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Charles Wright: What’s up with the London Stock Exchange?

Dire warnings abound about the Square Mile institution. Are they justified and should we care?
Charles Wright

From its 17th century beginnings in the coffee houses of the Square Mile, the London Stock Exchange has grown into one of the best-known financial institutions in the world, a regulated marketplace where companies come to raise money by “listing”. That is, offering shares to corporate and private investors.

But this venerable City fixture is in trouble, it seems – in long-term decline, even facing an existential crisis, according to some recent commentary. Firms are delisting or shifting their listing to the US, and new listings are down too. UK pension funds are putting their cash elsewhere, with just five per cent of their assets now held in UK stocks and shares. Last year, the stock exchange market lost 88 companies, the most since the 2009 financial crisis.

What’s going wrong? Does it matter?

There are many explanations on offer. The impact of Brexit is often cited, along with restrictive regulations compared with the US, Stamp Duty raised on share dealing putting off investors and private equity predation. There’s a lack of liquidity too: a buoyant market supports plenty of trading, with investors able to trade easily without affecting prices. That doesn’t seem to be case for the City.

Fundamentally, perhaps, the US market puts higher valuations on companies seeking funds, and delivers higher returns for investors. Lower valuations in the UK not only prompt companies to look elsewhere, but also encourage private equity takeovers, further undermining the market.

The model of finance “rooted in the City of London of old” had failed to move with the times, House of Commons business and trade committee chair Liam Byrne suggested this week. “The London Stock Exchange is no longer the engine of growth it once was,” he said. His committee is now launching an inquiry into what a “new architecture of investment” should look like.

How important is this, when trading is global and the big money world of speculation, takeovers and eye-watering pay outs can seem divorced from everyday life for most of us? Perhaps more than we think.

Firstly, overseas listing or takeover can lead to relocation, putting London jobs at risk and leaving UK investors with less choice in their home market. A weaker market also affects wider financial and professional services – those bankers, lawyers, accountants and consultants who between them contributed some £110 billion in tax revenue to the Treasury in 2023.

More important though is the wider economic impact. The presence of globally significant listed companies, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said in its Revitalising UK Public Markets report last month, not only sustains professional services but “attracts international capital, enhances the UK’s global market credibility, and connects the UK to many global supply chains crucial for innovation, productivity, and employment.”

As Birmingham University professor David Bailey put it succinctly in the Independent earlier this year: “Ultimately if London isn’t seen as an attractive market for bigger companies to list their shares, this raises a question mark over whether UK firms can attract money.” That affects the government’s growth ambitions, and ultimately all of us.

So, what to do? Various reforms are on their way, as Rachel Reeves highlighted in her annual Mansion House speech last month – simplifying exchange rules, a taskforce to attract new listings, rolling back regulation, which Reeves argues has “gone too far” in seeking to eliminate risk, and targeted support for growth sectors such as fintech. Reeves won’t be bowing to City demands to axe Stamp Duty on share purchases though – it currently brings in £4 billion a year to the Treasury.

The big government push is about persuasion: getting pension funds pledging to invest more in British business and major infrastructure projects, and a new drive to encourage reluctant Brits to get into stocks and shares – “Tell Sid”-style advertising, for those who remember the 1980s, urging us to buy shares in the newly-privatised British Gas.

More pension fund investment at home would boost business, increase liquidity in the market, lift valuations and deliver higher returns to pension savers, the government hopes. Similarly, it argues, the UK’s low levels of “retail” investment – just 23 per cent of people investing directly in the stock market compared to nearly two-thirds of Americans – mean savers as well as businesses losing out while an estimated £300 billion sits in low-return cash ISAs. The new ad campaign will help to explain the benefits of investing.

The jury is out on these moves, but there are also suggestions that things aren’t perhaps as bad for the Square Mile as commentators suggest. The CBI report argues the the London Stock Exchange remains “one of the world’s largest and most liquid markets, underpinned by deep pools of capital, global financial expertise, and a trusted legal framework”.  This year, the FTSE 100 Index of the largest listed companies actually reached record highs, with the exchange overtaking Paris to regain its position as the biggest stock market in Europe.

There’s optimism, too, that the market is well placed to take advantage of investor uncertainty in the US. City figures, including stock exchange chief executive David Schwimmer, are reporting investors returning to London, plus a “very healthy pipeline” of deals which could boost the market further.

Serious concerns remain, though, particularly about keeping as well as enticing high growth companies. As Byrne says, “too often, our greatest entrepreneurs struggle to find the scale-up finance they need to build world-beating companies on these islands”. The latest defector is online payments company Wise in a reported £12 billion blow to the exchange. Companies must be encouraged to “invest for growth rather than focusing on dividends and buybacks”, according to the CBI.

