Just short of five years ago, my wife and I went to Rome to celebrate the 25th anniversary of our getting married there. We were unaware of the earliest reports of a mysterious new virus appearing in China, taking the life of a 61-year-old man and making seven other people critically ill. We returned to a London that seemed equally oblivious and carried on with our lives as usual, not imagining that what, in February 2020, the World Health Organisation named Coronavirus Disease 2019 – Covid-19 for short – would, within a few weeks, begin ending the lives of thousands of fellow Londoners and others across Britain.
Not until early March did the implications of Covid begin to be publicly addressed by political leaders and start to affect people’s behaviour. On the 3rd of that month, Sadiq Khan launched his campaign to win a second term as Mayor of London and took questions from journalists about the spread of the virus. Later that day, Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a press conference to launch his government’s Coronavirus Action Plan, convey expert advice about washing your hands and reassure the nation that it should be “going about its business as usual”.
It was already apparent that Labour’s Khan and his Conservative predecessor had low opinions of each other, and these would not improve. But on that day, the two men, advised by the same sets of experts, said exactly the same thing to the public: essentially, keep calm and carry on until further notice.
That evening, I chaired a meeting in Fitzrovia, where attendees jokingly touched the toes of each other’s shoes instead of shaking hands. But an Italian woman who had wanted to be there did not get to the event – she had instead rushed back to her homeland, where family members were stricken with the novel sickness and 79 compatriots had so far been killed by it. Within a week, that number had quadrupled. Within three, Johnson had announced the first UK lockdown.
What happened next in London was, of course, a bleak and turbulent period of its history, described by some at the time as an existential crisis for the city, a plight it hadn’t experienced since the Blitz. The Covid-19 pandemic was also a time that revealed and intensified both the worst things about the capital and its great strengths: on the one hand, for example, how much harder and more fragile London life is for its least well-off than for its affluent; on the other, its extraordinary resilience as a place and the generous strength of its communities.
This went on for two years and ended just under three years ago. Perhaps, in part, because it was followed by another period of national turbulence, in that case caused by national government successively collapsing into chaos, desperation and disrepute, that it seems to have been quickly forgotten about. Perhaps, in part, it is just because we would rather not remember. But with Covid still around, influenza levels running high and another, though far less dangerous, new virus appearing in China, perhaps it would wise to start remembering and also wondering what has changed for the better because of Covid, what has changed for the worse, and what has and hasn’t been learned.
The first of a series of reports from the the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, published last July, produced ten recommendations for the country being better prepared for combatting any future pandemic. It found that although the UK had made ready for dealing with a big flu outbreak, it wasn’t ready for Covid-19. Emergency planning was complicated by the many institutions and structures involved, health and social inequalities were not given enough advance consideration and local authorities and volunteers were not sufficiently involved.
The inquiry’s first report looked at national, not regional, pandemic planning, but its conclusions will surely have been of urgent interest to public bodies in London, a huge metropolis of nine million people whose own governance architecture for civil emergencies was pretty intricate. Following the report’s release, Professor Kevin Fenton, a prominent public health leader in the capital at the time and now Mayor Khan’s statutory health adviser, responded to it in his capacity as president of the Faculty of Public Health.
He welcomed its emphasis on better preparedness and on understanding inequalities as “a key theme in the response to all emergencies”. For Fenton, the next big question was about the new government turning those recommendations into action. The same surely applies at London level, but a huge issue for the Mayor and, perhaps in particular, for the boroughs when Covid-19 took hold was what they saw as the cavalier, top-down attitude of Johnson’s administration towards consulting them and keeping them informed.
As the government’s effective takeover of Transport for London during the pandemic also showed, its commitment to ending “Whitehall knows best” attitudes appeared to be both partial and partisan. These days, TfL’s top brass is much more cheerful, but still considers itself to be playing catch-up after month upon month of exhausting negotiation of short-term funding deals with Johnson’s Department for Transport and cronies.
Meanwhile, London’s economic metabolism as a whole has been permanently altered by the pandemic and has yet to fully adjust. Working from home was already on the rise, but Covid pushed it rapidly higher. For office workers, while the hybrid week has become a settled fixture, its consequences for productivity and growth are still debated. The pleasures and benefits of attractive public space, so eagerly embraced during lockdowns, are given higher priority than they were by built environment designers, and are embedded in developer calculations about persuading employees to commute and visitors to visit.
Time will tell how effective such adjustments are. The picture seems a little clearer with Londoners’ transport habits. Great hopes were expressed that extra bicycle lanes and low traffic neighbourhoods would see a long-term switch away from car use towards “active travel”, yet TfL data indicate that travel mode shares in 2024 were near identical to those of 2019. Hopes of a transport silver lining to the pandemic may have been misplaced.
The pandemic hurt London badly. Typically, London also bounced back from it strongly. But it emerged a changed place for many and the potential of that change being for the better – for London’s infrastructure, for its poorest people and for its way of life – is not yet fulfilled. There is still time. Is there the will?
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