London – Page 8 – Richard Brown

Urban growth forever?

[Original published on OnLondon, 3 January 2018]

In his foreword to his draft London Plan, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan writes of London’s population growing by 70,000 every year, to reach 10.5 million in 2041. Population growth has been London’s big story for the past 30 years. Growth assumptions underpin the business case, and increasingly the funding strategy, for everything from affordable housing delivery to major infrastructure projects like Crossrail 2. But could these be wrong? Could a toxic mix of falling immigration and priced-out professionals slow or even reverse London’s growth trajectory?

Population projections – like all predictions – tend to be either lucky or wrong. As Tony Travers observed in a recent edition of Centre for London’s London Essays, population projections underestimated London’s decline in the 1960s and 1970s, then missed the first signs of recovery in the mid-1980s when London’s shallow growth was dismissed as a blip in the pattern of decline that cities were expected to pursue. But growth continued, gathering pace through economic cycles of boom and bust.

London’s population growth is not a single process, but the product of great surges of people arriving and departing, at airports and stations, maternity wards and hospices. In mid-2016 London’s population was estimated, on the basis of passenger surveys and NHS registrations, to have grown by around 110,000 in the preceding 12 months. The components of this growth were as follows.

Births	130,000	80,000	110,000
Deaths	-50,000	80,000
Domestic in-migrants	580,000	-95,000
Domestic out-migrants	-675,000	-95,000
International in-migrants	220,000	125,000
International out-migrants	-95,000	125,000

This pattern has been pretty consistent in recent years: young UK residents move in to London from across the country, but more move out every year – generally to south east England. This domestic net migration from London is countered by international migration to London, and the city’s young age profile is reflected in a surplus of births over deaths.

There have been variations: in the years of the financial crisis, domestic out-migration slowed, perhaps because the credit crunch meant thirtysomethings were unable to get mortgages and so were stuck renting for longer. And the years since 2014 have seen a spike in international in-migration, potentially driven by the lifting of restrictions on Romanian and Bulgarian workers.

Could Brexit disrupt these flows? There are already some signs that things are changing. In November 2016, the Office for National Statistics’ latest estimates of net long-term international migration showed a sharp fall of 38 per cent in London. The figures are only estimates, with wide margins of error, but the ONS assessed the fall as being statistically significant. It may be a blip, but could it signal a longer-term change? Other indicators certainly suggest a slowdown: the number of foreign nationals registering for a national insurance number when they arrive to work in London dropped by 20 per cent between the beginning of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, with European nationals accounting for most of the decline.

Bringing the UK’s international migration down to “tens of thousands” as the Government has pledged would therefore have a big impact on London’s population, and it looks as if the mere prospect of tighter controls is already having an impact. Would this be offset by more people coming to London from the rest of the UK, and fewer leaving? Previous research has shown that when international migration declines (generally in recessions), domestic out-migration also slows, keeping population levels up.

But this depends on the balance of push and pull factors remaining constant: as long as London offers economic opportunity, people will come here; as long as it remains an expensive and tough city to live in, people will leave. Net out-migration has been rising since 2009 – from 30,000 to more than 90,000 – but it still has some way to go to attain its previous peak of 110,000 in 2004.

So what about births and deaths? The number of deaths in London has been pretty constant – around 50,000 Londoners die each year – but the annual number of births has climbed from around 100,000 to around 130,000 in the past 15 years. However, “natural increase” replenishment of London’s population has also been affected by immigration: 70 per cent of babies born in London in 2016 had one parent born overseas. Reducing immigration levels could, therefore, have an impact, in the long term, on that part of the picture too.

When London’s population started to recover in the mid-1980s after four decades of decline, it was driven first by domestic migration and then by accelerating international migration. Since then, momentum has grown, as freedom of movement, an internationalised economy and cheap air travel have combined to open London up, creating a city where 800,000 people – 10% of its population – arrive every year, and only slightly fewer leave.

But there is nothing inevitable about continued growth. It is perfectly possible to imagine a scenario where falling international in-migration and rising domestic out-migration combine to stop London’s growth in its tracks. If net international migration fell back by 20% a year, it would fall to around 65,000 in three years’ time – only slightly lower than its level in the early 2000s. If this was combined with a growth in internal out-migration to its previous peak, and a slight dip in births, London’s population growth could be reduced to just 17,000 by 2019 and could go into reverse the following year.

This is all highly speculative. We are still in the dark about the nature of Brexit, let alone its impact: London is still creating jobs and attracting inward investment, though business confidence remains fragile. The long-term change in international migration may be negligible, or may be counterbalanced by domestic movement.

London may continue to thrive economically, preserving and enhancing its offer to businesses and talented people from across the world, or its service sector economy may take a hit; academic research in recent months has suggested both that London will be hardest and least hard hit by Brexit. London property prices may resume their stellar trajectory, or may cool off to allow wages to catch up. It will only be in the next few years that we understand whether Brexit checks, stalls or amplifies the phenomenal population boom that London has experienced over the past 30 years.

