Reading Dickens is one way to get a feel for this. Many locations in his books are not yet part of the London conurbation. IIRC, one book has a character walking over fields to get to Hammersmith, for example.
" Henry VIII rebuilt the church in 1542 ... at this time it was literally "in the fields", occupying an isolated position between the cities of Westminster and London."
In the 1550s the country was unrecognisable compared to now. England's total population was about 3 million, now London's population is 9 million (and was 100k then)...
Edit: Apparently, wolves in England had just become extinct at the time...
It makes you wonder what it will be like in another few hundred years...
When we first moved to London (Zone 2/3) the place we lived in used to be a large apple orchard 100-150 years prior.
Where we moved to after was on the grounds of a former nunnery then recouperation hospital. And now the area we're in used to be grazing fields 100 years ago.
I was shocked the other day by seeing a physical travelcard ticket for Zones 1-9 and having to confirm from a Tube station map that a Zone 9 actually exists. This is four more than I could remember.
This post really highlights how much of the development in London is infill into already existing Victorian (or earlier) neighbourhoods and how the city is growing without sprawling outwards. The Victorians built the Metropolitan line out almost all the way to Aylesbury anticipating that the city would follow but it really hasn't. When you take the tube to zone 9 you start to go past horses and cows in fields. There are some really nice walks in the Chiltern hills starting from Chesham and Amersham and you don't feel like you're in London at all. We always wonder if people living there even consider themselves as Londoners.
Zones beyond 6 have existed since at least the late 90s. My vague recollection is that A-C basically meant "the top end of the Metropolitan line" - certainly how it seemed for me as an SW Londoner. Then at some point the letters were changed to numbers and more stations were brought inside over in Essex, Kent, etc. The Wikipedia page for stations in zones 7-9 has a changelog of sorts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_in_London_far...
Long ago when I moved to London, it was zones 1-6 then A-D for stations outside Greater London. I think changing A-D to 7, 8 & 9 made it simpler; most people aren't interested in what the local government is when they buy a ticket.
To be fair I didn't know that either... For some reason I thought 7 was the last zone... 13 years here (almost to the day) and I've learned something new !
It will not continue seeing such rapid growth for another few hundred years, world population will plateau by mid century and even the big cities will at some point stop growing.
But the "suburbs" (some of them would not be considered suburbs but simply outer parts of the city in a lot of other places in the world) are immensely more populous than 100 years ago.
birth rates in pretty much every developed nation are below replacement level. Some countries are using migration as a sort of band-aid fixed but the worst fears are starting to come true recently.
Previously some people had thought or hoped that falling birthrates was/is a natural concequence of becoming rich enough, that as countries develop kids are seen as less of a necessity.
But iirc newer data shows falling birthrates even in poorer nations that are stagnant/not developing. They are still well above replacement rate for now but its not a good trend.
As for reasons why: nobody has one single cause, but a major one is that current economies mean children are more of a cost than a benefit, and even the most ambitious incentive programs dont make up for the toll of both working a job and taking care of a helpless human.
As for why this is a bad thing: There are a lot of inbuilt assumptions to the way society is structured that will begin to break down. Things like: there are more workers than retirees. There are more students than teachers. There are more juior employees than managers. When these kinds of things start to change, we will have to adapt society or things will just fall apart.
You're already starting to see previews of this sort of crisis in sectors where few young people join, like becoming merchant ship captains. People having to be called back from retirement, buisnesses failing not from lack of buisness but from lack of employees
The human population cannot grow indefinitely without moving to other planets, which is very much infeasible now and probably infeasible into the foreseeable future. Society just has to adapt. The problem I see is our current leaders are only interested in pushing the problem down the road. Declining population (which won't actually decline till 2080-ish IIRC) is not in itself a problem.
I agree. This is a transitory state, where a lot of assumption built into the social contract will break down. If we can fix them (and presumably we will... eventually), there is nothing inherently bad about a declining population.
Better medical technology means people die older. Older people already own most of the capital, having them live longer isn’t going to get us to a healthier society that’s not as biased towards existing capital versus innovation and income.
And older people passing their wealth to a newer generation isn't going to fix things either. All that changes is who will be ossifying society. At least, with medical technologies, people can't run away from the problem by dying of old age.
That's a separate problem to the population crisis. People thinks population's going to decline. I am not so sure. Things can change a lot in a few decade.
All we can say that at this current time, the trend is toward population decline.
it is extrodinarily unlikely anyone will do such as thing.
As I noted earlier. the birth rate is below replacement rate in almost all developed countries. If not for immigrants population would be shrinking. If anything they would demand more children...
The probability of death is correlated to your chronological age. The older you are, the more likely you are to die.
Eliminating or reducing the probability of death correlated to chronological age means our average lifespan is likely to be thousand of years, but not unlimited since we will die to other causes, likely involving accidents and natural disaster.
