London Calling Newsweek
Transcript of London Calling Newsweek
7/30/2019 London Calling Newsweek
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/london-calling-newsweek 1/6
Special Report: London Calling
April 24, 2005 8:00 PM EDT
For a glimpse into how successful cities evolve, take in the view from the
riverside office of London's mayor. High above the Thames, Ken
Livingstone enjoys a panorama spanning 2,000 years of crowded history.
All around, the survivors of catastrophic fires, wartime bombing and the
wrecker's ball jostle for space with monuments to London's new
prosperity. Just across the river, the medieval Tower of London recalls the
city's past as a seat of power. To the east, the former Docklands, now
home to some of Europe's grandest companies, conjures up its present as agateway to the world. And a thicket of towers, soaring above the skyline,
testifies to the status of Europe's largest and most vibrant center of world
finance.
And London's work isn't done. At 7.3 million, its population is just short of
the combined total for Rome, Paris, Vienna and Brussels. During the last
15 years it has added as many citizens as the entire city of Frankfurt.
Indeed, this is the only major European capital that's actually growing, afavored destination for work-hungry migrants from around the globe. By
2016, according to forecasts, London will gain 810,000 more people.
All that makes the city a developer's Klondike. A score of new
megaprojects are on the drawing board. Among them: a landmark 300-
meter glass pyramid, billed as the tallest building in Europe, at the foot of
London Bridge; a 10 billion pound rail link across the heart of the city, and
the wholesale redevelopment of derelict tracts of East London to make
7/30/2019 London Calling Newsweek
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/london-calling-newsweek 2/6
space for the new Londoners. Remember the Millennium Dome, Britain's
big gesture to the new age? A new settlement of 10,000 homes is rising in
its shadow. By midcentury, tens of thousands could be living in the
Thames Gateway, a string of new communities that will rim the river for 65 kilometers downstream to the sea. "Some cities capture an era--Paris in
the 19th century, or New York in the 1950s and '60s," says Livingstone.
Now it's London's moment--not some cool Britannia fad, fed by a few hot
bands or hip designers, but a wholesale reinvention. More than any other
European capital, London thrives on the outsiders it welcomes in. Almost
a third of today's Londoners were born outside the country. During the past
year alone, tens of thousands of East Europeans have come to the city after Britain opened its borders to workers from the new member states of the
enlarged European Union. More than 50 separate national or ethnic
communities are scattered across a metropolis that sprawls over an area
twice the size of New York's five boroughs. Some 300 languages are
spoken, from Acholi to Zulu, all linked (and this is key) by the global
lingua franca, English.
Workers in countries like Germany oppose an influx of cheap labor fromEurope's newly expanded east. Even in Britain fears over run-amok
immigration figure large in the current election campaign. The opposition
Conservative Party's manifesto, published just last week, calls for "secure
borders" and "controlled immigration." Tories say that means putting an
annual cap on immigration and establishing a points-based admissions
system--effectively screening undesirables. "It's not racist to want to limit
the numbers," says party leader Michael Howard, himself the son of
Jewish immigrants. "It is plain common sense."
But that ignores the secret of London's success. As Livingstone sees it, the
Tories' extremist right-wing politics threaten to undermine the very
essence of modern London--the engine that powers not only Britain's
prosperity, but much of Europe's. "The truth," he says, "is that immigration
is a way of life. Jewish, Irish, Asian, Caribbean, East European--each new
wave has enhanced London as a global city."
Past generations of megacities rose or fell depending on their access to
7/30/2019 London Calling Newsweek
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/london-calling-newsweek 3/6
resources or trade--coal mines and rail hubs. What counts today is the new
global class of knowledge merchants, the folks with new ideas to share or
sell. "Urban economic success really depends on smart, entrepreneurial
people," explains Harvard professor Edward Glaeser. "Cities have recentlysucceeded because urban density can facilitate the transmission of ideas."
Like New York (and few, if any, other cities), London provides the right
environment for these people: a relatively compact layout, a vibrant mix of
cultures and a service industry fueled largely by immigrants. It is one
model for the 21st-century metropolis.
London's particular alchemy has little to do with deliberate policy. For
much of the 1980s and '90s, the city survived without any form of central planning. London has grown haphazardly by fits and starts shaped by
global trade and economic trends. Spasms of unplanned large-scale
immigration are thus as much a part of London's heritage as the double-
decker bus or the black cab. For hundreds of years the city thronged with
economic migrants or fugitives from religious persecution on the
Continent. In the 19th century its population leapt sixfold to 6 million,
including a flood of largely Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and
Russia. The post-war decades brought another mass influx from India andPakistan as well as the Caribbean.
Diversity is both symptom and cause of the supercharged London
economy. The city must attract immigrants to stoke that growth; the
immigrants want the jobs that a flourishing London can offer, whether
they're 1 million-pounds-a-year Japanese bankers or Polish art historians
ready to scrub floors for 7 pounds an hour. "This is where I can make
something of my life," says 32-year-old Carlos Cabral from Mozambique,now running a Portuguese deli. Without the migrants, London would be
shrinking, not booming.