Found in the suburbs

[Originally published online by the Guardian, 6 December 2017]

The London plan, the latest draft of which was published at the end of November, is the great ocean-going liner of London mayoral politics. It carries as its cargo all the mayor’s most important policies, as it sails from draft to adoption, navigating the choppy waters of public consultation and examination-in-public on its way.

As soon as the plan’s two to three-year journey is completed, it turns round to begin afresh the process of review and redrafting. It is the keystone of mayoral strategies, and one of the most powerful tools the mayor of London has to define the shape of London. It regulates the use of land – a scarce asset in a growing but constrained city – and over time all 33 London boroughs should ensure that their plans and planning decisions fall in line with its policies on what should be built where.

This concentration of mayoral powers in planning means many policies take on a spatial complexion: while the mayor cannot tax or ban unhealthy fast food shops, he can propose that they are located away from schools. He cannot license nightclubs, but he can require developers to meet the cost of soundproofing if they build alongside nightclubs. He does not manage financial services, but he can preserve land for offices in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf.

If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and if you are a planning document, everything looks like a land use issue.

At the heart of the latest London plan is its focus on annual new housing supply, raised from its previous target of 42,000 to 66,000, with half being affordable. It’s an ambitious target, considering that the present supply of new homes, 29,000, is less than half the new target – but the mayor argues that the capital’s crisis over a lack of affordable homes requires a big step up. Few would disagree with that.

Some of the proposed homes may be built outside London – the plan commits to working more closely with neighbouring councils, a scheme that will be considered in a forthcoming report by Centre for London and the Southern Policy Centre – but the priority will be building homes within the capital.

Alongside investment in affordable homes, which Khan says needs to be increased to £2.7bn, and land at the Olympic Park and Old Oak Common, the mayor must rely on his planning powers to achieve his target. In some cases, he will be able to intervene himself in planning decisions, but can only do so where certain conditions are met, such as schemes with more than 150 housing units or buildings over 30 metres tall.

In most cases, he will have to rely on the policies and planning decisions made by individual London boroughs and some outer London boroughs, who are being asked to double or even treble their speed of housebuilding – and who may be reluctant to do so, given the concerns of local voters.

So the plan seeks to make it easier for boroughs to grant planning permission and harder to refuse it. High density in itself, for example, can no longer be a reason to turn a scheme down – although there is sensible provision for careful scrutiny of the design of the highest density schemes.

There is also a sharper focus on smaller sites, which are expected to account for 25,000 of the 66,000 new homes a year. The plan says smaller sites should be prioritised by boroughs, with design codes drawn up to identify opportunities for new development, particularly around transport hubs, and a presumption in favour of giving planning permission.

But all this relies on developers wanting to build. For 20 years, London’s housing market has boomed, so the challenge has been how much the mayor and boroughs can secure from developers in terms of social housing and other community benefits; where permission has been refused, developers have often come back with a better offer.

At the launch of the draft plan, London’s deputy mayor, Jules Pipe, was adamant that it would not stifle development or undermine viability of schemes. But planning as a tool works better at directing development than initiating it. There is already a growing backlog of planning consents that have been given, but where houses have not been built, and without a dramatic increase in funding, the mayor has only limited powers to get homes built.

The draft plan does want to find incentives for homes to be built faster, and a switch to more rental developments and smaller sites should help, but at a time when London’s housing market is cooling, planning permission will only be half the battle.

This article was corrected on 12 December to clarify the mayor’s target of £2.7bn to invest in affordable homes.

London Sounds

[Originally published in OnLondon, 13 November 2017]

Richard Brown is research director at think tank Centre for London and before that he worked for Mayor Ken Livingstone and on the transformation of the Olympic Park. So he knows this city. He also knows a few of its tunes.

Why don’t we sing about our city? Writing here recently, Westminster North MP Karen Buck observed how few songs celebrate London, when so many reference postcodes, districts or neighbourhoods, from Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street to Wiley’s Bow E3.

Given London’s uneasy relationship with the rest of the UK, the capital may simply be reticent, loath to sing its own praises. Like a tall person at a party, London stoops to blend in. Also, as discussed at a recent Centre for London seminar, London identity is a slippery concept; many Londoners identify far more closely with their neighbourhood than with the unexplored miles and unknowable millions of the metropolis.

Newcomers are less coy about celebrating the city, still conceiving it as a singularity, rather than as the patchwork of places that residents navigate, and it is striking how many “London” songs are written by new arrivals or even in anticipation of arrival. One of the earliest, Lord Kitchener’s London is the Place for Me, was written before he arrived in Tilbury on the SS Empire Windrush as it brought the first wave of West Indian migrants to London in 1948.

The Smiths’ London is about the journey south from Manchester, and the Pet Shop Boys’ song of the same name depicts the Eastern European migrant experience. The Pogues’ early hymns to London, including the bleary Dark Streets of London and the boisterously offensive Transmetropolitan, were written from an adopted stance of London Irish rootlessness. Even two of the best-known London songs – The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset and Ralph McTell’s Streets of London – were originally composed for other cities, Liverpool and Paris respectively.