In my opinion it could be solved by simply making it more attractive to have children, but it would require more equality and redistribution of wealth to cover the costs. There would still be billionaires, but the number of ultra-rich may be reduced.
Women wants careers and equal opportunities. That means they wait longer and longer before they get children because they want to make sure they have a career to go back to. That is the single most important problem that we need to solve.
1. Provide a decent parental leave (1 year minimum) with full pay.
2. Women often end up as the primary care giver who has to take care of the child when it is sick or attend parental meetings. This often hurts their career. We should incentivise men to take an equal part in raising a child, so that this is more accepted in work situations.
3. Provide free child care and health care. Many simply can't afford the additional financial burden of a child.
4. Provide free education including University. (see point 3)
5. Reduce the financial risk by creating a good safety net. If one or both of the parents are not able to cover their part, the government needs to provide enough support.
Simply put, the choice of having a child should not hurt families financially, or hurt their careers. Humans are "programmed" to want to reproduce, so if we remove the financial barriers
Yes, this will be expensive but it will be less expensive than a future without enough young people to take care of the old.
You are free to ask "Why should my money go to others", but then you don't get to complain when you are 90 years old and only get to shower once a month because they don't have enough people to help you.
Norway is close to providing all of what you describe and still seeing well below replacement fertility rates. It maybe be a start, and it produces a far more pleasant society, but it's not enough.
There are other concerns as well related to cost of living.
Even though we would like people to live outside the cities, cities attract a lot of potential parents. They end up in a situation where they have a long education and start their careers late and don't have the financial capability to get a decent family friendly apartment in the city. Many wait until it's almost too late, and having more than 1 or 2 is definitely not something most wants
The average age of first-time mothers is over 30 years old. A single child may be something the family can handle, but more than 1 or 2 forces the families to move outside the cities to be able to afford a house in addition to hurting the mother's career.
Tldr:
- Cost of living in the cities are too high
- If a second (or third) child forces them to move out of the city, many increasingly choose the cities
- Having more than one child after 30 will have a negative impact on the career as they simply can't work as many hours and has to spend long periods away from work
I think you can simplify that: Standards rise as living standards rise. People want more both for themselves and their children when they see that as realistic, and opting for fewer children is a way to make that happen.
Yes, I think that covers everything in a concise way.
If we want to go back to a sustainable birth rate, we need a wide range of actions. Some may require to reduce the financial risks, while others require encouraging cultural changes.
Because birth rates are going down worldwide and at some point the people who wanted to move away from the countryside/poor countries to the big global cities would have already moved (those left behind are older than the ones leaving, so such places will have even lower birth rates).
The major global cities will still grow in the next 200 years compared to now, just not as much as they have the previous 200 years.
As far as I can recall the population of the UK has hovered around 55 million since the early 80s at least, but this number doesn't seem to make sense to me. I'm reminded of a March 2020 London Evening Standard headline saying that half of the adult population of the UK had been vaccinated and the headline gave 55 million people as the total for that number, which gave me pause for thought.
The UK population is 67 million today - and has been growing consistently year on year since the early 00's. It did hover around 55-58 million between 1970 and 2000 though.
The number of houses built in the 1870-1900 period is mad - basically a 3 mile wide ring around London. It's really impressive - especially considering all building materials had to be brought in by railway and then horse and cart.
Interesting to note how London's population peaked in 1939, before falling steadily after that right up to the 1980's, when it finally started to rise again into the present day. A similar thing also happened to New York City in roughly the same time frame.
Sure, the war, the Blitz, etc. but those weren't the main causes. The regrowth in population took decades even after the war ended. NYC never got bombed, but it went through nearly the same thing during the same time frame.
i moved to London a decade ago, and it's incredible how much the city has changed. whole new neighborhoods have been built on the sites of former industrial parks. existing neighborhoods are expanding, and new skyscrapers are appearing all over the place. even new (and huge) infrastructure projects.
as a european, this change is something special. in europe you will rarely find a city as big and important as London where there is so much construction taking place in every single corner of the city.
It's astounding how much greener it is in the pictures.
It can take trees ~30 years to reach maturity where they can span across an entire street.
I assumed that part of the reason the nicer neighborhoods in the EU and most the US were so nice is because they had always been green and nice.
But maybe it only takes ~10 years or so?
Not familiar with London, but looking at the pictures, it looks like maybe this is a relatively new thing?
If so, that's kind of exciting, because I figured it might take way longer for other parts of other cities to become as nice and pleasant as the select few crazy expensive neighborhoods we all love.
That caught my eye - but I think in most cases it's just the time of year the photo was taken. Most trees are deciduous and none of the streets are particularly green in November - March. Obviously actual building sites (like the olympic park in the first picture) excepted.
