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3 London: Buzzing city life Before you read a) London’s disparaging nickname is “The Great Wen”. Can you come up with any other nicknames for cities? b) What is the most interesting city you have ever visited? How would you describe it? c) Think of three ways to improve your neighbourhood. d) Expanding cities cause major problems for people living there. Name five. Reading: London – The Great Wen In pairs, divide the text into two halves and quickly skim through your part of the text. Tell your partner the basic content of the text you have read. Growing London – Let the Great Wen get greater still 1  2  “BUT, what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, the metropolis of the empire?” So asked William Cobbett, a radical journalist in the 1820s. Two centuries later his term for London, the “Great Wen”, has stuck with us. The view that London, far from being a glittering metropolis, is in fact the source of provincial Britain’s woes, is as fashionable as ever. This morning, Aditya Chakrabortty, a writer on The Guardian , argues that London does not have a housing crisis after all. Rather, he argues, Britain has a London crisis – the capital city is growing too much and the rest of the country not enough. His view echoes that of the business secretary, Vince Cable, who commented last year that London is “becoming a giant suction machine draining the life out of the rest of the country”. Though Mr Chakrabortty is a Londoner, he speaks for millions of people living outside the capital who believe that the existence of a global megacity in the south-eastern corner of England is on the whole a bad thing. And in one sense, they are right: London does grow ever faster than the rest of the country. Between 1997 and 2012, London’s share of Britain’s economic output grew from around 19% to around 22%. The capital’s economy sucks in workers from all over Britain – indeed, from all over the world. That explains why there is so much pressure on housing. So many people want to live here that they are driving up the price. That applies to grotty rented flats over shops in Hackney almost as much as it does to mansion blocks in Kensington and Chelsea. Yet is London too big? Surely not. What London-​ bashers such as Mr Chakrabortty seem to suggest is that London’s dominance is wholly the result of government. Things like Crossrail, and the existence of government departments in the centre, is why the growth is in London. There is a little truth to this – transport and cultural spending is disproportionately high in the capital – but it misses a broader point. London gets much of its investment because it is already growing so strongly. And it is growing so strongly because it is already so big. Like other big cities across the world, “the Great Wen” gets its strength from agglomeration – the benefits that come from being squashed together. In London and the greater south east, these are clear. At least ten million people live within an hour’s commute of The Economist’s office in St James’s. Within a few miles of where I sit, I can find management consultancies, banks, internet start ups, hedge funds, car-dealerships, estate agents, newspapers, radio stations, countless restaurants, television companies, even a couple of gin distilleries. Why do these companies choose to base themselves in London, paying as much as £100 per square foot for space, when they could fill up “lovely cheap buildings north 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 44 Regional identities Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eige tum des Verlags öbv