Finally, the stock exchange, populated by big firms often earning most of their revenue abroad, doesn’t represent a full picture of the economy, and more of us dabbling in shares may not shift the dial. This week, BusinessLDN, while on board with the message that London is the “best place in the world in which to do business”, called for wider action. That should include investment in essential infrastructure and training, and, in London, more devolution, empowering the capital to “lead on project delivery and fulfil its full potential as an engine of UK-wide growth”.

It’s a call echoed by John Asthana Gibson at the Social Market Foundation in his response to Reeves’s latest initiatives. “If you want growth”, he said, “focus on supply side reform: build houses, railways and power plants.”

Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky. 

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE

Categories: Analysis
Tags: economy

Talk About London: How did Greenwich get its homeless out of B&Bs?

The latest On London-London Society podcast hears from council leader Anthony Okereke and a senior officer about creative solutions to a huge problem amid difficult circumstances
Dave Hill

Earlier this year, Greenwich Council announced that it had achieved a huge reduction in the number of homeless people it was responsible for being temporarily accommodated in bed and breakfast hotels, saving a lot of money in the process.

The cost of temporary accommodation has become a huge drain on the already strained resources of many London boroughs, as I have reported in depth. So how did Greenwich alleviate that pressure?

Council leader Anthony Okereke (pictures) and Shaun Flook, Greenwich’s assistant director, housing needs and tenancy, explained to Leanne Tritton and how they got all of the relevant Town Hall departments working together to identify homes available, establish entitlements to them and generally do whatever they could to find them somewhere better.

Listen to the podcast here or watch it on the On London YouTube channel below.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay  £5 a month or £50 a year. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: Greenwich Council, homelessness, London Councils

Duncan Flynn: Six ways London Conservatives can recover

Support for the Tories has collapsed in the capital, yet there is no sign so far of them changing their losing approach
Duncan Flynn

The May 2026 London council elections will mark 20 years from what could be considered the high point for the Conservative Party in London in the 21st Century. The 2006 contests, which took place with Labour, as now, in national power, saw the Tories receive more votes than Labour overall in the capital, get more councillors elected, and win outright control of 14 of the city’s 32 boroughs. Those including Ealing and Redbridge. Today in those two places, the party has just four and five councillors respectively.

This collapse at a municipal level has been replicated in terms of parliamentary seats, with the Tories now reduced to nine London MPs out of 75, all of them representing constituencies on the outskirts of London. There are no Conservative MPs in travel zones 1 or 2. For many seasoned election observers, the fact that Chelsea & Fulham now has a Labour MP and Westminster City Council is Labour-controlled further highlights the scale of Conservative decline in inner London.

At a mayoral level, the Conservatives have struggled to find an electorally viable challenger to Boris Johnson’s successor, Labour’s Sir Sadiq Khan, even though he has been eminently beatable. Despite he lacklustre performance of Shaun Bailey in 2021 and the uninspired populism of Susan Hall last year, it is worth remembering that both candidates still managed to win the support of over 30 per cent of voters in London, over 800,000 of them.

This demonstrates that there remains a viable Conservative base in the capital. Or at least there was until rise of Reform UK, which is now attracting around 15 per cent of voters in London according to recent polling and two weeks ago gained a council seat from the Tories in traditionally true blue Bromley.

Many London Conservatives will undoubtedly argue that the rise of Reform means the party needs to move further to the populist Right and double down on tough immigration and culture war rhetoric, yet there is scant electoral evidence to suggest that such a strategy will win a sufficient number of hearts, minds and votes in London to facilitate a Tory renaissance.

Indeed, it is no accident that the strong Conservative performance in 2006 and Boris Johnson’s ensuing mayoral victories in 2008 and 2012 came at a time when the party’s national leadership was presenting a more moderate, socially liberal face to the electorate.

Again, some will insist that in the post-Brexit age of Trumpian populism, politics has irrevocably changed and that there is no market for moderation on the centre-Right. However, this ignores the fact that the collapse in Conservative support in London has followed the party’s reinvention of itself as a supporter of a “hard Brexit” at the expense of the traditional Conservative pro-enterprise narrative.

Furthermore, the more recent embrace of the divisive culture war agenda has undoubtedly alienated a strand of largely middle-class professional, traditionally Conservative voters who combined fiscally conservative and socially liberal outlooks.

Indeed, throughout the last Parliament it frequently felt as if the Conservatives at national level were quite relaxed about losing the support of people in Fulham and Wimbledon if those voters could be traded for Brexit-supporters in “red wall” seats.

This perception was reinforced by the sneering rhetoric deployed by figures in the party hierarchy, who frequently derided Sir Keir Starmer for being a member of a north London elite holding dinner parties in his north London townhouse.

