This article has been adapted from a lecture recently given by Dr Brown as part of the Associateship of King’s College‘s “London Unfolding” series.
XXX
London is my home and it has been so all of my life. Recently, it feels as though it has been under attack. As a patriotic Londoner – not an oxymoron in my view – I can’t help but take some of these attacks a little personally. But there is also a tremendous gap between the London I am seeing described and the city I know. It seems like a good time to revisit “The London Problem”.
When I wrote about it in 2019 for think tank Centre for London and again in book form in 2021, the issue was that despite all of its successes – and there are many – there was a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the capital in parts of the rest of the nation. This was intensifying in national and local discourse alike. There were several reasons for this. Many were entirely understandable, and I will explore them in some more detail below. But many (not all) were based on false assumptions and prejudices. It is worth unpacking those as we go.
However, since the book’s publication, another wave of anti-London sentiment has crashed, largely through our computer screens, causing further chaos and disruption. Anti-Londonism has gone international and taken a darker turn. This makes the “problem” an even more knotty one.
Before we get into all that, let me lay out the current reality of our capital city, and why I am so proud to be a lifelong Londoner.
THE CASE FOR LONDON
London is an incredibly complex, dynamic place with many flaws and challenges, but at its heart it is one of the greatest and most competitive cities in the world. Its history as a centre of trade and commerce goes back to Roman times. Whilst it has been destroyed, reshaped, fallen and risen repeatedly across hundreds of years, it has endured remarkably.
Such was its draw, that even the very real risk of catching the plague or having your house burned down was not enough to deter people from coming to the medieval city. By the 1800s, it became the largest city the world had ever seen. The years following the Second World War saw population decline, but growth returned from the mid-1980s and London began to thrive once more.
By 1992, the sociologist Saskia Sassen identified London as one of the world’s premier “global cities”, in her influential work of the same name. Once an “imperial city”, the heart of the British Empire and a centre of trade in goods, London adapted remarkably to become a centre of a new type of globalised economy.
With this specialisation came a need for – and attractiveness to – a high-skilled and highly-mobile international workforce. Global cities compete for workers, talent and dominance. Their success generates a tremendous amount to their national economies in taxation, which can be spent on their continued improvement as well as redistribution. This does not happen automatically, and there are many challenges too, but it is fair to say that there are very few truly global cities in the world. London is one of them.
Not only is it one of them, but it is arguably the global city.
Loughborough University’s Globalisation and World Cities project identified London as one of just two “Alpha + +” cities in the world, alongside (but ahead of) New York. The project looks at “corporate globalisation”, or flows of what are termed “advanced producer services” between global cities. That is just one, largely economic, measure of city competitiveness, but in a competitive field, London comes top.
The Mori Foundation in Japan produces similar rankings, but across a much wider range of measures. This more multifaceted approach to ranking cities still sees London emerge top. It comes second on economic and research and development measures to New York, but first for cultural interaction and accessibility and ranks significantly higher than NYC on liveability and environment measures. Overall, it is judged the best city in the world.
On that note, Resonance Consultancies/IPSOS’s Best Cities project attempted something similar, with survey data from 21,000 people across 31 countries combined with “hard” data from air quality to labour market participation. Again, London comes top.
All of these indices are subjective. Choices are made about what to include and exclude, and not everything that makes a city great can be measured on a graph. In fact, there is a reasonable argument that most of the things that we value the most – joy, safety, love, fun – cannot be accurately measured. Sometimes they even clash with economic growth or affordability. But these measures reflect a wider truth – that London, whilst not without its flaws, is simply one of the greatest cities in the world, and this is recognised across the globe.
London’s appeal as a tourist destination is also huge, offering yet more evidence that it might actually be quite a successful place. In 2025, London won Tripadvisor’s ‘Traveller’s Choice’ award. High and low skilled people choose to come here to work and live, and highly mobile tourists choose to visit. In an increasingly interconnected and mobile world, London is a magnet.
And not only does London hold a world-class appeal as a place to live, work and stay, but its status as such generates a huge amount for the national economy. In fact, London and its surrounding regions effectively fund the nation. This is not by design, and the nation’s disproportionate reliance on London’s economy is not ideal for capital or country. Everyone would like the UK’s second cities to have stronger economies, and no one wants former industrial towns and seaside communities to decline.