But many more songs are unambiguously about London, while never naming the city. Karen Buck picks out her erstwhile constituents The Clash, whose songs are an A-Z of punk reference points, but Woking imports The Jam were also prolific in the key of London: In The City and Strange Town celebrate the giddy excitement and the nervous alienation of coming up from the suburbs, while Down in The Tube Station at Midnight and That’s Entertainment take a more jaundiced view of late 1970s London, and its “smell of pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs, and too many right wing meetings”.

When I arrived in London in the 1990s, punk was long gone, except for postcards of theme-park mohicans on King’s Road. Alongside St Etienne’s electric ballads and Pulp’s class satires, Underworld’s early albums are powerfully evocative of London at that time. In Dirty Epic, sounding like a blissed-out Iain Sinclair, Karl Hyde invokes “the sainted rhythms of the midnight train to Romford”, capturing the queasy hedonism of London clubbing as acutely as Soft Cell’s Bedsitter or the Pet Shop Boys’ West End Girls did in the 1980s.

The capital looms, even when unmentioned, over all the later phases of Britpop, when Oasis, Pulp and Blur abandoned their regional roots to celebrate the capital’s offer of sex, drugs and existential angst, and – as 2000s war clouds gather – is a powerful presence in Damon Albarn’s subsequent work with The Good The Bad and The Queen. Songs like The Libertines’ Time for Heroes, and Plan B’s Ill Manors chart London’s history as a centre for protest and of rage. They don’t mention the city by name, but they don’t need to. Where London is mentioned, in Lily Allen’s LDN or Elvis Costello’s London’s Brilliant Parade, it is sardonically or even bitterly.

Even among these anonymous appearances, as the backdrop for stories of love and hate, success and failure, positive portrayals of London seem sparse, as Karen Buck argues. We don’t rhapsodise the city; even Noel Coward’s elegant wartime London Pride is a casual and minor key ode to a “grey city, stubbornly implanted, taken so for granted for a thousand years”. But perhaps that’s right: London’s glitter, so keenly serenaded by new arrivals, soon loses its lustre. It is replaced by a deeper, more clear-eyed but less articulate attachment, even a quiet sense of tainted civic pride, which infects and informs whole genres of music.

You can follow Richard Brown on Twitter and read more of his work on London via here.

Transport of no delight

When does \’disruption\’ tip over into irresponsibility? That was one of the fundamental tensions underpinning the tech manifesto published by Centre for London, with Tech London Advocates and London First, in February 2016. The row over Uber\’s licence suspension in London shows that we are still some way from an answer.

The Tech Manifesto argued for an approach that balanced \”open innovation, with consideration of citizens\’ needs\”, and identified \”the disruption to the private hire markets caused by the introduction of Uber in London [as] a prime example of regulators failing to keep pace with the scale and speed of a particular innovation\”.

On Friday, it felt like regulators finally caught up, when Transport for London announced that Uber\’s licence to operate in London would be revoked from the end of September. But the racing metaphor quickly implodes: the events of the last few days look like an object lesson in how not to do digital regulation. Transport for London\’s decision to pull Uber\’s licence appears to have come out of the blue, with little opportunity for Uber to address the concerns about driver and passenger safety that have been raised. At the same time, Uber, so rich in political networks, has responded with petitions and media campaigns about its 40,000 workers and millions of customers, blowing squid ink rather than trying to engage with the concerns about its systems and policies.

It may be that TfL has announced the \’surprise\’ revocation to force the pace with a company that would otherwise happily deploy lobbyists and lawyers to haggle for months over sanctions and compliance, and it may also be that Uber is sincere in the sentiment expressed by its CEO in a tweet on Saturday, asking London to \”work with us to make things right\”.

But this clash – more interesting because it is more textured than other cities\’ decision to ban Uber outright – does not inspire much faith in the future for intelligent discussions about regulating the digital economy. We cannot preserve business as usual for every element of city services, but we shouldn\’t give \’disruption\’ a free pass an unalloyed benefit to urban life – individually or in aggregate – either.

Sumday

[Originally published in Telegraph, 31 May 2017]

Almost a year after the EU Referendum, two sets of figures released by the Office for National Statistics seem to reinforce the idea of London as a place apart from the rest of the UK. Dig a little deeper, however, and it is convergence and mutual dependence that come to the fore.

The data on regional fiscal balances drew a sharp contrasts between London and the South East, and the rest of the UK, with the former paying nearly £250 billion on taxes, and receiving services costing almost £50 billion less in 2015/16, while the balance was reversed elsewhere. This translates to a per capita ‘subsidy’ of £3,000 in the year from London to the rest of the UK.

This shouldn’t be too surprising. The capital’s economy and its population have been growing as fast as ever since the financial crisis, fuelled by cheap money, openness to talent and growing trade in services. This economic growth means that London accounts for disproportionate levels of corporation tax, higher wages are reflected in higher income tax and national insurance payments, and soaring property prices are reflected in stamp duty receipts – half of which are derived in London.

In terms of expenditure, London costs more per head in terms of economic development, transport and technology costs, but significantly less in terms of social protection (ie, benefits). The balance between welfare costs and economic infrastructure costs is interesting, though there’s a limit to what you can conclude from a one-year snapshot of figures.