Rather than learning the lessons of recent defeats, there is minimal evidence thus far that the Conservatives, now led former London Assembly member Kemi Badenoch, is looking to appeal to the sort of London voters who backed the party under David Cameron but have abandoned it in recent years. Given her dwindling poll ratings and the persistent rumours of a challenge to her leadership, Badenoch can ill afford another electoral drubbing in London next May.

With that in mind, I suggest six ways in which the Tories in London may wish to consider repositioning themselves ahead of next May.

One: End the anti-London rhetoric

London remains the UK’s primary economic engine and contains millions of private sector employees who should be natural supporters for a pro-enterprise centre-Right party. However, if your messaging is at best lukewarm and at worst antagonistic towards London’s wealth creators, don’t be surprised if they don’t vote for you.

Jeering about London lawyers (some of whom vote Conservative) and north London dinner parties should be dropped by the Conservatives, as they are both electorally damaging and at odds with the instincts of a party which should champion aspiration and social mobility.

Two: Offer a positive, forward-looking vision

In recent years, we have seen some senior London Conservatives aligning with those increasingly strident online voices who portray London as a city in irreversible decline. Yes, London has enormous challenges and the performance of the current Mayor on issues such as the delivery of affordable housing and tackling knife crime has been lamentable.

But an unrelenting doom-laden narrative is not the basis for a political resurrection. Leading London Tories need to demonstrate that they have a positive, realistic and forward-looking vision for the capital, not a sepia-tinted nostalgia for a London of the distant past.

Three: Have an amnesty on Brexit

As we know, Brexit was not popular in London in 2016 and is even less popular in 2025. However, many Conservatives still cling to it as a central feature of their party’s policy platform, seeking to use the return of Trump in the White House as an opportunity to relitigate the virtues of our decision to leave the European Union.

However, a simple fact remains, namely that the pronounced decline of the Conservatives in London has broadly coincided with the party adopting a pro-Brexit position. Unless it is willing to put Brexit firmly behind it and have an amnesty for those who were not enthusiastic cheerleaders for it, then it will struggle to win back former supporters who deserted the party over this issue, many of whom live in London.

Four: Have a coherent pan-London position on housing

Despite their pro-housing rhetoric, both Mayor Khan and the Labour government are significantly under-shooting their targets for housing delivery. However, they have been largely let off the hook by a Conservative Party which abolished mandatory housing targets when in government and whose London MPs routinely campaigned against additional housing in their constituencies during the last Parliament. With the average age of Conservative voters now 63, the party has fallen into a comfort zone of instinctively opposing the new homes required to solve London’s housing crisis for younger generations.

Conservatives in inner London have campaigned against taller buildings, whilst their colleagues in outer London have typically opposed Green Belt development. If the Tories are to have any chance of appealing to a younger audience, such an obstructive approach to housing delivery in the capital has to end. The party needs to have a rethink about the sort of housing it thinks acceptable and where it should be provided. Bland and meaningless platitudes about supporting good development no longer cut it.

Five: Talk about law and order more responsibly

That London has a serious crime problem is not in doubt. However, too frequently Conservatives in London (and elsewhere) focus not on specific incidents and policing issues arising from them but seek to draw broader conclusions, often focused on a culture wars narrative they believe will be to their political advantage. This often causes problems around community cohesion and does little to address the very valid public safety concerns which result from the initial criminal activity.

London Conservatives should rightly put addressing crime (especially knife crime) at the forefront of their campaigns, but they should do so responsibly, in a way which does not exacerbate community divisions unnecessarily.

Six: Embrace creativity and soft power

From Wimbledon and the O2 to Wembley and the West End, London is a world-leading creative and sporting epicentre, capable of attracting huge “soft power” investment. With London’s night time economy struggling under Mayor Khan, there is an opportunity for the Conservatives to be much more overtly supportive of it and to consider which policy levers can be used to increase tourism.

The London 2012 Olympics took place under a Conservative Prime Minister and a Conservative Mayor. It is high time the party reexamined its approach to soft power and the important role of London’s cultural and creative sectors more specifically.

***

Such is the parlous position of the Conservative Party both nationally and in London, these ideas will not in themselves guarantee its revival in the capital. However, the first challenge for London’s Tories is to stay relevant, attract new supporters and create the conditions under which a recovery will take place in the event that the national picture improves.

Central to this will be ensuring that when the selection of the next Conservative mayoral candidate comes around, high calibre individuals with serious track records of achievement, not just in the political arena, will be persuaded to seek the nomination. Ultimately, this will be the best barometer for assessing whether the Conservatives have a viable future as an electoral force in London in the medium term.