I would strongly argue that London’s success is not the cause of decline elsewhere. Regardless, it is clear that if the UK were to lose its globally-competitive capital city overnight, whether by London seceding from the UK, or being cut out and floated off down the Thames towards Europe, the UK would be a poorer place. In fact, it would soon be bankrupt. As things stand, taxes raised in London and its surrounding regions fund public services across the country. The opposite is not true.
So, London is a world-leading economic miracle with a global pull that is also contributing an oversized amount to the UK’s national economy. It is also getting safer. Fraser Nelson of The Times has done sterling work pulling together the best possible available crime statistics, alongside hospital statistics, to see where London’s knife crime and murder rate are currently at. We’ll talk more about his reasons for doing this in a minute, but the headline here is “rates are going down”. London’s murder rate is better than that of most of its global comparators, and things are only improving. Of course, one murder is too many. But we are looking here at whether knife crime and murder rates are getting better or worse here – and the answer is, objectively and fairly, unequivocably better.
Clap your hands and celebrate, right? Apparently not.
THE RECENT CASE AGAINST LONDON
London’s success seems to lead to an almost inversely-proportionate intensity of hatred. I have decided not to single out any particular British London haters. There certainly are some particularly bad offenders across our politics, but it would also be fair to say that both left and right wing strains of anti-Londonism exist, even if they differ in form, frequency and ferocity.
I have instead decided to highlight just a few of the complaints of one of the most powerful men in the world, as they summarise some of the key arguments. Donald Trump is perhaps the most social media-savvy US President to date. He has made a series of claims about the capital which overlap quite strongly with some of the key anti-London themes we see across social media, with an added dimension of personal vitriol against London’s three-time elected Mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan.
The core claims, made between 2018 and 2025, are about violent crime – which is apparently out of control in the capital – the implementation of Sharia Law, and the existence of “no-go” areas, into which the Metropolitan Police are afraid to step. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but none of these things are true.
Yet as my King’s colleague Dr Mark Hill has observed, the number of social media posts portraying London as dangerous has risen significantly – and at a time when most measures of violent crime are on the decline. London has real problems with phone-snatching and shoplifting and briefly had one with the robbery of luxury watches (although this was clamped down on with some success). It is remarkable that knife crime and murder are declining in London, yet a narrative that violent crime is doing the opposite is growing in strength.
There are unusual and particular reasons for this current wave of anti-London sentiment. Trump has a personal animosity towards our Mayor, for reasons only he truly knows. Elsewhere, social media companies and algorithms are creating a false sense of reality for their users by repeatedly and relentlessly funnelling extreme content towards them.
Bots and other nefarious actors, including nations and groups that wish us harm, are actively stoking this trend even further, attempting to harm London’s reputation and undermine both capital and country. And when some crime is indeed up, people are willing to believe that serious violence is too – or that places they have never visited are indeed “no-go” areas.
Readers of Jim Waterson’s London Centric recently reported encountering examples of this kind of anti-Londonism from people living as far afield as Australia, Los Angeles, Dubai and even the remote Suriname Amazon. Concerns tended to echo those mentioned by Trump above. None of this sentiment was based on personal experience, or even mainstream news, but rather social media impressions. This new age of global anti-Londonism is particularly pernicious, and difficult to counter. But in one sense, hating on London is nothing new.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF ANTI-LONDONISM
The long history of anti-Londonism in this country predates social media, the internet and even the printing press. To attempt to distinguish between its novel and perennial elements, we must take a whistle-stop tour through this history of what a previous Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, called “London-o-phobia”.
Roman Londinium was founded somewhere around 54AD, and I’m sure there was plenty of anti-Londonism around at the time – Queen Boudica springs to mind. But we don’t have all day, so let’s start in 1593, when Queen Elizabeth I passed an Act of Parliament, attempting to constrain London’s growth by imposing an early form of Green Belt around it.
