assistance than they currently receive, two curry restaurant owners, Abdal and Ayub are enjoying a cup of tea at a curry café before their own businesses get busy. When asked about current challenges, they, like other curry restaurateurs, lament long-standing staff shortages and recent rising costs for such as food, energy and VAT.

They also reveal that they decided a while ago not to partner with any food delivery platform, partly because their kitchens could not produce more dishes than they already do during peak times, but primarily due to the impact on margins. ‘The cost to my restaurant would be around 25 or 30 per cent, so it’s not really viable,” says Abdal.

Unlike Ali, the owner of the dark kitchen, Abdal and Ayub are clearly concerned about the long-term impact of delivery platforms on the entire UK curry sector. Eighty per cent of the industry is run by British Bangladeshis (some are relatives), with annual revenue of £3.5 billion from restaurants and takeout, the latter being especially important in the capital’s suburbs and nationwide.

‘The food delivery companies have all the data,’ says Ayub. ‘They know exactly what’s going on. If they choose the four most popular dishes from various cuisines, like Indian, Chinese and Thai, and open [branded] hubs across the country, then our community, the British Bangladeshi community, will lose out in a big way.’

All names have been changed. Photos by Raju Vaidyanathan. Dr Seán Carey is a senior research fellow at the University of Manchester’s School of Social Sciences and a member of the Centre of Dynamics of Ethnicity (CODE). He is also a member of the Beyond Banglatown project team, which is led by Professor Claire Alexander of the University of Manchester. The Banglatown study was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

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Categories: Analysis
Tags: Brick Lane, hospitality industry, Tower Hamlets

Speaking of London: making the case for the capital in the age of ‘levelling up’

Research by think tank Centre for London has produced some encouraging findings about attitudes to the city along with some continuing challenges
Charles Wright

Politicians remain keen to bash the capital, it seems – but anti-London sentiment among those living outside the city could be the “dog that didn’t bark”, to quote the well-known Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of Silver Blaze. That was the message from Centre for London research director Claire Harding at the think tank’s annual London conference last week, reporting back on its latest research on “levelling up” and its implications for the city.

The first part of the research, published in June, had set out the now familiar challenges faced by many Londoners: the highest poverty rates in the UK by many measures, high housing costs, and a continuing squeeze on council and City Hall finances prompted, Harding said, by concern that the “lived experience of low income Londoners was being ignored in the political rhetoric around levelling up”.

And it raised the thorny conundrum London’s advocates have consistently grappled with – “the need to tell our city’s story better” as Harding put it, speaking with a “united voice” and “rejecting the zero sum economic notion that in order for Liverpool to succeed, for example, Lewisham has to do badly”.

The second part of the research, due to be published shortly, has looked in more detail at the relationships between London and the rest of the UK: its vital net contribution to the Treasury and social and cultural contributions to the life of the country, along with that question of “how we speak about shared challenges and opportunities”.

As part of the research, the centre staged five focus groups this summer probing perceptions of London, in the North of England, the South/Midlands and in inner and outer London – with some perhaps surprising results, Harding said.

“We were really struck by how similar the views were of people who live in London and those who live in other parts of the country,” Harding revealed. Both groups expressed positive opinions about the city’s diversity, its employment, culture and leisure opportunities and its status internationally, as well as negative views about crowds, high costs and pollution.

Non-Londoners as well as Londoners were both well aware of poverty in the capital too. “Nobody thought that the city streets were paved with gold and that everyone was wealthy,” Harding added.

Most unexpected, Harding said, comparing her findings with her previous research a decade ago, “we really didn’t find much anti-London sentiment. That was the dog that didn’t bark. Politicians like to use this divisive rhetoric about our city, but it seems the public aren’t really buying it.”

But if that finding was an indication of some softening of anti-London attitudes, potentially making it a bit easier for London’s advocates to make the case for the capital, there were some challenging findings too, particularly for those arguing, as Sadiq Khan and indeed minister for London Paul Scully did at the conference, that “London is the engine that powers the UK”.