London's been a very green city for decades, if not a hundred years, because of planting done when victoirian development started. If anything, the last years seem to have had a reduction in tree cover, to fit in all of these new developements. The saplings carelessly planted in their place will take decades to reach maturation.
“A powerful storm ravaged many parts of the UK in the middle of October 1987.
With winds gusting at up to 100mph, there was massive devastation across the country and 18 people were killed. About 15 million trees were blown down. Many fell on to roads and railways, causing major transport delays. Others took down electricity and telephone lines, leaving thousands of homes without power for more than 24 hours.”
I grew up in the rural midwest and one day I was with my parents on some back road. Dad pointed to a woods and told me that when he was a kid that was a field. So it only took a 30 or so years for it to turn back into woods.
The planning in London is very poor. All they build are really the buildings that are meant to store value for foreign investors, typical open plan offices or warehouses.
There is nothing build that would be for workshops or light manufacturing.
Friend of mine have been trying to find a workshop space in London or vicinity for over a year and there is very little available.
It's either very expensive and too large or could be alright, but it doesn't have a bathroom and a sink. How are you supposed to work if you can't even wash your hands or you have to go to another building to do it?
It's like everyone thinks here the jobs of future will feature a person with a laptop hot desking.
> There is nothing build that would be for workshops or light manufacturing.
Large capital cities are generally terrible places for manufacturing. Real estate is competitive, transport is congested and labour is expensive.
That's why most Chinese products come from tier 3 cities unless there's a really special need for skilled labour or a legacy factory happened to be built 15-20 years ago when the tier 1/2 cities were smaller.
> All they build are really the buildings that are meant to store value for foreign investors, typical open plan offices or warehouses.
Offices and warehouses is not what I expected to follow the first part of that sentence… office and warehouses are pretty productive! And likely a better use of space in a dense urban environment than a manufacturing facility.
The infrastructure is aimed at IT or any "bum on the seat" type of business were only tools that are required to do the work are a laptop and a phone.
But, if you, for instance want to do some light manufacturing - like making electronic devices, you are out of luck. In theory, you could do that kind of work in an office, but when estate agent hears about "soldering iron" or "ultrasonic cleaner" they nope out.
I lived in Canary Wharf ~2011-2012, on the 42nd floor and with a stunning view west over the city. The shard was being built at the time and I've got plenty of photos of dramatic sunsets, rays streaming through the glass and trusses. As much as I loathed living in London, I quite enjoyed the view.
What was your reason for loathing living in London?
Edit: reason I ask is because I assume it's costs, I can't imagine your apartment was cheap. I don't see much evidence that even SWE's can comfortably live there.
London is actually surprisingly cheaper than many cities in US. You just have to find your place based on the budget. I lived in Ealing area (sure it’s far from many actions but lots of great ethnic food in far cheaper price than anywhere else) in a quite a spacious apartment and it was half as much as what I spent in both two cities I have lived in US. And the tube is excellent (compared to our public transport standard). I actually somewhat miss my time there. It was safe (again based on my standard in US) and I didn’t really need a car.
It was a one bedroom rental in a newly developed skyscraper called the landmark, I think I paid about £1400/month. Cost was a thing, sure, but coming from Stockholm I was used to things being expensive and anyway the move to London effectively tripled my salary at the time. I was doing fine. After the year lease was up the estate agency wanted to jack the rent by 60%, which I then learned was par for the course in London so I moved around a bit, as you do. I eventually found myself living in Islington which I didn't mind so much.
It wasn't the one thing that made me loathe living in London though, it was more like death by a thousand cuts. It ground me down you could say.
I visited again this past Christmas for a few days, the first time I was in town just as a tourist. I can definitely see the appeal when you're staying just a few nights, it's a good tourist town, but living there just wasn't for me.
Living in London is best done by moving progressively further out and treat going in to the centre as tourist trips. I spent my first couple of years at Marble Arch, and then moved to zone 3, and now I live in zone 5. I couldn't imagine living further in. Too little for the money, and too busy.
I only go in to the centre to go to fancy bars and restaurants for date nights etc., or for other touristy stuff.
That's the one kind of inflation which didn't bother me too much. I still go out just as much I just drink less. That's healthier.
The property situation makes me far more angry. The UK construction and property industry completely lacks market discipline and quality regulations have been reduced (see: Grenfell where that literally killed people, but also the shocking build quality of most properties).
Then there was the restriction of homebuilding - deliberately engineered by successive governments in order to jack up property prices and parasitically extract a greater % of Londoner incomes via rents.
When the Tories talked about being Singapore-on-Thames I wished they meant build thousands of nice HDB apartment blocks and get tough on corruption but alas it seems what they actually meant was Moscow-on-Thames - make London an even bigger haven for oligarchs and dial up the corruption with more no bid government contracts to their mates.
| quality regulations have been reduced (see: Grenfell where that literally killed people.