In the early 1600s, James I proclaimed, with some sadness, that “Soon, London will be all England”. London was growing, as ever more people were drawn to it, despite the enhanced risk of death and disease that living in the city then brought. These dangers did not deter those seeking the benefits of life in close proximity to increasingly large numbers of people with different skills and ideas. Despite its drawbacks, they kept coming, seeking not only the cold, hard economic opportunities created by what economists call agglomeration benefits, but fun, fame and fortune, friendship, frolicking and fornication.
But London’s popularity was also driving increasing concern that its expansion would eat up the countryside, dominate national life and corrupt England’s green and pleasant land with something much more sinister – the city. It was in the 1820s, during the century in which London’s population boomed, that the radical pamphleteer William Cobbett described London as “the Great Wen”. A Wen, for those not familiar with this outdated terminology, was a sebaceous cyst, in this case, a puss-filled urban growth on the face of an otherwise beautiful country. Cobbett’s primary concern was for the preservation of the countryside, but his anti-London successors added other elements.
By the 20th Century, London’s growth was considered a problem for numerous reasons. Industry was deemed too concentrated in large towns and cities in the South and the Midlands, leading to congestion and pollution as well as draining opportunity and talent from the rest of the country. The capital was too powerful a magnet, attracting talented people and resources away from the regions, not only causing the capital to overheat but also leaving the rest of the nation to decline.
This idea, which survives in more contemporary political discourse, directly connects London’s success to decline elsewhere – in my view, a misunderstanding. Regional economic growth and opportunity is not a zero sum game – there is not a finite amount that must be shared around. In recent years, Manchester’s growth rate has outstripped that seen in the capital, yet London has survived.
And London competes on the world, not the domestic, stage. The business links and people it seeks are simply different from those sought elsewhere in the country. But given that London dwarfs England’s second cities by an order of magnitude, in terms of its population size, its economy and its continuous built-up area, you can understand why some may assume that its growth or success are directly linked to the relative underperformance of other parts of the UK.
Wartime added another element, in that concentrated areas of population and industry became targets for bombing – a weak point in Britain’s ability to defend itself. A growing Garden City movement, which looked upon dirty, overcrowded and increasingly polluted cities and envisaged leafy new planned settlements elsewhere as the solution, also gained traction.
The postwar years saw government build New Towns outside of London, actively encouraging Londoners to move out. It used a series of carrots and sticks to incentivise business to locate itself away from the capital. After more than a century of growth, London’s population declined, as did the economic gap between the capital and other UK regions. But this gap was closed primarily by “levelling down” London, rather than by “levelling up” any other region.
Under Margaret Thatcher’s government, this actively anti-London regional policy was (largely) abandoned. Population growth returned to the capital from around 1986 – I played my own small role in this by being born at the Whittington Hospital in Islington in that year – and growth in London and the South East returned once more. The gap between London’s economy and the UK average continued to grow, with all the good and bad that it entails.
London’s success seemed unstoppable. Remarkably, when plotted on a graph, the Global Financial Crash of 2008/9 caused little more than a short blip in this pattern, before the gap began to open up once more. But the crash arrived on UK shores via a globalised financial services industry which in the UK is overwhelmingly concentrated in the capital, and particularly in the City of London.
Ensuring that the wider economy did not collapse involved some pro-banking (and pro-banker) policies, which generated understandable resentment. Arriving in close proximity to the scandal over MPs’ expenses, one of several moments that has seen an anti-politician sentiment grow in the UK, London’s status as home of the highest concentration of bankers and national politicians surely damaged its reputation somewhat. Bad feeling was growing.
Another point is important here. Whilst it is true that London now contributes significantly more than it takes out of the national purse – and is highly unusual and almost alone in doing so – both figures are high. London’s economic miracle has been supported by investment in its infrastructure. Public services are also more expensive to deliver in the capital for several reasons, and this accounts for some of London’s high spending figures. But it is extremely reasonable to gaze on London’s international-level public transport network, for example, and to say – well, why doesn’t Leeds even have a tram yet? Why should London get everything, when it already has so much?