“People didn’t really buy the argument either that London’s success is central to the success of the rest of the UK, and they didn’t buy the ‘global city’ argument,” Harding said. “That’s still a challenge for London’s advocates. Those of us who do buy that argument need to be communicating it a lot better.”

Effective approaches, the focus group report suggests, include highlighting London’s diversity, its cultural offer and its international status, and putting less emphasis on its tax or spending contribution and the role of its political and financial institutions.

Other suggestions include using stories rather than statistics to talk about poverty and need, highlighting shared values and concerns and acknowledging that “London isn’t perfect”, and encouraging more domestic tourism. “People who lived outside London were more positive about London if they visit, and some were pleasantly surprised by what they found,” Harding said.

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Categories: News
Tags: "levelling up", Centre For London, Claire Harding, poverty

London arts industry counts cost of ‘levelling up’ funding cuts

Many smaller organisations have received grants for the first time, but the historic English National Opera might have to leave the capital altogether
Charles Wright

Last week saw the opening of London’s newest purpose-built concert hall, at Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms, backed with £800,000 of “levelling up” cash from the government along with £86,564 a year Arts Council funding for the World Heart Beat music academy which runs it.

The venture was heralded by minister for London Paul Scully, speaking at the Centre for London conference last week, as the first levelling up project in the country to open – evidence, he said, that the flagship policy was not ignoring the capital.

“When London does well the rest of the UK does well too,” he said. “Pulling jobs, investment and local growth away from Londoners could not be further from the truth of what we are trying to aim for.”

It was a claim that will have rung hollow three days later north of the river, at one of the city’s oldest and grandest venues, the London Coliseum, home of the English National Opera (ENO), as the company saw its entire grant axed from the Arts Council England’s 2023-2026 funding programme, unveiled on Friday.

The £12.6 million a year cut to the ENO, with an offer of a smaller one-off grant to help it relocate, possibly to Manchester, came as a surprise to the venerable organisation, almost a hundred years old. “It wasn’t what we were expecting,” said one back office manager. “The chorus and orchestra are devastated. There will inevitably be redundancies.”

That was confirmed later in the day by ENO chief executive Stuart Murphy. “This is a brutal cut,” he said. “We are going to have to massively downsize the company. We have a big home base that will now have to be pulled apart. That’s almost a hundred years of tradition and culture and loyalty, just gone.”

Conductor Leo Hussain, fresh from the ENO’s Tosca, said on classical music website Slipped Disc that he was alternating between “desperate sadness and f***ing fury thinking of dedicated, generous, brilliant artists who will lose their livelihood because of wilful cultural vandalism by the government”.

There were other high profile casualties as the Arts Council, contrary to Scully’s assertions, carried out a government instruction to take almost £50 million funding away from London, with Hampstead Theatre, the Donmar Warehouse and the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill losing all their grant.

Big beneficiaries also saw significant reductions: almost £2 million from the South Bank, £1 million from the National Theatre, £500,000 from the Serpentine Gallery and £3 million from the largest single recipient, the Royal Opera House – a 19% real terms cut according to the company.

Overall, London saw 282 organisations selected to receive £152 million a year between them up to 2026, a third of the total distributed to England and Wales, though down from 37.5% of the total in 2018 and 46% in 2012, including grants to assist 24 to move out of the capital.

The Theatre Royal Stratford East, the Lyric, Hammersmith and Unicorn children’s theatre retain grants of just over £1 million a year, with £1.8 million for the Young Vic and £2.4 million for the English Stage Company at the Royal Court.

Other familiar names on the list include Talawa Black British Theatre in Croydon, Graeae Theatre, Tara South Asian Theatre, the Hackney Empire, Islington’s Almeida, the Havering Theatre trust at the Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch, getting an almost 40% hike, and the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn.