Grenfell was a horrible tragedy. It was built as social housing in the 50’s or 60’s to a much higher standard (in terms of space and utility) than the so called luxury apartments of Canary Wharf.
The installation of cladding to modernise the building to meet modern energy efficiency standards and the apparent failure to make sure that work was completed within the regulations seems to be the cause of the catastrophic spread of the fire.
London planning is a complete mess.
We waste millions on poorly executed projects to modernise social housing to save on CO2 emissions and at the same time we have the wealthy living in Victorian and older houses that are not allowed to install double glazing in order “to preserve the character of the property”.
Yes, the fact that you can draw a direct line between recent watered down regulations designed to bring in more profit for the construction industry and 72 people being burned alive just makes it that much worse.
London planning isn't an accidental mess. It's a deliberately engineered mess designed to let property/land owners and construction companies act as a parasite on the productive economy.
thanks for the stats. Most often, rental stats are for new leases but actually those are numbers also for current renters (" The index not only measures the change in newly advertised rental prices, but reflects price changes for all private rental properties, including for existing tenancies.").
5% rent increases last year...
The terrible thing is how they destroy old house from the inside and build multiple flats with terrible quality at huge prices because renters are pretty much in a dire situation and, stuff like RTO and centralization, makes it even worse for them (commute cost+rent cost+living cost in those areas)
All the while charging extremely high tax rates that get distributed to who knows what, the war on Ukraine, maybe.
That makes it sound as if it's 600k each year. It isn't - that's the figure for 2022. The figure for 2019 is 180k. Supposedly, the 2022 figure is inflated by official programmes encouraging immigration from Hong Kong and Ukraine.
The UK could very well easily up with net emigration and still have rising rents.
New York in the 1950s ran a very high level of immigration (GIs returning from the war) and had the strongest rent controls it ever had. Neither property prices nor rents rose very much.
London only passed the population threshold it reached in 1939 in 2015 - LONG after rents and property prices had been jacked up to eye watering levels.
Building social housing isn't hard, it just requires a government that operates on behalf of the working classes (who want a roof over their head) rather than land owners (who will try to stymie that process in every way they can in order to jack up rents and asset valuations).
Land usage is horrendously inefficient in the UK and that is largely by design. Immigration might exacerbate rent rises all other things being equal but as I said it could just as easily happen with net migration too.
With Singapore you could argue that immigration is a key issue with their rising rents because proportionally it's so much higher than the UK, they make very efficient use of land and they are very much more space deprived.
In the UK it's not an issue with immigration because other variables override it.
That is unless somebody is really in the mood to indirectly take the issue to a xenophobic or a racist place on behalf of a few populist property oligarchs looking for an easy scapegoat.
I'm not sure what distinction you are drawing between "immigration" and "net migration"? Net Migration is just all the people that have immigrated (moved to) to a country minus all those that have emigrated (left) a country. That is the figure of 600k for the UK currently.
>> In the UK it's not an issue with immigration because other variables override it.
Care to name some? I guess you could say that UK housing is "inefficient" but again, I'm not sure making people live in tower blocks just so that more people from other countries can move here is all that fair of a solution, or if it is what people are proposing at least make it explicit and have it as a party policy that people can vote on.
TBH property oligarchs would favour high migration because of the effect it has on property values and rents.
>I'm not sure making people live in tower blocks just so that more people from other countries can move here is all that fair of a solution
The only forcing going on in London is handing over between 30-50% of your paycheck just to have a roof over your head.
Nobody would have to be forced to live in an apartment. You just have to build them and people will rent or buy them.
As I said, unless you want to take this to a racist place it's not an issue of immigration. Not in the UK anyway.
>TBH property oligarchs would favour high migration
Yes, thats why the Tory party effectively used xenophobia to garner votes while simultaneously increasing net migration to the UK. It was all about throwing a racist bone to their voters who were heavily swayed towards UKIP before betraying them.
For non-Londoners, it’s worth pointing out that £8 for a pint is exceptionally high. In most smart pubs in central london the price for a regular pint is approx £5-£6.50. And you can get pints for approx £3 in centrally located Wetherspoons (a common pub chain).
> Now it is honestly too expensive, £8 a pint in pub near work, it makes going out less fun.
Aren’t the salaries higher as well? In Paris a pint is €7 on average (~£6) but according to Glassdoor the average SWE salary is only €53k/yr vs. £68k for London.
If you want a flat in central London you'll be paying half (or more?) of your £68k salary on rent after tax. In Canary Wharf you might not even be able to afford rent.
A £68k salary won't bring you close to being able to afford a mortgage, unless you have capital from other means e.g. inheritance.