Finally, there is a perception gap. At Centre for London, we did some polling, asking people living elsewhere in Great Britain how much they thought London contributed to the national economy. Over three quarters said it contributed “a lot” or “a fair amount”. However, when we asked how much they felt it contributed to the place in which they lived, this figure dropped to 16 per cent.
It would be easy – and arguably accurate – to say that this is contradictory, another example of people simply not understanding the very complex way in which the national economy works. But again, it is a very understandable response. If your local area feels run down or in decline – and this is of course true of some places and not others, but bear with me – the contribution of parts of London’s economy to funding local public services feels like an abstract thing.
So there is a history of some resentment, some bad associations, a growing economic gap, and a perception gap. And the gap has become so notable that post-Thatcher governments – including even the recent Conservative governments, from 2010-24 – began to talk about using policy to close it.
David Cameron and George Osborne talked about “rebalancing” and focused on the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands Engine. Theresa May’s government developed an Industrial Strategy. Boris Johnson made “levelling up” the nation’s regions a central plank of his platform. The manifesto of the current Labour government committed to “building a stronger economy in all parts of the country”, pledged to address health inequalities between regions and proposed transport improvement for the North of England. In British politics, this amounts to a broad, relatively enduring and bipartisan consensus – there is a “problem” to be remedied here, if not an agreed solution.
BEING ‘DIFFERENT’
But in amongst this swirl of rapidly changing policies and plans, we had a referendum. We can debate endlessly whether the EU referendum of 2016 and its results were a cause or an effect of regional discontent, or about something else entirely, but there was a clear spatial aspect to whether places voted to Leave or Remain. Broadly speaking, with a couple of notable exceptions, it was the big cities, along with Scotland, parts of Northern Ireland and Gibraltar, that supported Remain and were on the losing side.
London, having the largest concentration of Remain voters due its sheer scale as well as its demographics, stood out in some eyes as symbolic of an out-of-touch elite with views that clashed with those in the rest of the country. In fact, there were more Leave voters in London than in the entire North East, and even the most Remain-voting constituencies in London still saw one in five voters go for Leave. Even so, the outcome fuelled an existing sense that London was not only different but also alien.
In 1777, Dr Samuel Johnson provided a quotation as wonderful as it is over-used: “Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” A mere 242 years later, prime ministerial adviser Dominic Cummings told reporters to “get out of London” to talk to some people who “are not rich Remainers”.
Johnson’s quote shows us London being celebrated as the most incredible compendium of all the glories, achievements and delights of human existence, a place to find all the greatest ideas, experiences, goods and people in the world, expand your mind and delight your soul with all that life has to offer. And the diversity of London’s offering has increased immeasurably since the 18th Century.
Cummings’s remarks touched on a different view. I am sure it has existed for as long as Johnson’s, but I would argue that it has increased in prominence in recent decades. Here, London is seen as out of touch, full of people who don’t understand the “real” world and concerns of ordinary citizens, dominated by liberal elites and oligarchs but no “real people” – presumably the sort who voted to Leave the EU. The capital’s diversity and complexity are seen as a hinderance rather than an asset. Its intellectual and material riches are seen as keeping its elites from reality. Get out of London, the argument goes, it is an echo chamber, disconnected and distorted.
This attitude speaks to a reality. London voted to Remain overall, so it does have a lot of Remain voters, and most of the UK’s millionaires and billionaires live here. Parts of its economy are extremely successful. And power resides here: London is home to national politics, the monarchy, the largest concentration of bankers, much of our national media, and a great deal of our national cultural life.
But 1.5 million Londoners voted to Leave the EU (a larger number than the national winning margin for Leave). And whilst some parts of the capital are particularly affluent, there is also huge poverty here. In fact, London’s out-of-control housing costs mean that poverty rates in the capital are higher than any other English region. Inequality is higher in the capital than elsewhere. This is, in part, due to the distorting effects of the most successful parts of the capital’s economy, but far from exclusively so.
So London is not a place dominated exclusively (or even in majority) by “rich Remainers”. Exposure to too many “liberal elite” dinner parties can create a distorted view of our nation’s capital, leaving an individual with the impression that everyone in London thinks the same, just as watching too many videos of street crime online can make you think that it is happening everywhere, all the time. Invitation or disinvitation to elite dinner parties has a lot to answer for in turning otherwise reasonable people into rabid anti-Londonites, in my view.