But, however successful London looks in terms of tax revenues, for many Londoners, the city’s gravity-defying boom feels like something that is happening to someone else. The second set of figures, on gross disposable household income, seems at first to confirm the sense of London excpetionalism. The figures, for 2015, show the average gross income of Londoners to be more than £30,000, almost twice as much as in the North East. Taxes and benefits bring the numbers closer together: the London average is £25,000 and the North East average is £16,000.

The gap is still significant. But, as any Londoner or tourist will tell you, it’s amazing how fast the money goes. Throw housing costs into the mix – neither mortgage capital repayments nor rent are included in the figures – and the gap closes further. Deducting the average 2015 rent for a one-bed flat in each region, you are left with residual income of £12,000 in London, and £11,000 in the North East. And that £1,000 ‘London premium’ will quickly be eaten by the higher costs of transport, childcare and beer in the capital.

Life is tough for many people in London – and it’s been getting tougher as income grew more slowly between 2014 and 2015 than in other regions, even before spiralling rental costs were taken into account. Also, of course, there is no such person as an average Londoner, and the differences within the city are as stark as those between London and other regions. Income per head (after taxes and benefits but before housing costs) in Kensington and Chelsea has nearly £60,000 per head, while the average resident of Barking and Dagenham has £16,500.

So these figures don’t show that Londoners are a bunch of effete metropolitans rolling in lucre, or that other UK regions are free-riding on the capital’s coat tails. But they do show, in line with Centre for London reports, the leading role played by housing costs in the persistent poverty that many Londoners face, and the importance to the whole UK of sustaining the openness to talent and trade that supports London’s growth.

Lamé, Duckie

I don’t get to Duckie as often as I used to, partly the result of moving to Brighton, and partly just getting older. But, for several years in the late 1990s, Duckie was the hub round which my week revolved. Friends’ parties, gigs and meals out could come and go, but from 10pm on a Saturday night, I would be at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern.

Duckie was founded in 1995 by Amy Lamé (appointed this week as Sadiq Khan’s new ‘Night Czar’), together with producer Simon Strange, DJs the (London) Readers Wifes, and door whores Jay and Father Cloth. London’s gay scene at the time was pretty conformist, dominated by identikit shirts-off techno sweatboxes, with only a few alternatives (like Popstarz, which was always a bit too fixated on Britpop for my taste). Duckie brought something new, mixing performance art, political activism, northern soul, electro, grunge and glam, all delivered with wit and intelligence.

Compered by Amy, a modern dance troupe would be followed on stage by an alternative drag act, or by striking Liverpool dock workers urging solidarity and collecting for a hardship fund. In between acts, you could spend half an hour swaying and struggling through the friendly crowd to bar or loo, as Kate Bush, The Damned, Suede, Pet Shop Boys, X-Ray Spex, The Smiths, and Althea and Donna boomed from the turntables (the Wifes were loath to indulge in DJ-ish gimmicks like ‘mixing’).

After the ever-changing roster of “the Readers’ Wifes’ favourite record OF ALL TIME!”, the never-changing refrain of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John’s ‘Xanadu’ would close the show, as the lights came up, and the crowd spilled out onto Vauxhall pavements. For five years, Duckie rocked my world.

Duckie was/is open and welcoming, challenging but safe, intelligent but amiable, arty but not po-faced, boozy but not lairy, crowded but not claustrophobic, raucous but not rough, sexy but not self-obsessed. As Amy Lamé settles into her new role, that sounds like a pretty good vision for what London’s nightlife could and should be.

Block-ed

Redeveloping council estates has become a popular way for boroughs to build more houses in London, where land is at a premium, but it is a high-wire act, conducted over a shark tank, with volleys of custard pies being hurled from the sidelines.

Build at too low densities and the numbers won\’t add up; go too high and you create a lumpy enclave out of keeping with its surroundings. Spend too much buying out existing residents and you kill the business case; spend too little and you will have to resort to compulsory purchase. Build too much market housing and you\’re accused of driving poor people from their homes; build too little and you won\’t make enough to cross-subsidise more affordable housing. Offer too little to developers and they won\’t take on the risk; offer too much and you look like an easy touch.

One of London\’s largest such schemes began to wobble on Friday, when the Secretary of State turned down Southwark\’s Council\’s application for a compulsory purchase order to enable the demolition and redevelopment of the Aylesbury Estate, planned to increase total housing numbers from 2,700 to 4,000. The scheme has been intensely controversial, with accusations of \’social cleansing\’, occupations and forcible evictions providing a stormy backdrop to the slow-grinding legalities of planning and public enquiries.

It is hard to avoid boggling at the politics of a Conservative minister seemingly siding with anti-gentrification protestors against a major development scheme promoted by a Labour council. Is this a sign of the May government\’s commitment to helping the poorest in society? Is this dismissal of the public-private partnerships that have dominated public projects for so many years another sign of the \’end of liberalism\’?

You can imagine Conservative spin doctors savouring some of these interpretations, but the politics of this decision are probably fortuitous rather than intentional. The process of confirming (or not) compulsory purchase orders is a quasi-judicial one, made on the basis of an inspector\’s report and carefully worded official advice, not for political positioning.

