A century ago, the London Society, an influential civic group, produced a plan for London’s future made up of contributions from such leading Edwardian architects as Edwin Lutyens and Aston Webb. It took time to realise their ideas: 14 years for the creation of the greenbelt; 40 years to set up a unified metropolitan government for the city; and even longer to dig the Channel Tunnel. But, with the exception of a Zeppelin landing strip proposed for Wormwood Scrubs, it turned out to have offered a surprisingly accurate forecast of what London would one day become.
As suggested by the decidedly sceptical response to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s project for a generic B-movie science-fiction city built in a straight line (170km long and 500 metres high), we are much less fascinated by wide-eyed visions of the future than we used to be.
In the London Society’s new book about the future of London, which is published this month, clouds of flying taxis, random outcrops of super-tall, swirling glass high-rises and a planning regime that might have been conceived by Elon Musk are all conspicuous by their absence. We have become justifiably suspicious of big-picture planning in the UK. And, even before the HS2 railway debacle, of our ability to deliver it.
The emphasis instead is on the ideas that we can use to make a city work better, in particular by addressing the failings of the Metropolitan Police and a shortfall of at least 30,000 affordable new homes every year. Baroness Lawrence, whose would-be architect son was murdered by racists 30 years ago, uses her chapter in the book to make an eloquent plea for a more equitable future and our obligation to address one of the city’s biggest challenges: “the urgent need to strengthen the relationship between its people and its police . . . The Met today are like an open sore that can’t be healed because they make no attempt really to heal it.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, there is little discussion of mayoral politics, or the Ultra-Low Emission Zone in the book — issues that will certainly shape London in the years to come. According to Ricky Burdett, professor of urban studies at the LSE, the system of directly elected mayors introduced in 2000 has achieved a lot already, and despite efforts by Conservative ministers to dilute them, the mayor’s powers are critical to the city’s future.
“Without them there would be no integrated transport system, represented by the Overground, and the Oyster card. There would be no London Plan, which is much more than a boring regulatory document, it’s a powerful statement of what the city can be, and it has to be reviewed every five years.”
The most engaging contribution is in the form of three imaginary scenarios suggested by Kat Hanna, a planner. The most radical version of London that she proposes is as an emerging sovereign city-state, one that has left the United Kingdom and rejoined the EU. It is governed from what in today’s reality is still the Bloomberg HQ near St Paul’s, with the English parliament transferred to Warrington in Cheshire.
The much more likely of her three possible future cities is that of a London as a Unesco-designated World Heritage Site suffocated by the weight of its own past. Piccadilly Circus is already overwhelmed by troupes of visiting teenagers. Covent Garden is choked by people on cycle tours. In future, they will move from one English Heritage recreation of a dealing room staffed with waxwork effigies of traders in red braces and striped shirts to the next.
In this version of London, Soho House members club has turned Richard Rogers’ former Lloyds Insurance building into a multistorey, 24-hour nightclub. Any remaining actual work that has not been subcontracted to artificial intelligence has migrated to Canary Wharf, or to working from home, a prognosis reflected in the rising vacancy rates for commercial buildings in the City of London and the faltering weekday ridership numbers on the Underground, which today have yet to reach 85 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.
In fact, the process of creeping fossilisation is already well under way. Dignified civic landmarks have already become temples of hedonism. Lutyens’ Midland Bank was one of the first to go. The sober hall near the Bank of England, with its black-and-white-chequered marble floor and its dark wood counters now has the air of ancient Rome after the sack, with City workers baying for cocktails.
Most recently, the Old War Office building on Whitehall, from which Winston Churchill led the defence of Britain against Hitler, has become the Raffles OWO hotel where bed and breakfast starts at over £1,000 a night. Its 2.5 miles of civil service linoleum-lined, cream-painted corridors have been turned into an oak-panelled evocation of a gentleman’s club-cum-country house. Next in line for the treatment is Smithfields meat market, which is on the way to becoming a museum.
“We are in the midst of a real time experiment to see if the productivity of an urban agglomeration can be replicated when hedge fund analysts are working from a yacht in the south of France,” says Tony Travers, an academic specialising in the government of London, who has contributed to the London Society’s book. “At the moment the hotels, restaurants and theatres in London are booming. We don’t know what will happen in the longer term. As Venice shows, luxury shops are not enough on their own to make a productive economy.”
Hanna’s most optimistic prognosis for London is that it becomes a more balanced series of neighbourhoods: no longer a monoculture or a place in which City of London authorities discourage house building for fear of hampering the masters of the universe as they go about their money market business, but the focus for a diverse mixed economy. In this version of the future, the residential population of the City of London grows from just 8,000 to 20,000, as subprime office space is turned into flats. In turn this makes it a more attractive place to work, shop and eat out.