One other thing has changed significantly over the years between the observations of Johnson and Cummings. It is often said that London has always been a diverse and multicultural city. This is not inaccurate, but neither is it entirely true. As a port city founded on trade, London has long been more diverse than the nation at large. French Hugenots arrived, fleeing religious persecution and settling in Spitalfields and Soho between the 16th and the 18th Century. Eastern European and Russian Jews arrived in the 19th Century, settling in the East End. These are particularly prominent examples and moments, but London continually had people arriving from elsewhere in the country and elsewhere in the world, and settling for the long or short term.
However, the numbers were relatively tiny until fairly recently. It wasn’t until the decades following the Second World War that London began to become truly diverse in its population, in terms of national origin and birthplace, and, connectedly, ethnicity and religion. In 1901, less than five percent of Inner London residents were born overseas. In 1951, this figure was still under 10 percent. By 2011, it was around 40 percent. Londoners born in Ireland were not initially counted as born “overseas” which makes a difference to the figures, but not enough to fundamentally change this remarkable fact. The most recent census found 40.6 percent of all Londoners (not just those in “Inner London”) were born overseas. And, of course, many of those Londoners born in the capital in recent years are the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of migrants.
So the scale of demographic change is tremendous. I should say that I have focused on the percentage born overseas rather than ethnicity, religion or any other demographic measure for two reasons: firstly, ethnicity measures and categories have not always been a feature of the Census, and definitions and methodologies have changed over time. More importantly, I think a focus on the percentage of Londoners reporting themselves “White British” or otherwise is at best irrelevant – polling evidence shows that the vast majority of Brits believe that people of any ethnicity can be British, so why would it matter? – and in some cases is used for sinister reasons. In other words, I am not an ethno-nationalist, and I am quite content with that, thank you.
But none of this is to deny the pace of change here. It is remarkable and notable. What is clearly true is that London’s diversity has exploded over the course of just one long lifetime. A 75-year-old Londoner who was born in the city will have known a population that looked and surely sounded very different from today’s.
How exactly this weaves into anti-Londonism can be a difficult area to analyse. Discerning whether discomfort with, or hostility to, a diverse population is the primary motivation for someone expressing their distaste at our nation’s capital often involves attempting to see inside someone’s heart (although not always, as increasing numbers seem comfortable saying that this exactly why they don’t like London, and doing so explicitly and loudly). To say that London’s rapidly-changing demographics have played no part in a wider sense that London is “different” from the rest of the country, even amongst those who do not cite this as a primary reason, seems far-fetched.
It is important to acknowledge that Londoners tend to agree that people from different backgrounds get on well together in the capital. Polling from the Policy Institute at King’s Colleg in 2019 showed how much more at ease with immigration and community cohesion Londoners are than Parisians. But that doesn’t go for all Londoners and certainly not all Brits.
SO WHAT?
So this is the “London Problem”. It has long been seen as too big, too busy, too dirty, too dominant, too disconnected. And in recent decades, too expensive, too different and too diverse. In recent years, it has been portrayed by some as lawless, and by others as the epicentre of the downfall of Western Civilisation.
My take is a little different. London is not without its problems. I do not deny its rapid demographic change or the real challenges that this brings. Community cohesion is imperfect and requires constant work. Events overseas can explode into tensions at home. One community’s attitudes or expectations can and do clash with another. Offence can be, and often is, taken. Just by way of example, Londoners are more socially conservative, on average, than their counterparts in the rest of the country, but London is also the LGBTQ capital of the UK. Balancing true diversity so that all are free and able to live to their full potential in relative harmony is not automatic and it is not easy.
London’s economy is also flawed. The proceeds of its most successful parts are not shared equally, and our disproportionate over-reliance on certain industries is a clear risk for the national economy too. Housing costs are a key driver of London’s poverty, and the quality of housing at the bottom end is a huge issue in and of itself. London’s success and appeal as a place to live, coupled with a failure to build and increase the supply of homes at anywhere near the level needed to meet demand, has made the capital an increasingly unaffordable place to live. And, like any big city, London is crowded and can be dirty and congested. Huge progress in recent years on air quality has not eradicated the problem entirely. Crime continues to exist.
