London endings
I am lucky enough to live right on the river Thames at Wapping. The view from my balcony is fascinating. Brown and brackish, the tides and the current compete endlessly. In a twice daily rhythm, the water surges and withdraws up to 7 metres in height, as if drawing deep slow breaths. By this point, it is shedding its skin as a river.
The wildlife is equally muddied, with swans, geese and ducks competing with herring gulls and terns. The herring gulls quite often tussle, usually unsuccessfully, with eels. I spotted a seal outside my window one morning recently. The surrounding city sends its representatives too, with pigeons, jackdaws and even parakeets to be found around and about the waterside.
Wapping is a quiet part of London. It has an elderly well-heeled clientele who like it that way. When I first came to London in 1990, my best friend was lodging here. I turned up my nose at the idea of sharing in the area: it was too quiet, too cut-off. The river is still quiet. Apart from party boats in the evening and the river taxi, there is little river traffic.
It would have been a very different story 100 years ago, when the warehouse conversion I now live in had first been built. London was the busiest port in the world. This stretch of water is part of the Pool of London, the reason why London exists (don’t take my word for it, that was the view of the Venerable Bede). It would have been frenetic.
That London is long gone. It died in the 1950s with containerisation. A way of life that had endured for nearly two millennia vanished.
Let’s not get too nostalgic about that. Quite apart from anything else, Wapping was grindingly poor then. Sherlock Holmes’s opium dens were in Limehouse, just along the river (an Antony Gormley statue now stands in the river there aloft). Call The Midwife was set nearby. But things were lost as well as gained by the change. The Thames, in a city built around the river, long felt as though it had lost any purpose. Only in recent years has it regained a purpose as a new lung of London, a fluid parkland at the heart of the city.
It is in the nature of any great city to keep reinventing itself. London is a great city. In my 30 years in London, I have seen many changes to London, most of them positive. The transport network, once a bad joke, is magnificent and taken for granted. Canary Wharf, which I look out onto from my balcony, didn’t exist in 1990 and now is a major city and financial centre. Not only that, it looks great. In the same time, Kings Cross, Paddington Waterside, Stratford and Nine Elms have all sprung up like Venuses from the mist — admittedly, no one is likely to paint any of them on a scallop shell.
As new Londons are created, old ones die. When I first came to London, the City of London was a very different place from the one it is now: more formal, less glitzy. A fellow trainee solicitor was sent home for wearing an olive-green suit. Trouser suits for women were frowned upon. Offices were fluorescent-lit with grubby carpet tiles in buildings that can most kindly be described as functional.
Business was gained through connections, with little supervision of fees or suitability. Client lunches were typically alcoholic and often long, reflecting the way in which work was won.
On other days, high-flying City types would lunch side by side with secretaries in dismal greasy spoons that served up lifeless chips and cannonball peas, manned by formidable women and their defeated husbands. Tea and coffee looked more or less the same sludgy brown colour. Starbucks did not arrive until 1998.
The City also had a much flatter hierarchy then that could be scaled much more quickly. When I was a trainee solicitor, above me there were assistants and partners, divided behind a thick curtain between salaried partners and equity partners. I made partner in five years from qualification, reaching the milestone before my 30th birthday. When I retired, I was a variable share partner (a rebrand of equity partner) and below me there were fixed share partners, legal directors, senior associates, associates, assistants and trainees. It’s notable for a lawyer to make partner before 35 now.
Work finished at 6 at the latest. The pubs closed at 9pm and were empty well before then (no one has more than about three hours’ drinking in them). An informal segregation took place between the builders’ pubs and the suits’ pubs, and everyone knew which was which.
The modern City is much more professional and a lot less fun. People had more time to themselves then and more time to think. I remember the horror as a trainee at the idea of one department head expecting every fee earner without exception to record 7 chargeable hours a day every day (a lawyer has a lot of tasks that are not chargeable so this will equate in practice to a 10 hour working day for most lawyers, not including lunch). That would be seen as a minimum in most City law firms now.
Bonding was something that just happened. Younger partners would scoop up the assistants on a Friday lunchtime and take them to a pub or cheap restaurant. Because young lawyers didn’t need to live in zone 19, evening drinks didn’t need to be planned weeks in advance.
To be clear, I have no misty-eyed romanticism for the awful employment practices, the sexism, the homophobia, the dubious ethics and mediocre client service. Things are much better now, even when they don’t seem to be. But something was lost as well as gained — as structure is imposed, free-wheelers get their wings clipped. As the City became committed to professionalism and diversity, it lost touch with anarchy.
In my time in London, the city has flourished. Correlation is not causation, of course. It has greatly built on its success as a financial centre and added to it a tech centre. With all that money came a cultural renaissance that is remarkable for how much it is taken for granted. The art, the shows, the gigs and the restaurants have all improved out of all recognition from the early 1990s. This in turn makes London a desirable place for the brightest and best to come and live, and plays its part in the thought processes of decision-makers.
Imagine you’re the FD of a European bank. Do you want to set your head office in famously-dull Zurich, in Frankfurt, whose chief cultural attraction is a palm house, or London? Remember, this is where you’re going to have to live too. You can always justify any greater cost by reference to recruitment and retention. That way you don’t have to listen to oompah oompah bands.
This has created a virtuous circle where the money attracts the culture and the culture attracts the money. Success has many parents, but among those who need to be credited with helping to maintain London’s success are Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal, Banksy and Tracey Emin, Nicholas Serota and Charles Saatchi, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Cameron Mackintosh.
Recently, however, there is a sense of an ending. The first blow was Covid-19. Agglomeration, once London’s best weapon, was suddenly turned against it as the idea of meeting in numbers went out of fashion and restaurants and theatres were closed. By the time some form of reopening began, the venues found themselves with serious staff shortages. London’s cultural life diminished as venues shrank capacity and offerings.
The staff shortages led to a wage spiral, leading in turn to higher prices. And on top of that, we now have the energy crisis, which is likely to lead to still higher prices and closures of venues. It feels as if London’s cultural life is shrinking for now.
London is not alone in facing this. In a city, however, where its cultural life is such a big draw, the decline is particularly important.
London’s continued success is not preordained. Brexit has left the City on the wrong side of a barrier to the EU, a major market. It is a costly city in which to work. If it loses advantages, that virtuous circle could turn into a vicious circle if London gets de-emphasised in companies’ business planning and in turn it becomes a less attractive place for cultural ventures to be launched.
Will it happen? I’m uncertain. But I sniff a change in the wind. London will no doubt continue to be a successful city, but will it keep its pre-eminence in Europe? We may be living through another of London’s endings, and this time the compensatory beginnings are not easy to spot.