The capital entered 2025 with a familiar set of strengths and weaknesses. The average Londoner was earning in eight months what his or her equivalent in Burnley earned in 12, thanks largely to the city’s “high knowledge” business sector accounting for around a quarter of all its jobs.
Yet London’s poverty rate was running at 24 per cent, representing about 2.2 million people. About one third of London children were growing up in poverty, with that percentage varying from about 12 per cent in Richmond to nearly 50 per cent in Tower Hamlets. An estimated 210,000 Londoners were homeless and living in increasingly expensive temporary accommodation, getting on for half of them children.
Here’s how 2025 unfolded against that backdrop, featuring lots of coverage by On London writers.
JANUARY
News that Sadiq Khan had received a knighthood prompted shadow home secretary Chris Philp to dismiss the honour as a “reward for failure”. It was an audacious response from the London Conservative whose party had, just a few months earlier, lost to Labour’s Khan in a mayoral election for the third time in a row and been slaughtered in a general election.
It also demonstrated two things about the Conservatives: one, they had learned nothing from their successive rejections by the electorate, including the virtue of humility; two, that they, along with the populist Right more widely, regarded Khan as the personification of everything they most disliked, not least London itself.
Crime continued to be the City Hall Tories’ chosen political battleground, with truth and reason its chief casualties. Better news was the Met’s release from the “enhanced monitoring” by His Majesty’s inspectors it had been under since June 2022.
Housing looked sure to remain a huge and complex problem, with massive waiting lists for social rented homes, housing associations struggling to build, and the Labour Mayor adjusting to the Labour government’s approach to Green Belt building. For On London, Lewis Baston drew an outline map of the capital’s shifting political loyalties.
FEBRUARY
At Imperial College, the London Growth Plan was launched, with the Mayor, his deputy for business, leading figures from London Councils, a junior government minister and On London‘s Charles Wright all in attendance. In line with the government’s top priority, it was a blueprint for restoring the capital’s productivity growth to the upward path it had been on until until the financial crash of 2008. Housing, transport infrastructure and skills training – an “inclusive talent strategy” – were prominently featured.
In London politics, Labour held four of the five seats it defended in six borough by-elections, but lost support along with one seat to the Conservatives (in Westminster). Bizarrely, though, two City Hall Tories attacked Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer for his criticisms of Reform UK, the biggest threat to the Tories nationally. One of them, the juvenile Alessandro Georgiou, called Starmer “a Commie in a tie”. It was all very Trumpy.
Police statistics showed the London region to have one of the lower rates of violent crime, although shoplifting and theft from the person had risen since the pandemic. Also, the public consultation on the Mayor’s plans for the “transformation” of Oxford Street opened.
MARCH
Transport for London produced a compendious one-year report on the effects of the Ultra-Low Emission Zone being expanded to cover all of Greater London. It concluded that it had been a good thing, a view not shared by ex-pat self-publicist and Pimlico Plumbers founder, Charlie Mullins, who narrowly avoided being stripped of his OBE for saying on X/Twitter in 2022 that “someone should kill” the Mayor because of the anti-pollution scheme.
Trump Tory Susan Hall thought Mullins a victim of free-speech double standards. Her social media activity also included publicly backing MP Rupert Lowe in his row with Nigel Farage, which saw Lowe suspended from Reform UK, and egging on other far-Right figures. She also applauded Philp for making the false and inflammatory claim that almost half of London’s social housing is “occupied by people who are foreign”. I dismantled his ignorant allegation.
In a further example of adjusting to the Labour government’s policy approach, Mayor Khan attended the annual MIPIM property trade event in Cannes for the first time, hoping to attract more overseas investment. The context was a decidedly sluggish housing market, not helped by the slow workings of the new Building Safety Regulator, as New London Architecture’s annual tall buildings survey noted.
TfL pledged to tackle ongoing concerns about the deterioration of the bus service, with passenger numbers tumbling and average speeds in central London falling to around seven miles per hour. In happier news, the London Eye reached the age of 25 and On London joined forces with The London Society to launch a new podcast series called Talk About London.