London’s affordability and, to some extent, its liveability, would be eased by sharing some of the burden with the UK’s other big cities. It is in no one’s interest that the gap continues to grow between London and the rest. “London-centrism” in policymaking definitely exists, and London’s past success can become self-reinforcing when it comes to making decisions about future investment.
Successive attempts to “rebalance” the national economy have failed, except by harming the capital. But the economic gap is not a simple result of deliberate favouritism. London’s success has been its capacity to adapt and thrive as a “world city”, and no other UK city, town or region is quite the same. There is no finite pot of growth, and other parts of the country can and should be assisted and celebrated. The relative underperformance of the UK’s “second cities” is an issue, even if it is not a direct consequence of London’s success.
However, we need to acknowledge that these difficulties do not add up to a case against the capital. Alongside a tendency towards nostalgia for a largely imagined immaculate past, we Brits seem to be developing what I feel is an inherently un-British intolerance for the hard graft of making things gradually better, working through problems, improving and tolerating, compromising and listening. Instead, we are acquiring a taste for calling for smashing it all up and starting again, under the banner of”‘what have you got to lose”. In my view, there is a tremendous amount to lose.
London’s economy, though flawed, is the engine that drives our national economy. Without it, we would be poorer, not richer. Public services across our nation are kept afloat by taxes raised in the capital. Crossrail was not just a good project, but also a means for facilitating the economic miracle that is our capital by increasing the size of the area from which its centre can be easily reached.
That city centre is one of the most productive places in the world. Most nations would kill to have a global city. Ours has arguably the most successful such city in the world, and it more than pays its way. Furthermore, there is some evidence that the UK’s other big cities are catching up to it, challenging the idea that the capital’s success is a drain on their resources or prevents them from growing too.
London was not quite “built” by migrants in the way that New York City was. But migrants, both national and domestic, have strengthened and improved it immeasurably. This is not just about food and music and sport and other things that make life worth living, but about cold hard economics. Innovation thrives on diversity of ideas and talents. Like many of our people, many of our businesses were born overseas. London is a sort of liberal free market experiment, and its dynamic blending of different people and skills and experiences and ways of thinking is the fuel that fires its pistons.
And, by the way, London does this exceptionally well. The last Census found that over three-quarters of a million households in London included individuals from multiple ethnic groups. That is nearly a third of all households with more than person living in them. More than one in 20 Londoners is of mixed ethnicity, and both the numbers and percentage of Londoners in that category increased between the 2011 and 2021 Censuses. If you don’t trust opinion poll findings about whether or not people from different backgrounds get on, consider the increasing numbers of them living and having babies together. I think that is fairly concrete evidence that they are getting on ok, thank you very much.
People come to London to meet others, not just to hide in the anonymity of a big city. It can be a lonely place, but so many people are here because they actually like and want to meet and interact with other people. That includes falling in love and pursuing other, less long-term, endeavours. You’ll have to forgive me here, but I do think love is another thing that makes life worth living. How sad to oppose it in any of its forms.
I considered ending on questions about what comes next – the impact of AI, global and national politics, climate change. Or even what might be done to help fix the so-called “London problem”. But these are issues for another day. For once, I would like to take the opportunity avoid trying to solve all of the world’s problems in this lecture.
My parting message will instead be a simple love letter in praise of London, this incredible, flawed, horrible, messy, dirty, beautiful city – the city in which I have lived my whole life, and in which you are all studying and working and living, whether you are here for a long time or for a good time.
London has its haters. But what do they know? You are here now, in the greatest city in the history of the world. What a time and a place to be alive. What a shame it would be to waste time hating one of the most remarkable achievements of civilisation – especially when so many of the accusations thrown at it are false.
Listen to Jack Brown’s lecture as he delivered it here.
OnLondon.co.uk is funded by sales of publisher and editor Dave Hill’s twice-weekly newsletter On London Extra. To start receiving it, become a paying subscriber to Dave’s personal Substack. Thanks.