Duncan Flynn is a Senior Director at Cratus Group. He served as a Conservative councillor in  Hillingdon from 2014-22, including as chief whip in 2020-22. He has since left the party. Follow Duncan on X/Twitter.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay  £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Borough elections 2026, Conservatives, Labour, Reform UK

John Vane: Cleveland Street – two famous addresses, no dream connection

A very Victorian scandal occurred there in the 19th Century, but during a different part of it from when a legendary writer was a local resident
John Vane

I went there in search of a significant address and ended up discovering both it and a second one across the street. In fact, it wasn’t quite like that. But let’s pretend.

Cleveland Street, in Fitzrovia, forms part of the boundary between Westminster and Camden. Its most conspicuous feature is the BT Tower, previously called the GPO or Post Office Tower. It was formally opened in May 1966, a couple of months before England won the World Cup at Wembley, by the novel double act of Billy Butlin and Tony Benn. It remains one of London’s tallest buildings.

However, Cleveland Street’s fame predates all that for reasons unconnected with telecommunications or architecture.

In 1889, number 19 was revealed to be a brothel where gentleman of the upper classes had transactional close encounters with teenage boys from the lower orders. Toffs involved included the Earl of Euston, Lord Somerset, who was an equerry to the then-Prince of Wales, and, according to rumours that were never proved, Prince Albert Victor, second in line to the throne.

The Cleveland Street Scandal, as it became known, recently formed the basis for The Flea, an excellent play by James Fritz which has had two successful runs at The Yard theatre in Hackney Wick. It is also a case study of moral panics about homosexuality, one with particular purchase for having occurred in Victorian England, a period often associated with what their champions optimistically term “traditional values”.

Would I find a plaque or any other commemoration of this transgression location on Cleveland Street? I didn’t, and although I was pleased to find a number 19, the 19th Century house of assignation of that same address has long since been knocked down. Perhaps it wasn’t even on quite the same spot.

There was, though, more for my London explorer’s pleasure. Directly opposite, above the door of the Grade II listed Number 22, is a blue plaque informing us that Charles Dickens twice lived at that house, first as a small child – born in Portsmouth, it was his first London home – and then as a youth.

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Did the goings on at Number 19 take place literally a stone’s throw from the young Dickens’s front door? No such luck. His tenures were in 1815-16 and 1828-31, decades before the scandal and when today’s 22 Cleveland Street was 10 Norfolk Street (the renaming took place in 1867, absorbing Norfolk Street into the original Cleveland Street, named after the 2nd Duke of Cleveland). It has, though, been suggested that the proximity of 10 Norfolk Street to the Cleveland Street Workhouse provided inspiration for Oliver Twist.

My discovery of the adjacency of two such significant addresses, though hardly an original find, excited me enough to stand in the middle of Cleveland Street and make a very poor job of filming them both in the same shot, attracting curious looks as I did so. Maybe I should put the footage on TikTok. What would Dickens have done?

John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, publisher and editor of On London for fiction and sketches. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here or here.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay  £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE.

Categories: Culture, John Vane's London Stories
Tags: BT Tower, Charles Dickens, Cleveland Street, Fitzrovia

Lewis Baston: Barking & Dagenham – Labour holds, Greens thrive and Tories slide

A change of winning party was never likely in the Thames View by-election, but the result still showed how the electoral landscape is moving
Lewis Baston

“Labour holds ward in Barking & Dagenham” may sound like the definition of a “dog bites man” electoral incident, but there were several interesting features of Thursday’s council by-election result in the borough.

Thames View ward is in the south west of Barking & Dagenham. Its northern border is the A13 road and part of the railway line that runs between the town of Barking and Dagenham Dock. Much of the area was marshland until comparatively recently.

The Thames View estate, around Bastable Avenue, was built in the late 1950s by the then Barking Borough Council as a southern extension of Barking. South of that, around the place labelled Creekmouth on maps, there is a large area occupied by light industrial and warehouse usage. By Galleons Drive in the south east of the ward there is an area of newer housing – the ward’s share of the Barking Riverside development. A new block of flats in De Pass Gardens went up in flames there in June 2019.

The name of the ward is not entirely satisfactory. As psephologist Adam Gray commented: “You’ll need binoculars and be atop a high rise block to view the Thames from here.” However, it is the name for the estate that supplies most, although not all, of the ward’s population.

Barking & Dagenham’s former Thames ward had become grossly oversized by the time of the ward boundary review that reported in 2021, because it was the site of large-scale housing development, particularly around the new Barking Riverside station.

The Local Government Boundary Commission for England (LGBCE) essentially split the ward into two – a three-member ward called Barking Riverside and the two-member Thames View. The old Thames ward was not divided neatly between the established council-built estate and newly developed areas. However, the Barking & Dagenham Labour Group persuaded the commission that the communities were interdependent and that it was therefore reasonable to mix the two types of residential area within each new ward.