APRIL
Following years of preparations and protests, the Silvertown Tunnel, the first new Thames road crossing east of Tower Bridge for more than 30 years, opened to traffic. The other big transport news was that book swaps at some London Underground stations were given leave to return.
Relations between London’s boroughs and City Hall, which can be scratchy at times, had been tested somewhat by a proposal from London Councils to change the capital’s 25-year-old devolution settlement to give boroughs a degree of power over mayoral decisions. Richard Brown, who was there at the Greater London Authority’s birth, took a measured view. I interviewed London Councils chair (and Lambeth leader) Claire Holland about that an other matters soon after.
In other news, Labour took by-election beatings from two directions, the London Society released a London Explained podcast about Brick Lane (researched, written and presented by me) and Julie Hamill spotted Bill Nighy on West End Lane (as you do).
MAY
A year of 25th anniversaries continued with that of the very first election for Mayor of London, which took place on 4 May 2000. Attempts to address London’s ongoing housing emergency continued too. In Greenwich, announcing the opening of the consultation on the next London Plan, Sir Sadiq Khan said he intended to “actively explore” facilitating building on Green Belt land within Greater London – a sharp change from his previous, long-held position of being resolutely opposed to this.
There was a lot more behind that headline change including, as Charles Wright wrote for On London, a “review” of the policy of giving “fast-track” mayoral approval for development schemes offering a minimum of 35 per cent “affordable” housing. There had long been calls for it to be reduced. In the days that followed, the G15 group of London housing associations reported a 66 per cent drop in the number of homes it was building – down from 13,744 starts in 2022/23 to just 4,708 in 2024/25 – and the government reduced the Mayor’s affordable delivery target for 2026 to make it more hittable.
I completed a long piece about Hackney’s Woodberry Down estate, where a huge regeneration programme had become stalled and the object of some questionable protest narratives. Think tank Centre for London’s housing summit highlighted the problem of short-term lets in central areas.
TfL reported a sharp increase in London road deaths and injuries (which isn’t what the Mayor had in mind), the long-awaited report of his London Drugs Commission recommended the decriminalisation of the possession of small amounts of natural cannabis for personal use, and Richard Brown warned that government plans for curbing immigration could hit the capital’s care homes hard and weaken its higher education sector, with ill-effects for the whole country.
The degeneration of the Conservatives continued. Their shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick – aka “Westferry Bob” – produced a stunt video of himself challenging fare dodgers at Stratford and claiming that a “once proud” capital was going to the dogs. In reality, fare evasion was falling, Boris Johnson had had to deal with increases in it when he was Mayor, and the issue has been with us for decades.
At the end of a largely dispiriting month, it was pleasant to report the opening of the V&A Storehouse on the Olympic Park.
JUNE
An unpopular Labour government’s spending review was the big political theme. In her House of Commons speech, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made a point of snubbing London by endorsing the questionable view – questioned, indeed, even by her own assessors – that the capital enjoys preferential treatment from the Treasury and announcing funding for a bunch of transport schemes elsewhere in the country. It was the latest example of Labour policy being shaped by Fear of Farage and a capitulation to destructive “north-south divide” populism.
There was, though, a sign of hope that support for extending the Docklands Light Railway south of the Thames and into Thamesmead would eventually be forthcoming, a scheme with the potential to make possible the building of up to 30,000 new homes north and south of the river. It was clearer than ever that the capital needed all the housing help it could get. Deputy Mayor for Planning, Jules Pipe, told the London Assembly shortly before the spending review that without “enormous” public subsidy the gigantic housing targets set for London would be a mere “intellectual exercise”. Meanwhile, Trust for London calculated that London had returned to the top of the regional poverty league.