Big cities are big enough that you can have vastly different ideas of what it means to "live in New York" or "live in LA" - I had friends in both who would say they lived there, but were a minimum an hour from the central business district.
I gave up answering where I lived years ago, now I just reply with the name of the nearest international airport; people are much more likely to know where LA is than any of the hundreds of smaller cities in and around its metro area.
I got a 2.5% salary increase this year. Because of inflation is should be > 8% (ONS has a recommendation). Complained about it and they still wouldn't increase it.
Unfortunatley we are seeing prices like this in the US as well. I live in Denver, CO and a pint here typically runs between $5-$10 depending on the place.
UK Pint == Imperial Pint. USA disapproves of imperial measure, for historical reasons.
A fluid ounce is based on avoirdupois, which isn't "imperial", so it didn't have to be abandoned. I think pints, quarts and gallons, all being based on the pint, are the only measures that differ significantly between the US and the UK.
I'm not a Londoner, I only visit occasionally, but I think this may be a psychological response to a big increase.
I used to like going out in London: "everything's so cheap!" Especially, getting a nice beer at a random pub would cost significantly less than a random basic lager in Paris.
But this year, I was shocked to see the price increase. It's now pricier than Paris, even though Paris prices have also edged up a bit.
And since my cash is Euros, I always compared the prices as converted to euros, so this accounted for the conversion rate variations.
I'm sure you _can_ find salaries that low but it's not typical. I started on £30k 6 years ago, and that company was infamous for underpaying grads! Most other junior developers I knew (at other companies) were on ~£40k or so.
£8/pint is also way more expensive than normal. I was out in Shoreditch last night, paid £6.70 for a pint of Brewdog, and that was more than I'd usually pay.
Healthcare is terrible. It's mostly a scam with lots of propaganda and lack of perspective by British citizens. I'm not kidding. It's a system where the NHS will just push you forward and the insurance will cover fuck all and try to get you to the same NHS doctor.
It's the same nanny state style as some other European countries where they will try and sell you nothing over the counter because "you might abuse it" but they have a drinking and illegal drug culture to rival the best of them.
The US sucks if you're in the lower end of the spectrum without insurance but with insurance you actually get treatment. There's other countries where it's a pleasure to have private healthcare if you're middle class but many in europe definitely aren't. They'll just try to discourage you unless you're having an "my leg is detaching" type of emergency.
There's a reason why there's ads in the tube to "go to turkey to fix X health problem".
We should stop comparing having a health net for the jobless in a country with the US and typical quality of life/healthcare situation for a professional.
Edit: If I felt things worked, and people would eventually be able to afford houses and get into a better situation high taxes would be fine, but it's high taxes and policies that still benefit the richest/landlords/corporates/big pharma. It's corruption and classism. He former is widespread in many countries but the pretense otherwise is what is annoying.
I would say it's pollution, crime and lack of avenues for small kids.
I was living on a skyscraper and the amount of black dust I was removing from next to the windows was mind-blowing. I still remember moving 1hr out of London and feeling like I was breathing again.
Not what I wanted for my kids.
The amount of stabbing and theft going on was pretty crazy. It was all around you.
Some parks are ok and touristy, some parks are straight up dodgy and you run into drugged up, drunk people, (homeless?) people harassing you.
There are almost no kids around so not super easy to find friends for your kids. Nurseries are small and crowded because real estate is at a premium.
Again, moving out from the city fixed all the problems. Town life in the UK is actually pretty great. Sure you will miss on the main pros of London, events and networking.
I'd recommend finding a nice town commuting distance from London to reap the most benefits.
Your comments are a reflection of life in Tower Hamlets, where PanP etc. are. London otherwise in the N, NE and SW parts has clean air with plenty of green spaces for kids.
I was not in Tower Hamlets but in the City of London and Southwark, but I'm sure your comment is valid: London is a large area and you can get a better quality of life on the outskirts.
Still, flying from London to somewhere else or taking a train to go outside, the difference in air quality before and after was noticeable.
Canary Wharf is surrounded by poverty in a brown field redevelopment that has been a permanent construction site for over thirty years. It is not really representative of London.
London is an expensive city, you’ll need several million pounds for a decent family home but if you can afford it it’s an absolutely fantastic place to live.
Unfortunately the lack of affordable housing makes it less likely to be so in the long term.
Arguably it is developments like Canary Wharf and the associated planning concessions that have fuelled the London property market to make it practically unaffordable for the vast majority of people that do the real work.
> London is an expensive city, you’ll need several million pounds for a decent family home
Just not true. I grew up in a 4 bed house in a zone 4 area where such houses still go for under a million, especially if you're willing to do a bit of work.
It's a perfectly nice area, good schools, parks and trees, 30min train to central, what more could a normal family want?