And, when you look a bit deeper, the decision is a very conservative one. It was not the rights of council tenants that were the central consideration, but eight remaining leaseholders, owners of property bought under right-to-buy legislation. The compensation offered to them was judged to be inadequate, and their human rights likely to be breached if their homes were requisitioned. It was actually the very conservative defence of private property rights, and the Conservative policy of selling off council housing, that has knocked the project off course.

City Traders

[Originally published in London Essays, June 2016]

At seven o’clock on a drizzly April morning, Canary Wharf is just coming to life. Bankers, brokers and lawyers stream up from the station, ready for a new day of trading and deal-making. But in a low-slung yellow building just north of the gleaming towers, the working day is nearing its end.

Inside Billingsgate Market, traders in long white coats and wellington boots are chatting among themselves as they start to hose down their stalls. Polystyrene boxes packed with seafood glisten under bright fluorescent lights. The market is not as busy at it was earlier but customers still circulate: trade suppliers are keenly comparing prices and quantities alongside a diverse selection of retail browsers – a couple of Orthodox Jews, a Coptic Christian priest, Chinese families, bearded foodies.

There’s fish here from all round the British Isles: from Aberdeen and Grimsby, Brixham and the Shetland Isles, Whitstable and Lowestoft: coley and cod, sea bream and salmon, tiger-striped mackerel and scallops in the shell. Other stalls specialise in ‘exotics’ – species of fish from faraway oceans, many of which I have barely heard of, let alone eaten: redfish, milkfish, catfish, kingfish, needle fish, barracuda, croaker, tilapia, frozen breezeblocks of squid.

Billingsgate, which moved to Docklands in 1982, is the biggest fish market in the UK; 25,000 tonnes of fish a year, almost 100 tonnes a day, pass through on the way from sea to plate. Lorries arrive from 9pm until the starting bell rings at 4am, bringing seafood from UK fishing ports, from airports, from the cargo docks where frozen fish from the South Pacific and Indian Ocean is unloaded. The consignments are split between the 98 stands in the centre of the market and the 30 shops that line its edges, or sent to a freezer store the size of a football pitch at the back of the market.

Billingsgate is one of London’s five wholesale food markets. The Western International Market at Southall, New Covent Garden at Vauxhall, and New Spitalfields at Leyton all supply fruit and veg; Smithfield meat market remains on its historic site in Farringdon. Three of these – Billingsgate, New Spitalfields and Smithfield – are operated by the Corporation of London, which was granted exclusive rights to operate markets around the City of London in 1327. The Corporation estimates that their three markets handle nearly 900,000 tonnes of fish, meat, fruit and vegetables every year, and turn over nearly £1bn (though traders are cautious about disclosing precise figures that might lead to rent rises).

London’s streets may never have been paved with gold but they were always dotted with market stalls and filled with food. Shifting patterns of food production, trading and consumption have shaped the city, as much as struggles between church and state, nobles and merchants, industry and commerce.

London’s place names tell this story: Milk Street and Bread Street; Pudding Lane, where the Great Fire of London started; Eel Pie Island. Sometimes the old names have been erased: Old Fish Street no longer runs down to Billingsgate; and More London (the development by London Bridge that includes City Hall) eschewed the waterfront walkway’s old name, Pickle Herring Street – a salty reflection of Bermondsey’s history of food processing – opting for the stately The Queen’s Walk instead.

Meanwhile, London’s markets have been transformed. In London: the Biography, Peter Ackroyd describes the street market that formed the spine of the medieval City of London. You can trace the route down Cheapside today, from the bloody shambles of livestock and butchery at Smithfield, outside the city walls at Newgate (near the end of Holborn Viaduct today) to Poultry (the name is self-explanatory) and Cornhill, where vegetables, meat and fish were traded from what would later become the Royal Exchange, the foundation of London’s stock market. South of the Royal Exchange, on the banks of the Thames, Billingsgate was so ancient that the origins of its name are unknown, though it was granted a charter in 1400.

Until the Thames was overwhelmed with industrial and domestic waste, eels and other fish came directly from the river: as the city grew, the River Roding at Barking became home to Britain’s largest fishing fleet. There are records of a fleet at Barking from the 11th century, as Andrew Summers and John Debenham set out in London’s Metropolitan Essex. By 1700, boats would venture to Iceland, and by the 19th century the fleet was 200-strong, their catch cooled by ice harvested in the winter from flooded marshes. From 1850, decline set in, as the railways made remote northern ports quickly accessible by land, and street names like Whiting Avenue are all that preserve the memory of Barking’s seafaring heyday.

The arrival of the railways was pivotal for London’s food supply and urban development. Beforehand, most of London’s food was grown on its doorstep. In 1796, Daniel Lysons’ survey of the suburbs estimated that there were 5,000 acres (the same area as the Royal Parks) of market gardens within 12 miles of the metropolis, plus 1,700 acres of potato fields and 800 acres of fruit trees. Barges brought manure from London’s stables to feed the soil and returned food to the city’s markets. Ackroyd writes of “cabbages from Battersea and onions from Deptford, celery from Chelsea and peas from Charlton, asparagus from Mortlake and turnips from Hammersmith”. The railways untethered London’s growth from its geography by dramatically extending supply lines: the population was no longer constrained by the availability of food within a few miles of the city, and the market gardens of the suburbs could make way for housing.