Thames View is a predominantly working-class ward with areas of deprivation. It has, for London, low levels of professional and managerial workers (20 per cent compared to London’s 38 per cent) and people with degrees, and more working in routine occupations. It has a high proportion who are long-term unemployed or have never worked (16.3 per cent, compared to 10.3 per cent in London).

Social landlords house 44.5 per cent of its households and comparatively few own their housing outright or rent privately. It is ethnically mixed – 36 per cent white, 29 per cent black and 26 per cent Asian. It is also a religious ward by London’s – quite religious – standards, with above-average proportions both of Christians (44 per cent) and Muslims (30 per cent).

The by-election was caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Fatuma Nalule, who had first been elected for Thames in a May 2021 by-election and was re-elected as a Thames View councillor in the full borough elections the following year. Four candidates contested the seat, with the Liberal Democrats sitting this one out.

Lucy Lee, defending for Labour, is a long-standing local resident who has been a community worker for Thames Life and Barking Riverside Limited.

The Conservative candidate Andrew Boff is a familiar face in London politics. He was first elected a councillor in Hillingdon in 1982, led that council from 1990 to 1992, and has been a London Assembly Member since 2008, leading the Conservative group from 2012 to 2015. He is an interesting figure, in that he is basically a Thatcherite right-winger, but his liberal social views and his genuine love of London in all its diversity make him seem further to the Left.

Were the Tories to try to win over London rather than demonising it for the sake of votes elsewhere, they could do worse than make Boff their London figurehead. He also has a track record of doing well in borough by-elections in unpromising areas. For example, he won a seat in Queensbridge ward in Hackney in 2005 and achieved a 25 per cent swing in his favour in Thames ward when he fought it in 2021. He fought Thames View, less successfully, as the sole Conservative candidate in 2022.

Paul Powlesland, the Green candidate, is a barrister and founder of Lawyers for Nature. Summoned for jury service at Snaresbrook Crown Court a year ago, he asked to swear his oath with reference to a vial of water from the River Roding, which he held to be sacred and “effectively my God”. The Roding flows into Barking Creek, which forms the western boundary of Thames View ward where it meets Newham.

Lewis Holmes, the Reform UK candidate, was active on social media until deleting his X (formerly Twitter) account just before the election and after it was alleged that he had called Barking a “nasty disgusting place”. He has disseminated far-Right content including praise for “Tommy Robinson” and Rupert Lowe MP, which is the sort of thing Reform’s much-vaunted vetting process should be picking up.

Turnout in the by-election was 23.9 per cent, a low proportion but not much down on the 28.4 per cent of 2022. Lee (pictured, centre) held the seat for Labour with 334 votes, representing 36.1 per cent of the total and a severe drop since 2022, when Labour’s two candidates polled over 60 per cent in the ward.

It is only in safe wards that Labour can afford to shed so much support and still hold on, but fortunately for the party they have a lot of safe wards in London. Barking & Dagenham council consists of 50 Labour councillors (including Lee), plus an opposition of just one, an Independent who was elected as Labour in May 2022 but left the party group the following December.

Second place went to Powlesland with 277 votes, a highly creditable 29.9 per cent share for the Greens, who did not even contest Thames View in 2022. Their campaign was fought on the usual local issues – housing, street cleaning and crime, plus opposition to the borough pension fund investing in fossil fuels and businesses with links to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Late in the race they made the classic tactical argument that its outcome was between them and Labour. Holmes of Reform UK came third, with 197 votes (21.3 per cent) and Boff finished fourth with 117 votes (12.6 per cent).

We have noted the steep fall in the Labour vote, which is not unusual in by-elections for the party of national government. It is also significant that Boff, a local resident, having a bad by-election result is the latest sign of the poor shape of the Conservative brand in London. The Tory vote share has been down in 13 of the 21 London by-elections held in 2025 so far. This should be a source of alarm, given that the 2022 baseline reflects their worst ever set of borough elections.

Whatever they are doing, both nationally and across London, it isn’t working. For Reform on the other hand it was a moderately encouraging result, despite their campaign mishaps. The party secured its third best percentage share in any London by-election (after Bromley Common & Holwood and Brentford East). That is the more striking in view of the ward’s multi-ethnic composition, though, it should also be noted that Reform’s vote share is not much higher than the British National Party (BNP) managed in the old Thames ward in 2010 (17.9 per cent, on a 61 per cent turnout).

The Greens can take considerable satisfaction from the Thames View result. They demonstrated their ability to win votes from a mostly working-class local electorate, as opposed to the white liberal middle-class demographic traditionally seen as the Green core.

The party seems to have a knack for communicating with newly-formed communities, such as those of the Stratford, Olympic Park ward in Newham, where they picked up two councillors in 2022. They could grow stronger in Thames View and next-door Barking Riverside. There are not many new areas of this type, but it is an interesting feature of politics that voters in places who have seen great change are open to a left-environmental appeal.