At On London, Richard Brown explored the complicated story behind London’s embrace of Pride, and Julie Hamill mourned the passing of a fellow migrant from Airdrie. The City of London confirmed its intention to redevelop the current sites of Billingsgate and Smithfield markets as part of wider regeneration programme.
JULY
It was TfL’s 25th birthday on the third of the month. Less happily, on the seventh it was the 20th anniversary of the London Bombings. Earlier, on 2 July, the government announced that London had been allocated around 30 per cent of its 10-year social and affordable housing – £11.7 billion in all – with 60 per cent of the homes to be for social rent. This was good news, though getting the homes actually built would not be straightforward.
Populist Right attacks on London continued, with Nigel Farage exploiting the killing of a young man on a street in Knightsbridge to falsely claim that “London is in a state of collapse” and crime “out of control”. In fact, Met crime statistics had been showing falls in some of the more serious street crimes compared with the previous year. City Hall Trump Tory Susan Hall provided her usual tribute act. For On London, Tim Bale set out how dire the Conservatives’ situation in London had become. In Bromley, Reform UK won a London council seat for the first time.
TfL released performance data for the first three months of the Silvertown Tunnel, saying that congestion in the area was down and bus use, up. The government’s English devolution bill included plans to restore to Londoners their right to cast a second preference vote in mayoral elections after the Tories took it away.
AUGUST
Farage’s monstering of London continued when he informed a female Sky News reporter that she wouldn’t dare walk through the West End after 9pm wearing jewellery. “You know I’m right,” he told her. The reporter, Mhari Aurora, begged to differ. That was unlikely to deter the stampede of opportunists seeking to profit from the London-is-a-hellhole social media market.
Journalist descended on the Britannia Hotel in Canary Wharf, where asylum seekers were being temporarily housed and a small group of people protesting against their presence made a lot of noise. There was a far-Right social media frenzy about a hotel resident allegedly entering a local person’s flat. There wasn’t one about that person’s daughter being charged with assaulting a hotel security guard and more. She later admitted affray and still faces other charges.
In politics, Labour suffered a heavy by-election defeat by the Liberal Democrats in Camden, demonstrating that the party of national government faces challenges from an assortment of directions. Lewis Baston reported. TfL launched a poster campaign to dissuade people from playing music and video out loud while on public transport (and not before time). Julie Hamill told the heartening London tale of a flyaway parrot called George.
SEPTEMBER
Some have termed a “scoop” – a newspaper term, I gather – my reporting that the Crews Hill area of Enfield and the part of Thamesmead in need of a DLR station were lined up to be recommended locations for New Towns in London. Pleasingly, it turned out to be true. It also added to the already rather febrile backdrop to a London Society debate about housing in the borough which I, a London Society trustee, was pleased to chair.
The promise of further movement on housing policy was detected in remarks made by Jules Pipe at a conference of planning professionals. “Immediate measures” were being worked on with the government, he said, in order to kick-start the practically non-existent supply of new housing of every kind. The Mayor, he said, would be “increasingly active” in his interventions if boroughs dragged their feet.
With most London boroughs looking set to lose out from the government’s Fair Funding Review, number crunchers at London Councils and elsewhere were doing their level best to figure out exactly why the new formula for allocating grant was so unfavourable to so much of the capital. In one of my True London podcasts – a series launched out of frustration with the avalanche of untruths being told about the city – Tony Travers enhanced my understanding of the issue.
City Hall announced that in 2024 London had met government-set legal limits for nitrogen dioxide air pollution for the first time and well ahead of schedule. For On London, Richard Derecki warned that the advent of Artificial Intelligence is having a bad effect on youth unemployment. A far-Right march in central London led by so-called Tommy Robinson attracted up to 150,000 people (Robinson claimed there were three million). I wrote some lines I thought Sir Keir Starmer ought to use in his upcoming Labour conference speech. Oddly enough, he didn’t.