One walled market garden, between the City and Westminster, served the convent and abbey at Westminster. Covent Garden was seized by Henry VIII in the dissolution of the monasteries and granted to the earls of Bedford. In the following century, the 4th Earl began developing the land, with Inigo Jones designing the arcaded piazza and St Paul’s Church – a prototype garden suburb for prosperous Londoners. For a period the area flourished, but in time, Roy Porter writes, “the fruit and vegetable market also operating in the square sapped its smartness and the aristocracy quit, migrating to Mayfair”.

Covent Garden slid into seediness, but the fruit and vegetables market flourished particularly after 1666, when the Great Fire destroyed the City’s markets. In Victorian times, with new market halls in place, the market boasted 1,000 porters. In 1974 the market relocated to Vauxhall, after an epic battle between conservationists who wanted to preserve the old buildings and the Greater London Council, who proposed a comprehensive redevelopment in the worst traditions of 1970s car-based urbanism.

Every Day But Christmas, Lindsay Anderson’s 1957 documentary about Covent Garden, begins late at night in the fields of Sussex, where lorries are loaded with lettuces, mushrooms and roses, and set out through the darkness to London. The film records the quickening tempo of the market, as vegetables arrive, then flowers, then porters and customers (including London’s last female market porter and last flower girls, successors in trade to Eliza Doolittle), then cleaners and scavengers. The streets are a jumble of lorries, pallets and people.
Illustration by Lucinda Rogers
Illustration by Lucinda Rogers

There’s a calm interlude in the film, between the unloading and the stacking of the produce and the arrival of the customers, where the market workers retire to a café for a break – a cigarette, a cup of tea and a bacon roll. They are not the only nighthawks in the café. The camera lights on a group of gay men, chatting and shooting nervous glances at the camera (we are still 10 years away from the partial legalisation of homosexuality), and fixing elaborate coifs. Narrator Alun Owen intones archly: “Not everybody in Albert’s works in the market. Some of them, you wonder where they come from.”

Market workers would have been less naïve. Before London’s current redefinition as a 24-hour city, markets also stood out as permissive places, where the loud and the louche mingled with the traders who kept the city fed. As well as being a place of butchery and executions, medieval Smithfield was the location of St Bartholemew’s Fair, a notorious three-day debauch that ran for 700 years before being suppressed in the 1850s. In modern times, too, markets and nightlife enjoyed a curious co-existence: as in the Meatpacking District in New York, Smithfield and Vauxhall became hubs for clubbing, away from the potentially censorious gaze of London’s daytime population.

20 years ago, says David Smith, Director of Markets and Consumer Protection at City of London Corporation, wholesale markets looked like a spent force, a relic from a pre-modern era. Supermarkets were establishing their own supply chains and their own warehouses on the edge of London; the wholesale markets’ niche would only become narrower. In 2002 and 2007, reports recommended the slimming down of London’s markets, proposing that Billingsgate and Smithfield be closed and their business consolidated to New Spitalfields and/or New Covent Garden.

These plans foundered in the complexity of legislation and commercial interests, but then the wholesale trade experienced a revival: today, the Corporation’s markets are fully occupied and returning a small surplus. Three factors threw the markets a lifeline: one was London’s phenomenal boom in dining out, encompassing everything from opulent Michelin aspirants to inventive street food pop-ups. A city whose food had traditionally served as the butt of other people’s jokes became one of the world’s great dining destinations.

Another factor was immigration: supermarkets work at scale but the choice they offer is heavily circumscribed. ‘International food’ aisles have been outpaced by the growth in specialist suppliers of everything from Chinese greens to curry leaves to Polish sausage to pomfret. At Billingsgate alone, ‘exotics’ are now reckoned to make up 40 per cent of turnover. New Londoners have revitalised the city’s markets as well as its cuisine.

The third factor was a change in food-buying culture and a resurgence of middle-class interest in authenticity and provenance. The markets increasingly operate at the edge of mainstream consumption, providing specialities for minority cuisines and exquisite ingredients for epicureans, as well as acting as a secondary market for produce that is just a little too gnarly and imperfect for the supermarkets’ exacting aesthetic standards.

But the irony of London’s voracious appetite, for land as much as for food, is that the city is forever devouring its edge, driving markets and other food services further from the centre. Rational planning pushed Covent Garden, Billingsgate and Spitalfields out of central London, narrowing their focus to wholesale trade and relocating it to fringe industrial areas, but today these locations – alongside the massive redevelopment of Vauxhall, next to Canary Wharf’s new Crossrail Station and at the edge of London’s Olympic Park – are far from peripheral. Yesterday’s remote trading outpost is today’s property hotspot.

