Professor Greg Clark is one of the most distinguished advisors and commentators on cities there is, a man who travels the world helping urban leaders do their jobs better. Speaking with me and London Society chair Leanne Tritton for our latest Talk About London podcast, he revealed that he has visited 400 cities around the globe. In each case, his hosts are excited to discover where he is from.
“They want to talk about London,” he said. “It is a city that almost everyone has an opinion on.” He also described London as being possibly the best-known city in the world, and one that has “some very long-term advantages that people are aware of. It’s been a leading city in the world for almost 500 years.”
He added that foreign observers are extremely interested in how the UK capital recovered its fading fortunes in the second half of the 20th Century and the past 50 years. London has “surprised people,” he said, with its “global leading role” in finance, culture and the creative industries and sports, and with its growing population and cosmopolitanism. “The global view of London is different to the UK view of London,” he said.
The professor went on to describe the buffeting London has taken from three big shocks in a row – the global financial crisis, Brexit and the pandemic – and their consequences. And he noted, I thought very significantly, that international media has taken note that “London has not enjoyed unanimous support from the UK government over the last 15 years…people scratch their heads when they see that and say ‘why is the UK government not supporting its capital city?'”
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I was very struck by Greg’s mentioning the recognition elsewhere that UK national governments have seemed to take against London and the puzzlement this causes – surely, it is reasoned, such an impressive and important national asset should be prized rather than derided.
Greg’s observations, I thought, chimed with points made by Kim Darroch, former UK ambassador to the United States and former UK Permanent Representative to the European Union, when he spoke at the annual dinner of the Westminster Property Association. He described London as being “generally admired, even envied around the world, and it is a huge national asset”. Later, he said that London being “a true global capital” was one of Britain’s strengths.
Responding to a question from the audience, he said he’d “never really heard a bad word about London from any of my diplomatic colleagues”. But he added that an exception to the capital’s favourable image abroad was an impression being put around on “the MAGA wing” of US politics about it somehow being a “global centre of knife crime” or being taken over by Sharia law. Such claims, he said, were endlessly replayed on social media and by certain commentators in the States. “This,” he said, “is ridiculous”.
As ridiculous, I suggest, as the same behaviour by the UK equivalent of that “MAGA wing”.
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