Every day, at 6.30pm, chaos erupts at the old Euston railway station in London. It is the main gateway to the West Midlands, Wales and Scotland, connecting the capital with Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Glasgow, Scotland, but it cannot cope with the increase in high-speed trains and users have to put up with constant cancellations and changes of hours. «Do you see this sea of people pushing and running towards the tracks?» Francesca, a consultant in the City and a lifelong commuter, tells Panorama. «It’s been like this for months now and it will get worse. The situation is unsustainable, but my job is here, otherwise I would have already left.”
Welcome to Londonfrom which everyone runs away. Francesca’s story it is the parable of the British capital today, in which the inconveniences in public transport represent only the tip of the iceberg of a much wider crisis, which ranges from very high house prices to an ever-increasing “gentrification” which starves the middle bourgeoisie, pushing it in areas increasingly distant from the centre, to the point of petty crime which does not even spare the residential neighborhoods of a city where the luxury villas in Chelsea share the territory with the tent cities of the homeless, as also reported by Panorama in previous issues. If you visited one of the most beautiful European capitals in the world eight or nine years ago, you should know that it no longer exists. Although the number of total residents has not substantially changed in the last ten years – based on the most recent 2021 census, the inhabitants are 8,799,800 with an indication of growth of 0.74 compared to 2011 – the statistical data collected and the daily news portrays a profoundly changed reality at both a local and national level, and an exodus never recorded before. What remains are the opposite sides of the “code”: the most fortunate and those who have never been. Many people migrate, those who can leave the city completely, those who cannot, but cannot afford the neighborhood of the past, abandon the centre. There are those who do it because after Brexit and the pandemic, the United Kingdom and its capital are no longer the begodi of the pre-referendum period of 2016 and those who are progressively pushed into the dormitory suburbs of “Greater London”, the belt of suburbs where more and more residents have moved because housing prices and life in general are more accessible. In ten years the metropolitan area of Westminster has lost 6.9 percent of its population, while other peripheral areas have seen it increase by up to 13 percent. London no longer seems to be the welcoming destination of the Cool Britannia promoted by Tony Blair, but neither has it become the metropolis returned to its inhabitants, promised by Conservative governments over the last 14 years. It is impossible for families to buy a home and young single people who work in the center are unable to afford more than one room to rent in a shared house. In areas still free from petty crime such as Wimbledon, the monthly cost of a single room, in an apartment occupied by a family, is around a thousand pounds, around 1,200 euros.
«I was also lucky to find one big enough» explains relieved Michael, a recent graduate in creative writing and busy for a couple of months on a film set in Surrey, a 40 minute drive from Wimbledon «usually what they offered me were simply a bed thrown in the corner of the living room at home…” . The photographs of unlikely rooms, offered in the most desirable suburbs on the Spareroom.co.uk website, are eloquent. And we who thought that the basement of Harry Potter’s stepmother’s house, where the future most famous wizard in the world slept, was just a literary invention… Obviously it’s not just the rooms for rent that have seen increases, the cost too of life has increased much more compared to the average wage, especially after Brexit. According to research by Cambridge Econometrics, the consequences of the divorce from Europe – which are clearly emerging only in the last two years – have been decidedly worse for London citizens than in the rest of England. For the average Englishman, leaving the Union in 2023 cost around two thousand pounds a year compared to 2022, for the Londoner 3,400, around four thousand euros.
It adds to a difficult residential situation that of a rampant petty crime that no government has managed to contain also because the number of officers in the police force is increasingly reduced compared to a phenomenon that is rapidly growing. The most sensational cases of attacks on the public suffered in broad daylight in front of subway stations by members of some gang or at the hands of deranged people also end up on official media sites, but those reported on smaller portals such as MyLondon and similar are many more. On Nextdoor.co.uk, which collects communications from those who live in individual London villages, offers a glimpse of life in the center of the capital and its suburbs that tourists certainly don’t imagine. Two weeks ago a man “around 60 years old” was beaten to death, between 8 and 8.30 in the morning, in front of a primary school in Richmond, just as the children were entering the institution. The keyboard chatter immediately broke out among the mothers in the area who had received an email from the principal, saying that “if your child witnessed this traumatizing event, we have a support psychologist” .
In 2023, knife crime in London had increased by 21 percent and they remain on the rise also for 2024, indeed suburban areas such as Croydon, already defined as “the most dangerous area of the capital”, are tormented by a real guerrilla war, with off-limits areas, infested by gangs. But the exodus of families is also inevitably linked to that – much more structural – of the many companies which, after the pandemic and Brexit, have moved to more welcoming countries, where the workforce stolen from Londoners by the anti-immigration rules imposed after the 2016 and where the uncertainty for future investments is less heavy. The mayor of the City, Sadiq Khan, who led the capital even under conservative governments, had predicted that leaving Europe would be a disaster. «There’s no use hiding behind a finger» he explained this summer, commenting on the data on the closure of hundreds of venues due both to the pandemic and to the shortage of workers in the entertainment sector, «Brexit is not working and has very serious consequences on sectors essential for the city”. To cheer up the nights of a city that goes to sleep too early – during the week now all the restaurants close at 11pm and if you get late all you have to do is eat a sandwich at a fast food restaurant – eight years ago the mayor had hired the mayor as a consultant. influencer Amy Lamé, the “tzarina of the night”, who threw in the towel just a month ago, after having brought home an annual salary of 132 thousand pounds, but very little results. The industries in the sector are betting instead on cities such as Bristol, in the west of England, crowded with twenty- and thirty-year-olds, who prefer it for its old and new clubs to boring London or the resurrected Manchester and Liverpool, more lively and fun, certainly less dear.
The data collected in the field reveals that the nightlife here is by far much more active and prolonged than the London one, now reserved for a small number of wealthy elderly people who are content to sip a gin in the old city club, now also open to ladies, or to go home early, after a quick post-theatre dinner. Let’s be clear, London remains one of the most visited metropolises in the world, but its ten-year productivity index is 0.2 percent, compared to 1.4 in New York and the perception (fueled by differentiated offers on the websites of low-cost airlines -cost) that even visitors are starting to desert it in favor of European destinations where, to arrive, you don’t need a passport or biometric fingerprints such as Paris, Amsterdam, Rome itself, is tangible. London is not England, they say to explain that the capital is a world unto itself and does not represent all the souls of this country. But she is the one who made it great. To bring it back to the surface, we need to start here.