The City of London Corporation’s Markets Committee have asked for another strategic review, and at Billingsgate rumours of relocation abound. Moving to New Spitalfields is still discussed as one option, but space there is short; relocation to a new facility in Barking is another possibility. Meanwhile, at New Covent Garden (currently owned by central government), a joint venture is in place to build a new 500,000 square-foot market, together with 3,000 homes and 135,000 square feet of offices.

Curiously, the market that feels most secure is Smithfield, which has occupied the same site for the best part of a millennium. As London grew around the livestock market, Smithfield became increasingly controversial, not just for what one Victorian campaigner described as the “cruelty, filth, effluvia, pestilence, impiety, horrid language, danger, disgusting and shuddering sights” of the market itself, but also thanks to the chaos caused by driving animals through the narrow streets. A new cattle market was opened in 1855 in Islington, and Smithfield was re-established as a meat market, with carcasses delivered by underground railway.

The 42 traders at Smithfield today have successfully battled against redevelopment, the most recent proposal for which was rejected in 2014, following a public inquiry. The now-disused General Market, alongside Farringdon Road, is earmarked for the relocation of the Museum of London, but the Victorian East and West Markets and the 20th century Poultry Market are all listed, severely limiting the scope for profitable redevelopment, especially once the costs of relocating traders are taken into account.

The possible future for London’s wholesale markets is not simply survival or displacement. Markets could become re-absorbed by the city in their new locations, rediscovering the mix and urban quality that was lost in rezoning. The plans for Vauxhall Nine Elms Battersea see New Covent Garden as an essential component of local character, and include proposals for a new ‘Garden Heart’ of workspaces, with a ‘Food Quarter’ of specialised shops and restaurants alongside it.

The story of London’s wholesale markets is rich in anomaly. Trading animal carcasses and crates of fish on the doorstep of Europe’s leading financial centres is certainly a surprising use of prime real estate. But the markets’ survival should be celebrated, as should their continuing capacity for reinvention. In a city endlessly seeking novelty, variety and traceability in its diet, wholesale markets make visible the sinews and circulatory system of consumption, and draw a line connecting medieval trade in beasts, fowls and fish with the complex assets and derivatives that are bought and sold in financial markets today.

Crossed wires on paying for infrastructure

In giving the green light to the next stage of planning for Crossrail 2 in the 2016 Spring budget, the Chancellor has taken the right decision for London and the UK. Transport for a WorldCity, the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) report published a few days before the budget, powerfully made the case that Crossrail 2 is vital for sustaining economic vitality. The NIC estimates that the capital could pay for more than half of the £33 billion cost. But the detail of how London pays its share goes to the heart of our antiquated and hopelessly dysfunctional local government finance regime.

Ever since the Jubilee Line extension was built in the late 1990s, boosting land values so much that these could have paid for the project three times over, governments have wrestled with dilemma of big infrastructure: the costs fall on the public purse, but many of the benefits (and in particular property value uplifts) accrue to the people and businesses who are most directly affected. Property owners who pick the right numbers in the infrastructure lottery get a windfall at others’ expense.

As public spending has tightened in recent years, the search for clever ways of funding big projects has become more and more intense. Money borrowed for the Northern Line extension to Battersea will be repaid through developer contributions and ringfenced business rates, and commentators have suggested that Crossrail 1 was only spared the axe in 2010 because 60 per cent of its costs were met by Londoners and London businesses.

The Crossrail 2 package proposed by Transport for London follows the Crossrail 1 pattern by loading most costs onto London’s businesses and property developers. 18 per cent of the costs would be met from future fares and property deals; 20 per cent would come from a supplement on business rates (about a five per cent increase in the tax bill for most larger businesses); and 17 per cent would come from a Mayoral community infrastructure levy on new development.

But householders get off very lightly. Only 1.4 per cent of the cost of the project would come from council tax, specifically from rolling forward the Olympic precept that Ken Livingstone introduced in 2006 (memorably comparing it to the cost of a Walnut Whip for the average household every week). The precept currently adds £20 per year to the average ‘Band D’ household, around 1.5 per cent of the annual bill.

So where’s the problem? London’s booming businesses and rapacious developers get hit with the tax bills, lightening the load on ordinary citizens. This may look like good news, but given the state of London’s property market, this funding package would do almost all the wrong things. Charging an additional community infrastructure levy will threaten developers’ bottom line, which could just as easily result in delayed development, raised sale prices, or reductions in other social benefits like affordable housing, rather than in reduced profits. And higher business rates may be reflected in higher prices or slower wage growth, or may even push businesses away from London.

Modest London-wide council tax increases, on the other hand, will do nothing to capture the increased desirability and value accruing to homeowners, particularly those nearest the new rail lines, who will get the mother of all free rides (one possible exception being Chelsea, where affluent residents are protesting against a new station). In fact, Crossrail 2 may make matters worse for Londoners struggling to get on the housing ladder, pushing prices even higher in the districts that it opens up.

So the Crossrail funding package proposed for London could increase the costs of doing business in London, and hike the value of property, creating an unearned and largely untaxed bonanza for those living nearest stations, and pushing prices further our of reach for everyone else.