Photo from Barking & Dagenham Labour X/Twitter feed.  Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay  £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return bespoke newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE.

Categories: Analysis
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Julie Hamill: Oasis fever on the streets of London

The Wembley gigs on the band's world tour has brought people and their tribute wardrobes to the capital from far and wide
Julie Hamill

Last Saturday, I was in Marylebone, seeing a friend, and popped into The Volunteer on Baker Street for a pit stop. I pulled the door open to be met by a packed room filled with happy, smiling faces, all wearing the same gear, top to toe.

And when I say top to toe, I really mean it: bucket hats, three-stripe shirts, three-stripe trackies and three-stripe trainers. Absolutely everybody was wearing Oasis with their pint. I paused at the entrance in a scratch-record silence moment, then made my way through the crowd. As I was the only one not wearing the Oa-kit, it was clear who did not have a golden Gallagher ticket for that night’s opening Wembley gig.

Still, I was caught up in the anticipatory mood and couldn’t help but smile back at all these excited faces. In the loos, I met two Scottish girls and we had a chat by the mirrors. As I left, I told them to have a great time. “Oh, don’t you worry, we will!” they replied, in a self-confident manner like that of  the singer they were going to see.

You don’t have to know the dates to know that Oasis are playing Wembley. It’s clear from the sky-blue sea of 90,000 fans that light up London’s pubs, streets, and tube carriages with their singing, animated chatting and wardrobes worn with pride – one guy still had the tag on his T-shirt – for a miracle reunion they thought they would never witness. With a multitude of tribute bands cleaning up all over the city, and pre- and post-gig parties stretching along the Jubilee line from Wembley to Waterloo, London is having a significant cultural “were you there?/be here now!” moment.

Last Wednesday, there was another Wembley date and in the midst of the triple-stripers, I managed to chat to two visiting Americans, one from Boston, one from New York, who were elated to share why, of all the tour locations, they wanted to come to London.

“The city I’m from, Boston, is very sports-based,” said Evan, 43. “But the energy when the Boston Celtics win a championship is still so selective. In London the energy is everywhere, it’s universal. I can’t think of another place that rallies round a creative group the way London does. It has something so artistic and badass. This, plus, I really can’t think of another music group that has that legion. It feels like the whole city has an energy around Oasis right now. Even getting into Heathrow, straight away we were seeing people wearing Oasis merchandise, and it’s wild.”

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“When I landed in Heathrow, it was generations of fans: mums, dads, teens, and little kids in their full Oasis kits,” said Eddie, 51. “It’s families, and I have never seen that before. The only other time I’ve seen the family thing is when I went to Liverpool to visit the Beatles sites. They were wearing Beatles T-shirts, but not on this scale. I feel like everyone is loud and proud about the fact they’re here to see Oasis with zero f***s given. It’s like, ‘I’m gonna wear my bucket hat and my shirt and I don’t care!’ I think it’s the boastful pride that the band has in themselves. This is who we are and we don’t care if you don’t like it — we like it! I feel like their attitude has translated into the fan culture, and it’s spreading through the city.”

I was curious to know why they didn’t get tickets for one of the American gigs, where Oasis are also touring, and instead chose to fly to London for the experience.

“There’s a reservedness when you go to see a show in New York,” said Eddie. “For the first four songs people will have their arms folded – like, prove to me that you’re worthy of adulation; I’m sceptical about you until I see whether you’re worthy of me going crazy. Whereas in London there’s no reservedness. There’s no pretension, no worrying about who’s gonna judge me if I start singing early… I’m just here for this. Plus, there is something iconic about saying you’ve been to Wembley!”

After our chat I headed to Bond Street. The tube was packed with fans. Everyone was caught up in Gallagher brother fever, except for one man – the busker. At the exit, I noticed that he had, in addition to a tip hat, TWO card machines on display.

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He had chosen to sing some Crowded House tracks, which, in the midst of this hot London Oasism, I didn’t understand. He could have definitely (maybe) cleaned up with a singalong set of hits and his handy hand-height card tipping machines would have been a beeping frenzy.

Instead he sang Weather With You, and thus may look back in anger as hoards of fans passed by on their way to visit to the Oxford Street Adidas, no beeps given.

Top photo from Chazza_Charlotte X/Twitter feed. Middle pic by Julie Hamill. Julie writes novels, appears on Times Radio and does lots more. Follow her on Instagram. Oasis play Wembley again today and tomorrow, and twice more in September.

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Categories: Culture
Tags: Wembley stadium

Tim Bale: The Conservatives’ problems in London run very deep

Tories imagining they will make a comeback in the boroughs next year or win the mayoralty in 2028 could be fooling themselves badly
Tim Bale

Every time an election results in a victory for the challenger, one question is always worth asking. Did they win it, or did the other party lose it?  The general election is a case a point: Keir Starmer’s massive majority on a relatively low share of the vote had at least as much to do with voters desperately wanting rid of the Conservatives as it did with any particular enthusiasm they might have had for Labour.