If you have several million pounds, you can have a nice life literally anywhere. For the same money, you'd have a better quality of life outside London.
Theatre: London is certainly better than the provinces, if you like that kind of thing. I don't.
Sports: neither spectator nor participation sports are a London speciality.
Clubs: if that means nightclubs, Manchester had a much better club-scene than London when I lived there (mid 90s). I'm too old for clubbing now!
Museums and architecture: people visit museums and gawp at architecture when they're visiting a place. Once you've seen a museum, you've seen it. Sure, it's pleasant to live among nice buildings; but most of the London cityscape is not anything I'd call architecture.
I lived in Central London for 20 years. I hated it for 17 of those years. It takes an hour to get across town on the (stinking) underground, which is the quickest way. Traffic is the most-aggressive of any place that I've driven in the UK. People are unfriendly; nobody lives in London to make friends, they live in London to make money. Everyone's in a hurry, presumably because they want to make a lot of money so they can leave.
I find that people are much more friendly in London (they are certainly a lot less racist in general, which is lovely). It's the premier city in Europe, and very international which is lovely.
It has such a great mix of things – you are constantly surrounded by history and there is always something going on.
The in-nostril build up that you get from certain Underground lines is also mind boggling. I have not encountered anything comparable in other cities to that dust on the Northern line.
I live in the inner suburbs of North London (about 5 miles from the absolute centre) and don't really recognise any of those problems. There's loads of kids here - literally every 3rd house on my road has a family with young kids in it. Nurseries are no more crowded than other UK cities either. Obviously there's some level of crime - but that's also present everywhere to varying degrees. There's loads of kids activities here as well.
The city isn't a single place - it's a whole load of historical towns and neighbourhoods joined together. Experiences vary.
I grew up in Hartlepool (North East of England), moved to Australia when I was 19 and I'm 35 now.
I moved because I was stabbed, and can't count on one hand how many times I'd been assaulted and mugged in the 10 years prior. To hear the rest of the country is heading in a similar direction is a horrid reflection on the state of affairs in the UK.
It shows 614,474 net new dwellings between 2001/02 and 2021/22. Unfortunately, they don't appear to collect data on floor space at all. So this is less informative than it could be.
The number of residents per dwelling has gone up from 2.4 to 2.5. between 2001 and 2020.
Most of the new towers you see in the pictures are flats. For instance, around Wembley Stadium the vast majority are flats. Lots of (fancy) flats on the Isle of Dogs as well.
It's mostly offices only in the City and Canary Wharf.
We often hear here (Berlin) that the housing affordability crisis is due to not building enough housing...Yet London apparently built loads in the last 20 years and it's still as unaffordable as ever (or even more than ever)?
Is there any data showing that if we let loose and build a ton of housing that purchase prices and (especially) rents will reduce significantly? It's intuitively true but all the cities you can see a ton of construction in have also gone from "expensive" to "more expensive" at the same time.
Did any major city people want to live in got more affordable (or stayed affordable) in the last 10-20 years?
1) Housing affordability relates to building relative to growth rate. For a variety of reasons, inlcluding both London's glboal appeal and a fact that it is so dominant culturally, economically, etc. within the UK it's likely this rate of increasse was still not enough.
2) A lot of the building has not necessarily been what you'd call affordable. While you will get some benefit moving wealthier people, expats, and short term business lets, etc. to new stuff, that's way less efficient for solving the problem of affordability than just building enough homes for the people who need them directly.
3) Too much of London's (new and existing) real estate is owned as an investment and goes mostly unoccupied. This is a scandal and there should be large tax penalties for unoccupied housing.
I think what you hear is true but it is not the whole truth. It would be easy to allow developers in to build new housing in a way that wouldn't help at all (but would make them lots of money).
4) smaller households. You can add 50% more housing, but if more people are spending more of their years single, and desiring to live in their own abode, then increase in demand could easily outpace increase in supply.
The number of people per dwelling went up though, so that hasn't happened, at least not on average.
But I think the average could be misleading if the household size had gone up significantly in council homes, hiding a slightly falling household size in the private sector. But that's pure speculation.
Cities like London could absorb pretty significant population growth with high quality, high density home building of the right type, in the right areas as long as they also invest in infrastructure and services too.
Obviously making up the infrastructure and investment gap in other medium and large UK cities might make more sense. Most of the UK’s next 10-20 cities by size (at least) could probably take on a doubling or more in population while also becoming wealthier, easier to get around, and better overall for everyone who lives in them.
Just needs competent government and proper investment in the right places, which have sadly been far from forthcoming for a while now.
Probably better to ask ourselves more holistically what good urban design looks like.
There are very pleasant and extremely livable high density cities (or areas within them) as well as many example of lower density urban and suburban environments that are awful.
