· By Tam McDonald
An article in The Guardian last week asks “If we really have passed ‘peak London’, what does that mean for Britain?” The sub-heading concedes that the capital may have fallen on hard times but, as if this were a compelling counter-argument, “. . . it still offers a defiantly different version of Englishness.”
After regaling the reader with the many ways in which London is experiencing what English understatement might characterise as a “sticky patch”, the writer moves past any concern for what London might do about its current diminishment, and wonders instead about the implications of central London’s “obsolescence” for the UK’s allegedly delighted non-Londoners. While tougher times would render the capital “less-privileged”, the writer argues that it might “narrow the north-south divide” and make England “feel more united, and less like half a country with a huge city-state attached”.
The London characterised in this article is the very definition of the big frog in the small pond that could do with a bit of tactical shrinking for the sake of getting on better with all the smaller frogs and tadpoles. That definition is not what lifted the city out of the mid-17th century mire induced by war, plague, and fire; nor was it what marked the recovery from the last century’s wars and aerial Blitz. It did not constrain the reach and appetite of the English (and Scottish) Enlightenment, nor did it rein in the ambition and entrepreneurial energy that inspired Fleet Street and the City of London to become the Silicon Valley of the 18th century.
What distinguishes London from the rest of the country, and indeed from most of the rest of the world, is not the size of the population as some random conglomeration of the smug and privileged. All those people are in fact a community of communities, many of them world-class businesses, universities, research institutions, publishing and media companies, museums and art galleries. What these people have done is define a culture that has shaped and will continue very largely to shape the way the world thinks, relaxes, works, and plays. And what they have accomplished is in no way “defiantly different in its Englishness” – what does that even mean? – but in fact is suggestive of what can be accomplished in a world where people are bound by a common language.
Those who are content with populist prescriptions determined by national borders fail to grasp that human problems have scaled rapidly and globally in their resonance and reach. Communities of all types and sizes need the imagination and energy that respects this wider hinterland of chaos and opportunity. Think global, act local as the old saying has it. When the UK government awakens to the stupendous potential in soft power, perhaps then it will see that London unleashed will be a force for good in the world, globally and locally. Deploy more language teachers, drama coaches, artists, and musicians: bring home the nuclear submarines.
Far from peaking, the city’s best days lie yet ahead.