Sixty-one organisations across the city received funding for the first time, in line with the government’s encouragement to spread the capital’s smaller funding pot away from central London towards groups “more representative” in respect of diversity and location. Nevertheless, the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Southbank Centre between them still account for a third of London funding.

But it was the axing of the ENO which has reopened the argument around “levelling up” and the economic as well as the cultural significance of the arts, with City Hall estimating a £58 billion contribution to the national economy from London’s cultural sector pre-pandemic, supporting one in six jobs in the capital.

“London’s cultural organisations contribute billions and power our capital’s economic comeback as well as the wider UK economy every year which is why they need continued investment,” said Sadiq Khan.

The arts and culture sector is “what makes the whole of London so successful and vibrant,” added Ros Morgan, from the Heart of London Business Alliance, describing the cuts as “wilful damage to the arts sector and to London as a whole”.

The ENO’s Murphy, who said only last month when announcing his departure as CEO next September that he would be leaving the company “at a time when its future has never looked more secure and exciting”, warned of significant job losses among the company’s 140 musicians and singers and 150 technical staff.

The ENO had been “one of the few” opera companies successfully widening its audience, with free tickets for under-21s, people of colour making up 13% of attendees, all performances in English and a “wear jeans and t-shirts if you want” approach, he said.

Opera packed a “massive economic punch” in the capital, he added. And the company also played an important role as a “gateway” opera house for the industry, training young singers. “That, in one decision, has been destroyed,” he said.

As it explores the possibilities of relocation the company has pledged to continue to manage its prominent London home just off Trafalgar Square as an opera and dance venue “whilst maximising it as a commercial asset”.

But the funding decision inevitably raises questions, not only about the viability of a move away from London, but also about the future of the Coliseum, the largest theatre in the West End, with 2,359 seats, dating from 1904, a Grade II* listed building and, apparently, one of the first two places in the UK to sell Coca-Cola.

With Arts Council England chair Sir Nicholas Serota himself praising the ENO’s recent performance, describing it as “probably better led now than they ever have been”, there are questions too about the way the axe has been wielded, defunding a small number of organisations altogether, none of them failing, in Serota’s words, rather than “spreading the misery”.

As the Financial Times says in its review of the ENO’s latest production, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard, “does such a prestigious history of achievement over nearly a century really count for nothing?”

Photo from London Coliseum website.

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Categories: News
Tags: "levelling up", Arts Council, Croydon, Hackney Empire, Heart of London Business Alliance, Kilburn, London Coliseum, Nine Elms, Paul Scully

Richard Derecki: The Tufton Street of Siegfried Sassoon

A tree and pair of plaques commemorate the revered yet troubled poet of the First World War
Richard Derecki

Just off Westminster’s bustling Horseferry Road down the eerily quiet Tufton Street is a green plaque to World War I poet and novelist Siegfried Sassoon, sponsored by the Thorney Island Society. Sassoon lived from 1886 until 1967, and throughout his long life wrote books, reviews, journalism and poetry, but it is his poems from his time in the trenches that have endured and are still read and studied today.

Sassoon was a patriot. He signed up in the early days of the war and commanded troops, but came to loathe the military high command for its recklessness with men’s lives. His poetry is accessible and direct, and it often contrasts a pre-war English country idyll with the brutality of life in the trenches.

His work was controversial. It challenged the established hierarchy, with its presumption that senior officers knew best, as in The General where a premonition of death creeps through the first few lines, with the oblivious officer of the title cheerily sending loyal Harry and Jack to “slog up to Arras with rifle and pack, but he did for them both with his plan of attack”.

During his time in uniform Sassoon struggled with anxiety and fear: fear for his men, fears for his own safety and sanity. He felt he had to test his “manliness” by going out beyond the wire on nocturnal patrols to harass the German front lines and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery in rescuing two of his men after a raiding party went badly wrong. But he was conflicted. Over the years, the roll call of killed friends, of his own men and his younger brother, wore him down. He despised the blind patriotism of pride relations took in their dead and wounded and the cheap home-front jingoism of those who stayed behind.