Also, buildings are not really getting “ever denser and taller” except in the most extreme cases. In London, for example we’re usually talking about taking low density low quality housing or currently unused or underused ex-industrial land and turning it into higher density housing, offices, and retail. But this is not so high density that it icomes close to pushing the boundaries of what’s already known to be workable, especially when paired (as it usually is in London at least) with public space, local amenities, and transport upgrades.
I agree there’s almost certainly a maximum density above which we don’t know how to make cities livable.
London is nowhere near that. The relatively dense parts that suck to live in suck for other reasons or because of poor design (read: lack of care for the people who will live there from the designers/funders). Sprawl scales as badly, though it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t.
As for the rest of the UK: there’s even more opportunity to introduce well thought out density alongside infrastructure improvements and create a net benefit for everyone.
> we're creating the problem by literally importing people.
This is the opposite of how I see it. The UK could easily grow by properly investing in cities and infrastructure without eating into green space (and still meet climate goals).
Given the current unsettled world, we should be opening the doors to the smart and ambitious with a sensible but significant plan to increase population and have multiple globally important cities in say 20 years. Check out Canada for an (albeit incomplete and not without its challenges) example.
Two of my neighbours don't live in their London properties...
The live elsewhere in the UK and come to London once month or so for meetings.
Id never seen this before, but I assume this might be part of the problem, properties underutilised.
Many new flats target above average earners. London is attractive. And population is booming overall (UK population 2000: 59 million, 2023: 67.6 million).
If the goal is to reduce prices, then the solution is some combination of increasing supply and reducing demand.
Increasing supply of housing in London, or increasing supply of cities with qualities similar to London so that demand for London decreases. Or reducing the number of people eligible to live in London.
Increasing prices for labor at the bottom is also an option. Again, reduce supply of labor by offering free education to obtain higher paid work, etc.
Note that there will always be a tier of society who are at the edge of affordable for any desirable area. Not that efforts should not be continuously be made, but as some people are helped, others will arrive to compete (due to the desirability).
When I moved here the Gherkin was an iconic building in the skyline. Now I can rarely see it, surrounded by other generic skyscrapers. I find it really sad they obscured it from vision.
True. The Gherkin even just ten years or so ago was in all the b-roll footage whenever there was a documentary or segment about London, alongside Big Ben images.
Now, there are a whole bunch of skyscrapers, few with character (e.g., Shard), and many pretty basic (alongside Bishopsgate).
Overall, London keeps on building in so many of its areas (Kings Cross, City, Nine Elms, Victoria), and it's nice to see. I just hope these won't sit empty...
I have similar feeling about the LLoyds of London building, which is within the same few blocks. In the late '80s/early '90s it was iconic as a newly different building. Now it is practically lost between other huge (and IMO completely soulless) buildings.
I've enjoyed looking at these photos, but it also kinda makes me sad that there is such a massive drive to increase density in the city. I think I may be at a time of my life where I'm over being in or close to the capital.
As another former Londoner reading this thread, I think the confusion is that we were told increasing density will increase the viability and availability of local services, but the opposite turns out to be true. The London of today has more per sq mile than twenty years ago in terms of floor space but in level of interesting activity it doesn't compare.
I will admit the Shard is cool, but you are absolutely right about Lloyd's. Those of us of a certain age consider anything designed by Richard Rogers to look like the future we aspired to.
I remember when the NatWest Tower (Tower 42) was the tallest building, but yes I think it's sad that the Gherkin is now hidden behind a bunch of boring box shaped skyscrapers.
Almost everything you see is residential. And in the case of the new office blocks (the Canary Wharf shots), the developers are seeking consent for residential conversions. Playing SimCity and building only residential zones doesn't tend to work out great.
People like to say that people just have 'bullshit jobs' nowdays and I somewhat agree but this made me feel like there's actually a lot of work being done and progress being made.
Unproductive work is a financial drain, wouldn't it help investments to cut it? (We do have the problem of defining what's productive, though)... Economic calculation problem.
No. Those "unproductive" workers spend their money which ends up driving labor growth because of the services and goods they pay for. If every company got rid of the "unproductive" workers and all the inefficiency, you'd have wide swaths of really unproductive unemployed who are unable to contribute to the economy in any way, as well as all the "saved" money going towards the wealthy.
It's fascinating how boom and bust this is. You look at the City, or at King's Cross and there's just been a total transformation. Then you look at Nine Elms or Highbury and really very little has changed.
You've got Wembley - massively built up, loads of carparks gone and building in it's place. Then you've got the Millenium Dome, one big car park in 2007, one big car park in 2023.
The last two decades were a world of low interest rates where people worked in offices and lived in expensive, high density flats.
If commercial real estate has already peaked I wonder what the next two decades of development in London will look like?