The same goes for Reform UK’s win in last week’s by-election in Bromley. Yes, the party came from nowhere to take 34 per cent of the vote – a share spookily similar to Labour’s nationally last year. But that was only enough to win the seat because the Conservatives’ share fell so sharply.

True, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that Reform managed to snatch a seat in that south east London borough. After all, the town of Bormley was historically part of Kent, where earlier this year Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle swept to victory in county council elections. Nor should we forget that the Conservatives only squeaked home in Westminster seat of Bromley & Biggin Hill last July, again because their support fell precipitously.

But any London Conservatives hoping the challenge from Reform will be confined to boroughs bordering Kent, or where they only held London constituencies by narrow of margins, may be fooling themselves.  Their party’s electoral and reputational problems go much deeper – and a lot higher – than that.

Fourteen years of failure in national office mean the Conservatives are utterly despised by large parts of the electorate. Worse than that, they are now considered an irrelevance. In a polity where a party’s standing in the opinion polls now seems to count for more than how many MPs it has at Westminster, Reform UK is seen by many as “the real opposition” to a Labour government that’s rapidly become as unpopular as its Tory predecessor.

Added to that, just look at the way that the media hangs on Farage’s every word, while Kemi Badenoch struggles to get headlines – even if, ironically, that same lack of coverage might be said to have proved something of a blessing for Badenoch when it came to Bromley.

It meant, for instance, that her decision to go canvassing in an ultimately doomed attempt to hold onto what, in the end, was only one seat in an obscure borough council by-election didn’t get as much attention as it might have. The fact that the Tories and their leader threw the proverbial kitchen sink at the contest and still lost to Reform should arguably have produced far more comment and analysis than it did.

The same goes for the fact that all this has occurred in spite of the Conservatives spending most of their time since Badenoch’s elevation to the leadership turning themselves into an imitation of Reform – albeit far too pale an imitation, according to supporters of the man she defeated, Robert Jenrick.

Centre-right parties all over Europe have likewise attempted to fend off the challenges they face from populist radical Right rivals in the same mould as Farage’s outfit by moving, at least rhetorically, in those challengers’ direction. Very often, however, they find that right-wing voters prefer the original to the copy, while those more middle-of-the-road supporters their rightward shift has alienated have no intention of returning anytime soon.

Famous last words but, on the strength of the swing to Reform in Bromley Common & Holwood ward, next year’s borough contests in London probably won’t prove a total wipeout for the Conservatives. Even so, those contests are unlikely to provide them with much good news. How much that will be due to Reform UK and how much to the Tories themselves will, as ever, be a question well worth asking – and one to which Badenoch may struggle to come up with a convincing answer.

Will she even be around to do that? Who knows? Which means Conservatives in the capital should focus on making their own luck if they want to hold on in the boroughs next year – let alone stand any chance at all of recapturing the London mayoralty in 2028.

For one thing, they should stop obsessing not just about Nigel but also about Sadiq: this is almost certainly his last term, so they’ll be fighting another Labour politician before they know it, ideally with a Tory candidate with some star power and media credibility who’s allowed to depart from the party line now and then.

For another, while it’s reasonable to accentuate some of the problems the London faces, Tories there shouldn’t be so negative as to imply that they don’t actually like the super-diverse, teeming, largely pro-European metropolis they hope to represent. Leave the London-bashing to Reform – after all, that party’s evident distaste for everything the capital represents is why, in the end, the overwhelming majority of its voters are unlikely to fall for Farage’s schtick any time soon.

Tim Bale is Professor of Politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation, now available in paperback. Follow him on Bluesky.

Categories: Comment
Tags: Bromley, Conservatives, Reform UK

Charles Wright: Can Square Mile tension between heritage and growth be eased?

Leading figures from the City of London Corporation have been making public criticisms of Historic England
Charles Wright

A new skirmish in the war over development in the City of London seems to be breaking out – and not instigated by the usual “heritage lobby” suspects. This time it’s the City Corporation launching the attack, with the Historic England quango in its sights.

It isn’t holding back. Such heritage consultees were “too often” stalling projects with objections that were “haphazard, inconsistent and increasingly misaligned with the national imperative to drive growth” putting them “on the wrong side of history”, former Guildhall planning chair Shavran Joshi argued this month in separate Standard and Times articles.

“Senior planning officers” and “figures in the Corporation” were quoted too, accusing Historic England of standing in the way of the authority’s ambition to ensure London remains a global financial and professional services hub. Guildhall planning director Gwyn Richards spelt this out: “Persistent” Historic England objections were damaging investor confidence and appetite, he said. “As planners we know this from repeated developer feedback.”