London as a whole has twice as many people as it did at the time of the London Society’s first plan, and it is a much more diverse place. It is also a less self-confident city than most people would have predicted when it bathed in the afterglow of the 2012 Olympics. Brexit and the pandemic have given London a serious kicking.
Four decades of population growth went at least temporarily into reverse in 2021, and the City has lost some finance jobs to Paris and Milan. Travers is both mildly reassuring about London’s future and pessimistic about the rest of the country. He suggests that “in the same way that earlier plagues, fires and wars did not push London into a permanent downward trajectory, so the various ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ shocks that have occurred since 2008 also seem unlikely to do so”.
Figures published in the first half of 2023 showed London’s economy continuing to grow faster than other parts of the UK. Given a national economy in which 23 per cent of the country’s output is produced in less than 1 per cent of its land area, this is bad news for both London and the rest of Britain as well.
“London has been remarkably successful at continually reinventing itself since it lost its industrial base,” says Travers. Even the empty floors in London’s office towers may end up damaging the rest of Britain more than the capital. “You have to assume, unless landlords are prepared to keep them empty, which is unlikely, that rents for prime office space in London will come down. They will eventually fill up with firms that could not otherwise have afforded London and would have moved out to other cities.”
Perhaps the best way to understand where London is going is not from speculation about what the city might be, but to explore the city as it already is. The writer William Gibson’s famous line about the “future”, that it “is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed”, certainly applies to London. Within a territory that sprawls far beyond its political limits, London shows traces of both 21st-century overconsumption and 19th-century squalor, of traditional craft skills and advanced technology.
Claridges Hotel has built a palatial rooftop villa, set in reflecting pools, and with a collection of dozens of Damien Hirst works of art on the walls for those of its guests for whom the luxury of a penthouse suite is not quite enough. There is a taste of the overcrowded towers of China’s Pearl River Delta in the seemingly random urbanism of Vauxhall-Nine Elms-Battersea, where approaching 20,000 mostly luxury homes have been built in the past decade in a forest of skyscrapers visible even from Parliament Square.
What started out as an exercise in urban renewal turned into a development free for all. Housing became an asset class, leading to gross overdevelopment and unfulfilled promises of affordable homes. Simultaneously, London is also a place with backyard shanty housing and squalor that Charles Dickens would recognise.
In Isleworth and Stoke Newington, Essex and Croydon local authority enforcement teams struggle to deal with scores of “homes” barely the size of a double bed, some without windows. In Ealing this year, for example, one landlord was fined £200,000 for converting a family home into eight tiny flats when he had planning consent to divide it into three.
London is simultaneously home to a network of piece workers in the garment industry and to the Francis Crick institute, with 1,250 scientists, one of Europe’s largest biomedical research centres.
The Elizabeth Line is as impressive a piece of 21st-century transport infrastructure as any in the world, but Camden Town’s Northern Line station patently is not. Chronically overstretched, its platforms and exits become choked with crowds at weekends when it is closed to incoming passengers. In the morning, commuters step over the rough sleepers in their blankets lined up outside the station entrance.
Constant streams of tourist visitors wander past, on their way to view the facsimile punks. Their forebears in the 1970s would have been spitting at the crowds, not performing for them, as if they were Beefeaters on parade on the canal bridge that marks the beginning of Camden market, where developers have just secured approval for their plans to build a Ferris wheel.
The future of London is represented by Google’s about-to-be-finished monster building in King’s Cross, as big as an aircraft carrier with more than a million square feet, large enough to accommodate 7,000 people. It crowds into the carefully planned spaces between St Pancras and King’s Cross stations.
Thomas Heatherwick, its co-designer, at the risk of ignoring the beam in his own eye, told the FT this week that modern architecture has left our cites suffering an “epidemic of boringness”. But it is not clear if his building will be a monument to Silicon Valley hubris or to the digital revolution. At the beginning of this year Google slashed 12,000 people from its global workforce, and announced a second round of job losses last month. It has not specified how many of them would be in London, but the announcement provoked a walkout by Google employees here.
London is about the grand gesture planning of the new Stratford, where the V&A East museum is taking shape, and it is about Mare Street market, which maintains a lively balance between street food vendors and local shops, and Peckham Levels, where a repurposed car park has become an artists’ workspace. Here, creativity is not frozen out by affluence, and piecemeal pragmatism can achieve impressive results. Its future vitality is more likely based on the latter than the former. But it is its mysterious ability to be both at the same time that makes it a unique city.
Deyan Sudjic is director emeritus of the Design Museum in London
“London of the Future”, The London Society, Merrell Publishers
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