There's a lot of residential in these shots, too. Commercial skyscrapers are more "visible" but there's also plenty of residential being built. Now, it's not affordable and probably outside of most people's means, but it's there and making useless areas like Nine Elms somewhat of hot spots – not everybody's cuppa tea for sure, but some do like it for whatever reason(s).
I compared one set of before/after and was surprised how much has changed: all the buildings seem to have changed in that one... until I noticed I was comparing images from two different locations. :)
So named because it's where they keep the financial services people, who are now the only ones who can afford to make noise at 3AM.
Fun fact: if you head east from there, things get pretty damn ghetto pretty quickly. Like, you don't want your car to break down, "projects"-level ghetto. Then it all fades away to the peculiar English joy of Essex. But make no mistake, there's some serious ghetto really close to the money.
Note also, this is the area that was bombed most heavily during the war due to its position to the east of town. The German bombers would drop their loads and turn around ASAP to minimize time exposed to AA fire. A septuagenarian I know who grew up there described it as a child's playground composed of a wonderland of overgrown, bombed out buildings.
Sure, but that's also not comparable. Dubai's population was 20.000 (!) in 1950. 500k in 1990, 3+ million today. That's a ~150x growth over the lifetime of a single person. London has grown by I think 20-ish percent over the last thirty years and was alreay affluent and large decades ago. Which is still pretty swift compared to Berlin or Paris. The kind of catch up growth where cities are built out of nothing an old city cannot compete with.
Yes, because as a populated city it’s very young: it virtually didn’t exist in the 19th century while London was the most populated city of the whole world at the time. Even in the 1930s London had 300x the population of Riyadh. You have to wait until the 1980s to see Riyadh have more than 1M inhabitants.
This doesn't make it any less impressive to see a whole city changing in 10 years.
Even Dubai which is probably younger didn't have the same level of change in the last 5 years.
Yep - Greater London does have some hills, especially in the outer boroughs, but most of the highest points that are not within a couple of kilometres of the border are all under 140m high.
The real story is one of intensification. Before 2000-or-so there weren't many sky-scrapers in the City-of-London (i.e the central financial district), now it looks like there are upwards of twenty.
Similarly in almost every photograph there is much less brown/grey space. Either empty spaces, or inner-city car-parks have been replaced by parks, or by new buildings.
I think this is reflected in the population history of the city. Since 2000 the city has grown from 7.2 million to 9.0 million - that's a good 20%, and London within the city limits (not that this is a great measure of city size) now actually had more population than New York.
Yeah, city limits is a terrible way to measure city size because it varies so much depending on how different countries like to partition and label things.
On paper, Paris is much smaller than London (2 million vs 9 million), but Île-de-France has 12 million, but that in turn is a more expansive measure than Greater London. Inner London has 3.5 million. But London is basically a couple of significant cities with loads of towns and dense urban area in between and surrounding; Paris is structured quite differently.
Sure, but it still doesn't capture the nature of the respective cities.
Open up Paris and London in two side by side windows in Google Maps, at an approximately similar scale, and look at the pale yellow areas (the bits Google considers as retail rather than residential). It looks like there's more of them, spread over a larger area, in Paris than London. Paris is visibly denser than London.
To the degree that the main characteristic of cities is that they are dense population centres, Paris has more of that than London.
London has a lot of high streets which feel fairly generically similar, because they're basically the same across the whole UK - the same shops, the same Greggs, the same Costa Coffees, the same Coral bookies, the same companies.
The main thing that make cities interesting to me is niche shops, restaurants and other experiences which are not sustainable without a large catchment area of potential customers. Density is important to enabling that; a huge spread-out urban area, like the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, doesn't really deliver it.
I don't know if Paris has the same degree of niche experiences that London has. I lived in London for 15 years, I know it well and always enjoy myself every time I return, but I always enjoy my times in Paris too. Zurich, where I am now, is a very dull place compared to either.
No I'm not saying Paris is better. I'm not saying it's bigger either. I'm saying they're different qualitatively, that size isn't everything, that density is also important.
Hah, love that you're showing White City, you've missed the gigantic residential development by Westfield and the big commercial White City Place that's continuing to go up.
I thought the same actually. These photos don't capture the transformation especially well. From the ground areas of kings cross for example are literally unrecognisable when compared to 20 years ago. Similarly nine elms or North Greenwich look superficially quite similar in the aerial photos but the reality is they are changed almost beyond recognition.
Maybe just Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, but I do see way more "Britain is still a great place to invest"-type of messages recently in various media, and it's always a sad reminder of Brexit :(
Reading Dickens is one way to get a feel for this. Many locations in his books are not yet part of the London conurbation. IIRC, one book has a character walking over fields to get to Hammersmith, for example.
Going back further there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Martin-in-the-Fields