In June 1917, Sassoon wrote what became a statement against the war: “I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.” He sent it to people he felt might be able to use it politically, and he informed his commanding officer that he was no longer prepared to perform any further military duties.

Surprisingly, the army’s response was rather benign. Instead of facing a court martial, Sassoon was sent to a experimental hospital in Craiglockhart, where men were treated for what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. He met and mentored his young fellow poet Wilfred Owen, but was inexorably drawn back to the front. Hearing about setbacks on the western lines, he felt guilty about what his men were still going through. Like a condemned man walking to the gallows, he believed he could not escape the fate that awaited him. Returning from a patrol, he was accidentally shot in the head by one of his own men and finally invalided out of the army. Somehow, he had survived.

The war lent Sassoon’s life a certain nobility – he had wanted to fight for freedom and to defeat the Germans – but people had a romantic ideal of him that he could never live up to. Although he had a wide social circle of artists, writers and various hangers-on, he struggled to find his place in the world.

Max Egremont’s affectionate biography describes his austere living conditions at 54 Tufton Street – near neighbour to the building that today hosts secretive right-wing think-tanks – where he lived from 1919. In a House of Commons debate six years earlier, the area had been described as one of the most evil slums in Westminster, and it was still run-down when Sassoon moved in.

He shared the house with the poet Walter Turner and Turner’s wife Delphine. Sassoon had two small rooms, few possessions and no kitchen of his own. He produced journalism and worked as the literary editor of the Labour-supporting Daily Herald, but found it hard to write creatively: “The chimes of Big Ben tormented the insomniac Sassoon through the small hours,” wrote Egremont. Sassoon moved out of the Tufton Street house in 1925 when the rows between Walter and Delphine became too much.

The house was all but destroyed during World War II. But down Bennett’s Yard, next to the building now on the site where it stood and behind an imposing brick wall, you will be able to make out a large plane tree that was grown in the garden of the old house and is known locally as “the Sassoon tree”. The planting of memorial trees, particularly plane trees (they grow quickly and are resilient to urban life) to honour those who gave their lives became popular after 1918, and many towns and cities, not just in England, supported them.

Folklore has it that Winston Churchill planted the tree himself to commemorate those who had lost their lives, though there is no hard evidence to support the story. Nevertheless, in 1950 Westminster Council drew up plans to create a peace garden around the tree. These fizzled out, yet many people kept returning to leave mementos and scraps of poetry to celebrate Sassoon.

In the mid-1990s Westminster Council took steps to encourage redevelopment of the immediate vicinity. The Thorney Island Society opposed the proposal for shops, offices and flats on the grounds that it would sweep away examples of architecture from the 1760s through to the 1930s, including the Fleece public house, which was built in Georgian times and an important meeting place for the suffrage movement.

The Society came forward with its own, more sympathetic, proposals, but the battle with the planners and developers came to focus on saving the tree and ensuring public access to it. Led by indefatigable co-founder June Stubbs, a broad range of interested parties were contacted for support and to help with the lobbying. Stubbs marshalled her forces, contacting MPs, Lords, historical societies, Sassoon’s old regiment, the Chelsea Pensioners, even the Queen Mother. But the council pushed back, arguing that it was unclear that the tree was even designated a war memorial.

A compromise was eventually agreed with the developers: the tree would stay, albeit now incorporated into someone’s back garden, and a small, rectangular silver plaque fitted to the adjacent wall in memory of Sassoon and also to Colonel D’Arcy Hall, another recipient of the Military Cross who had lived in Tufton Street, along with “their comrades of the Great War 1914-18.” This smaller tribute is tricky to spot and the wording is now worn, but it’s an endearing token of remembrance.

Richard Derecki is an economist and governance expert who has worked for the 10 Downing Street strategy unit and the Greater London Authority. Follow Richard on Twitter. Photograph from the Thorney Island Society.

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Categories: Culture
Tags: Bennett's Yard, Tufton Street, Westminster Council