As the NIC report points out, the package proposed is constrained by the scope and structure of taxes raised locally. TfL are working with what they’ve got. As the London Finance Commission pointed out in 2013, London’s council tax bands have not been revalued since 1993, when £320,000 defined the top tier of property values, rather than representing a bargain, £200,000 below the average house price.

Regular (perhaps annual) revaluation would be fairer, allowing tax rates to be better tailored to the real values of homes and to capture some of the benefits that new infrastructure brings to home-owners in the shape of rising house prices. If new infrastructure dramatically increased values, council tax would reflect this, and a proportion of the new tax revenues could be top-sliced to repay money borrowed to pay for the investment in the first place.

The obstacles to council tax revaluation have been seen as practical as well as political. Practically, the exercise would be complex and call for careful callibration, but we shouldn’t make too much of this. The technology we use to track property values has changed out of all recognition since 1993. When anyone can check the value of their property against the local market with a few clicks of a mouse, a revaluation would not require a new Domesday Book.

There would be winners and losers, and political controversy, but these problems aren’t insuperable. Transitional reliefs would be needed, as might measures to allow tax to be deferred so that cash-poor owner-occupiers were not forced to move by sudden tax hikes. And Labour’s proposed ‘mansion tax’, a far blunter instrument than recalibrated council tax, did not do the party too much damage last year in London, the city that would have been hardest hit.

Other taxes could help to fund infrastructure too. Stamp duty and capital gains tax do actually reflect rising property values, though they only kick in when property changes hands, and in the case of capital gains tax they do not apply to people’s main residence. Nor are these currently available to the Mayor or the London boroughs, though the Government could at the very least extend the principle it applied to the Northern Line extension by allowing the Mayor to repay borrowing using tax revenues that would normally go directly to Whitehall.

In times of continuing austerity, booming London will have the devil of a job convincing the rest of the UK, let alone the Treasury, that it deserves massive public subsidy for infrastructure, however much other regions actually benefit from its growth. London is booming, and should pay its fair share. But without more comprehensive devolution and more control over its taxes, the capital will struggle to secure its future prosperity.

Cuts back

[First published on Municipal Journal blog, 26 November 2015]

Yesterday\’s Autumn Statement came at a challenging time for London. The capital\’s growing population is facing spiralling house prices, and putting pressure on infrastructure and services – from homelessness and social care to transport.

The Chancellor’s housing announcements took centre stage. The London Help-To-Buy scheme will raise the equity loan available for new homes from 20 to 40 per cent, reflecting the limited impact of the scheme in London to date. But the long-term impact on affordability is more questionable. If the scheme does not stimulate extra supply it will merely inflate a house price bubble.

The Chancellor also extended eligibility for shared ownership. Applicants will no longer have to meet locally-set criteria of living or working in a particular area or profession, and the income cap will be raised to £90,000 in London. But as Centre for London’s recent report Fair to Middling observed, the model doesn’t work for everyone; social rent, affordable rent and other forms of low-cost housing are also an essential part of the mix.

We don’t yet know the detailed allocations for local government in London, but the cuts appear to have been a lot less severe than many feared. The Chancellor boasted that cash expenditure by local authorities would be as high in 2019/20 as it is in 2015/16, but real terms spending will nonetheless fall by seven per cent over the four years, and will drop sharply over the next two years before recovering.

It could have been a lot worse – many were forecasting real terms cuts of 30 per cent or more, but the continued squeeze will not be easy, especially coming on top of the five lean years that saw London boroughs\’ spending falling by around 28 per cent in real terms. As Centre for London\’s analysis of the last round of cuts Running on Fumes showed, London boroughs have been resilient in coping with austerity to date. Over the next four years, the quest for efficiency savings will continue, and front-line services are unlikely to escape unscathed.

But the headline figures mask a quiet revolution. Revenue support from central government will fall from £11.5 billion to £5.4 billion over four years. The balance will be made up by retained business rates and council tax, forecast to rise from £29 billion to £35 billion over the same period (the figures do not take account of plans for full business rate retention). Many will welcome this devolution of fiscal responsibility, but questions of distribution and fairness will loom ever larger, as poorer boroughs, facing greater demands on services, struggle to grow their business tax base, and hesitate to impose permitted council tax rises to support social services.

Major London capital projects receive a boost: funding for the \’Olympicopolis\’ cultural and educational complex in Stratford has been announced (again), and the Government will bring land at Old Oak Common under single control. Further east, the extension of London Overground to Barking Riverside will enable higher quality development of one of London\’s longest-delayed sites, and investment in Ebbsfleet infrastructure should support the realisation of the new \’garden city\’ recommended by Centre for London.

One of the most dramatic changes is to Transport for London’s funding. Alongside pledges of an £11 billion in capital investment, the revenue grant that makes up 6 per cent of TfL’s annual costs will be phased out, saving £700 million by 2019/20. TfL will be expected to make up the shortfall through efficiency savings, through increasing fares (another blow to London\’s modest earners), or by generating revenue from the land it owns across London. This land has long been eyed as a potential source of housing; with TfL’s budget under pressure, the incentive will be to maximise value. Expect some fiery discussions about tenure mix and commercial value.