OCTOBER
A BBC Panorama undercover report revealed some Met officers at Charing Cross police station to be complete turds, unfit to wear the uniform and either unaware of Sir Mark Rowley’s attempts to clean up and professionalise the service or utterly uninterested in them. It showed that, despite the end of “enhanced monitoring” by inspectors in January, there remained lots of work to do.
The emergency measures for getting homebuilding going were announced, prompting a lot of pretty low rent media commentary and a more measured, largely welcoming, response from the planning and development sector. The hope was that the planned changes would enable more planning consents to be turned into actual homes, including more of the “affordable” variety than would be the case if nothing changed. I put together an explainer.
Conservative AM Keith Prince defected to Reform UK. New figures showed London visitor numbers to have risen above pre-pandemic levels, driven largely by people coming to the city from other parts of the UK.
What else? I completed two arduous but rewarding in-depth pieces: one documenting why the City of London and the traders of Smithfield and Billingsgate markets were to part company after hundreds of years, the other unpicking a misleading claim by Tory MP Katie Lam about English language proficiency in London schools.
Also, joy of joys, my friend Denean Rowe and I fulfilled our long-held ambition to put on a special screening of My Beautiful Laundrette, complete with guided walk.
NOVEMBER
Rachel Reeves’s budget brought warm encouragement or cold comfort for the capital, depending on how full or empty your individual glass was. The so-called mansion tax was a clunky half-measure to help Treasury finances rather than those of London’s boroughs, but the devolved “tourist tax” ought to help at local levels. Child poverty campaigners welcomed the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap, but said more action was required. Backing for the DLR extension was (quietly) bestowed at last and welcomed across the board, though the funding details were still to be confirmed.
Earlier in the month, the government’s new Index of Deprivation included, as its predecessor hadn’t, the effects of housing costs. This meant twice as many Londoners, 2.2 million, were assessed as facing income deprivation. Indices also underlined that depictions of London as being uniquely and irredeemably awash with crime are rubbish. Richard Brown went through the data.
Also in November, we learned that the Mayor was still aiming for his ambitious target of achieving “net zero by 2030” – his deputy for business, Howard Dawber, told the Centre for London conference that a positive “tipping point” was being reached. Retailer Scott Parsons was proposed as Oxford Street Development Corporation Board chair. I interviewed Teresa O’Neill, the outgoing leader of Bexley Council who had been in her job for an impressive 17 years. I exposed a huge false claim by Reform UK’s policy chief about foreigners and London social housing. And I finally completed a long piece about how Jewish Londoners were feeling two years after the start of the Gaza-Israel war.
DECEMBER
Naturally, White House gangster Donald Trump made his contribution to the mountain of lies told in 2025 about London and its Mayor, culminating in this month’s string of insults during an interview with Politico. What this showed is that Trump is losing his grip, both mentally and on popularity with US voters.
Not to be outdone, Trump’s chief UK sycophant, Farage, told viewers of GB News that Khan “is happy to celebrate every other religious festival around the world, but just not Christmas”. His remarks came not long after the Mayor had presided over the traditional lighting of the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree and a few days before Khan once again led his Christmas Carol Service at Southwark Cathedral. Go figure, as they say in the USA.
TfL’s end-of-year Travel in London report confirmed the bad news about bus speeds. And although TfL bosses struck a positive financial note when appearing before the London Assembly, Commissioner Andy Lord acknowledged an urgent need to increase ridership. Other significant Travel in London stats showed there has been no progress towards the Mayor’s 80 per cent sustainable mode trips target since before the pandemic, with cycling levels also little changed.
In the run-up to Christmas, West End footfall, in contrast to that in the rest of the country, rose. While that was happening, I was pleased to at last complete two long pieces I had been writing on and off since the late summer: one was about the history and the heroic shopkeepers of Hayes in Hillingdon; the other was about older Londoners in Camden and the city more generally.
I came out from behind my desk to enjoy the On London Christmas Party. And on Christmas Day, I made my traditional visit to my local corner shop. In many ways, its been a year of little progress. But there’s always been something to remind you why people call London the greatest city in the world.
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