That experience has helped to instill a basic tolerance. Londoners have
learned to live with--and sometimes relish--cultural differences. "What
makes us different is that we love diversity. We celebrate it," says Tony
Winterbottom of the London Development Agency. Londoners don't suffer
the overt racial tensions to be found in Los Angeles, Paris or Berlin.
7/30/2019 London Calling Newsweek
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/london-calling-newsweek 4/6
Indeed, the potpourri of cultures is an attraction in itself for those fed up
with life in the suburbs, or in blander European cities. Urban centers have
shed some of their 1960s associations with crime and grime; today, they
offer what a new generation most prizes: high-end urban amenities, shorter commuting times, more work and more opportunities for play. London's
cosmopolitan feel is crucial to its prosperity.
The city has other advantages. Begin with the famous big bang of 1986,
the deregulatory splurge that opened up the city's fusty financial services
and let rip the forces of global capitalism. Foreign players, impressed by
London's light-handed approach to regulation, snapped up the grand old
names of British finance. The doomy predictions that Britain's decision tospurn the euro would cost London its position as Europe's financial capital
have proved plain wrong. Yes, Frankfurt is home to Europe's central bank,
but it's London that calls the shots. Mighty Deutsche Bank may be
headquartered in Germany, but its big decision makers are in London.
These days more euros are traded daily in London than in the rest of
Europe combined.
With the big players comes the chance to make big money; one more goodreason why London lures the brightest and best. Within a few years of the
big bang, London was fixed in the world's imagination as a place of
opportunity, where the elite can pick up eye-popping bonuses or seven-
figure salaries that can't be matched outside New York. "This is the only
place in Europe where you can make a 1 million pounds a year while
working for someone else," says Tony Travers of the London School of
Economics. Add tax rates that are indulgent by some West European
standards--and it's easy to see why the high-fliers would opt for Londonover Paris.
Regulation "lite" carries over to other spheres, from the arts or
entertainment. Not by coincidence, London is a center for both. Ask Jorg
Roth, a German TV producer who moved to London in 1999 to start his
own production and distribution company. "You can lay people off with
only seven days' notice in London when it takes three months in
Germany," says Roth, who employs a staff of 15 with freelancers from all
7/30/2019 London Calling Newsweek
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/london-calling-newsweek 5/6
over the world. "I couldn't have done in Germany what I've done here in
the last five years."
Language clinches London's pre-eminence. Many newcomers choose thecity because they can use (or learn) English. A quarter of the world's
population is now fluent or at least competent in the language, and even a
shaky command opens up one level of the London job market. The city's
middle classes have come to depend on a ready supply of Australian
barmen, Hungarian nannies, Polish builders and Nigerian minicab drivers,
not to mention the Ukrainians or Romanians who clean their offices--or
quickly rise to employ those who do.
Can it last? To be sure, popularity has its price. Livingstone concedes that
daily life in his rainbow city can be "scratchy and difficult." London
motorists know to stay away from Trafalgar Square and other chokepoints
where traffic regularly slows to a Dickensian horse-and-carriage crawl.
Commuters endure daily frustration on a subway system starved of
investment for decades, and where key stretches of line are prone to shut
down with little notice. Violent crime is on the rise, the public-health
system is chronically overloaded and the middle classes shun the low-grade public schools. A rising number of exasperated families are
choosing to flee the city altogether.
And then there's the cost. Mercer Consulting last year ranked London as
the world's most expensive city after Tokyo, a jump of five places over its
2003 ranking. The 2.50 pound price of a pint of bitter in some London
pubs would shock a Czech beer swiller; the 2 pound charge for the shortest
ride on the London Underground would appall a Parisian. Even the
hardiest immigrants will take only so much discomfort. "I think people
should go to Birmingham or Manchester," says 22-year-old Michael, a
former political-science student newly arrived from Cracow, who's now
earning just 3 pounds an hour--below the official minimum wage--
delivering papers.
What's emerging, say the critics, is a divided London with almost 19th-
century extremes of wealth and poverty. "This may be the capital of the
world's fourth-largest economy, with thousands of homes worth more than
7/30/2019 London Calling Newsweek
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/london-calling-newsweek 6/6
a million pounds, but it has some of the nation's greatest housing
inequality," says Adam Sampson of the housing charity Shelter, speaking
at a riverside property fair in East London. "Go just inland and you'll find
three generations of a single family crammed into a two-bedroom flat."
Maintaining the city's allure may therefore take more than the old hands-
off approach. Indeed, after years of squabbling with the mayor, a worried
national government has now lent its weight to the drive to build new
homes and to restore the transport system. A 10 billion pound overhaul for
the network is planned. Already, a congestion charge on motorists has
eased the worst of the traffic problems in the inner city. Police numbers
have risen steadily. Perhaps the biggest challenges of all involves resisting political pressures that might kill the golden goose--over-harsh anti-
immigration policies, to name but one, that would diminish London's
standing as Europe's only world city.
© 2013 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2005/04/25/special-report-london-calling.html