Current City Corporation planning committee chair Tom Sleigh has been more emollient, expressing a desire for “constructive dialogue” with heritage lobbyists. But those “trying…too hard to prevent development and growth”, he told Building Design magazine, were at risk of being seen as “blockers at a critical time of national economic importance”. Developers have joined in. The Square Mile “cannot be preserved in aspic,” Ross Sayers, chair of the City Property Association (CPA), told The Times.

What’s going on, particularly as most tall buildings do get permission – 350,000 square metres-worth in the past 12 months? Isn’t Historic England, which, by law, must be consulted on major applications in London with heritage implications, simply doing its job?

There are 48 churches, 28 conservation areas and more than 600 listed buildings in the Square Mile. Historic street patterns remain amid the towers, and below ground there are extensive Roman remains. The discovery of some of these recently prompted a redesign of one of the latest office towers to be approved. Development in the City has an impact beyond its boundaries, too. We all care about that skyline. There’s clearly a role for a watchdog.

But in a continuing competition for international business, and demand for top-quality space outstripping supply, the City needs to keep building, the Corporation argues. Constrained by London-wide policy protecting views of St Pauls in particular, it is corralling major new building into the small “City cluster” zone of existing high-rise development – where the only way is up. The Guildhall wants another 1.2 million square metres of office space by 2040, and that inevitably brings conflict in what is the historic heart of the capital.

Hence the new skirmish: the Guildhall pushing for a “better balance” in planning policy between “preservation and progress”, giving more weight to developments driving growth, as Historic England warns of “severe harm” to important heritage sites. We need to get “comfortable” with “stone rubbing shoulders with steel” says Joshi, “without the worry of how the heritage lobby will judge us”.

Not everyone agrees that historic buildings sitting “cheek-by-jowl” with new buildings creates, in Joshi’s words, a “thrilling juxtaposition”. Planning inspector David Nicholson took on that argument when he considered the controversial Vegas-style Tulip tower in 2021. Juxtaposition was not always positive, he said, “particularly when…that was an assessment reached on balance.”

Earlier this month former Royal Academy chief Sir Charles Saumarez Smith, while accepting the need for the City to remain globally competitive, warned that the Guildhall’s big bet on continuing demand for “monolithic” offices was putting the area’s character at risk. “The pendulum needs to swing back,” he said.

Even the CPA, while supportive of the corporation’s approach, has reported workers’ views that the City’s public realm can feel “too polished”. It recommended the Guildhall to  embrace “greener, more characterful spaces to make the Square Mile feel more inviting and inclusive”.

This resonates with Sleigh’s view that the best developments “give something back to the street” –  “ground level activation”, in planning speak, as opposed to the ubiquitous tower-top “sky gardens”, which Sleigh suggested in his Building Design interview might be going out of fashion.

Sleigh isn’t backing down in the face of opposition to the Guildhall’s growth targets though. “We believe strongly that heritage and modernity can work alongside each other,” he told the CPA in June. “We will always robustly defend our positions when it comes to where growth should and must happen.” It looks like the stand-off isn’t abating.

Sir Sadiq Khan’s new London Plan seems to be in the Guildhall’s sights too, with the future of the capital’s Central Activities Zone (CAZ), including the Square Mile and the West End, at stake, according to Joshi. “If we give the CAZ the tools to grow, we’ll keep London ahead of global competitors like New York, Paris, Tokyo and Singapore,” he wrote in the Standard. The new London Plan is some way off, but Khan’s initial Towards a London Plan document does suggest the protected views policy might be reviewed to “ensure its impact is proportionate” – an early win for the Guildhall perhaps.

Is its message getting through to Historic England too? This week the watchdog said the City’s latest battleground proposal, Network Rail’s controversial scheme putting an office block above Liverpool Street station to fund improvements to the overcrowded terminus (pictured), was a “significant improvement” on previous plans. While advising councillors to grant permission only “if persuaded that harm has been minimised and would be outweighed by public benefits”, it is not lodging a formal objection.

Meanwhile though, a new Deloitte survey shows most of the new office space delivered in the City in the first half of this year was actually refurbishment rather than new build. With limited space to develop, continuing high costs, and new buildings taking some six years to complete, occupiers were “increasingly considering better-quality secondary space”. While the debate continues, the market itself might be embracing another approach to satisfying heritage lobbyists.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture with no paywall and no ads. The vast majority of its income comes from individual supporters, who pay £5 a month or £50 a year. They receive in return exclusive newsletters, bargain London event offers and much gratitude. Details HERE. Follow Charles Wright on Bluesky. Image from Liverpool Street station plans on Instagram.

Categories: Analysis
Tags: City of London Corporation, Historic England, planning