The future of our society hangs on our ability to meet the needs of everyone who lives here. For many it is about security and just about managing: a decent job, a home and a life free from fear of economic precarity or crime. Our failure to provide these basic needs before the pandemic was a stain on our country. After it, now we know that our failure has cost the lives of too many vulnerable people, we must do better.
But this article is about the ‘more than just about managing’. The middle class: people who have the economic freedom to make wider choices about how and where they live. It is prompted by my first trip to London in a year or so. An often weekly journey turned into an annual event is an opportunity to look at and to feel familiar sights through fresh eyes.
I’m immediately struck by the complex relationship between meeting the needs of everyone and the fact that our recent urban renaissance was driven, probably too driven, by the millions of people from the global middle classes who chose to call a British city, and above all London, their home.
To really make a difference to the needs of all in our post Covid-19 politics, we must understand how this depends on the economic engine of global talent. People. People whose absence from our cities has been as obvious as anything else as we’ve all wandered through deserted city centre streets these last eighteen months.
Here, I think we can see some good news. Life is already flowing back strongly. The tide has turned and places that were deserted have people in them again. Events like the football, as much as missives from our bosses to get back to the office, are reminding us that we are social creatures. We need and want the company of others. If the tide of humanity is flowing back into cities, the question isn’t whether they will return but one of extent. Will the high tide of humanity that was our pre-pandemic, pre-Brexit cities turn out to be the high water mark? It is of course too soon to tell. There are reasons to think that recent events and the damage, self-inflicted and otherwise, that they have wrought on our cities and towns will leave us weaker and less populous. But there is also strong pent up demand ready to be unleashed.
Our cities themselves, one of our greatest assets, hang in the balance. That really is the point of this article.
Like every other desk-based professional this last fifteen months, I’ve worked through Teams and Zoom, experiencing my work on cities and towns the length and breadth of the country through discussion, the written word, Google maps and imagination. But this journey reminds me that real life happens in bricks and mortar and concrete too, and on buses and trains. The real economy relies on its physical existence.
The first and perhaps most important point here is that the anticipation and some fear of this trip gave way to a grateful relief as I arrived and walked through Bloomsbury en route to our London office yesterday. I had a similar feeling when I went to Liverpool a few weeks ago for my first client meeting in a year. Perhaps it is just me but being in a place rather than just reading and writing about it is different. Physical presence produces powerful, visceral reactions. I suspect it is not just me. Watching football alone is a very different experience to being in a football community (and why despite logical arguments against, I still have a season ticket at Old Trafford). I and plenty of others have also written at length about how creativity too thrives in proximity as we wrote in a recent report, Place Matters.
The second important point about bricks and mortar struck me very hard as I walked past the Cork and Bottle Wine Bar in Leicester Square. A slightly dingy subterranean establishment, it holds the fondest of memories for a lot of civil servants of my time in London. It is one of those places where we went to act grown up, eating and drinking modestly priced fare after long days in the office. And as a result it is where a good deal of actual growing up happened. The bricks and mortar of that building are unremarkable. But what happened there was, in a workaday sort of way, rather special. The place is imbued with memories that produce a feeling of attachment. Everyone has their Cork and Bottles. Much more so than the grandeur of the buildings of a city, it is in the nooks and crannies of its watering holes and the people you meet and commune with in them that the essential feelings you have for a place are formed. These are of course related. Richer, more beautiful places tend to attract people. But so too, like Soho, Greenwich Village and the Northern Quarter, do seriously cool ones. Those places change of time and each generation has their own. This is what gives me optimism. The emotional muscle memory of the great experiences we have had will guide us back to the places in which we had them. That is true of our creative workspaces and of our social lives too.
The third point of reflection from this trip is on density. The tide of humanity may be returning to cities. But they feel far from full. Whether it was walking through Leather Lane for lunch or walking through Soho and Bloomsbury, the feeling was of a place running at half or lower than its usual density. There was also what felt like a qualitative difference in the people around me. Arriving in London has for a long time felt like arriving in a different country: busier, younger, more affluent with a different balance of people. It has always felt like it had proportionally fewer people like me and more of what the Italians would call the ‘bella figura’ of the average well-turned out global hipster. This week, London felt more like Manchester than I can remember in a very long time. The problem is that, at the same time, the Manchester I live in now has started to feel temporarily like the Manchester I left in the 1990s. This change is not for the better. If the global talent and money moves on, then everyone loses out. “Cakeism” only works if there is cake.
In these thoughts lie some uncomfortable issues with which we are all wrestling and some consequential choices too.
One of my wife’s favourite aphorisms, usually deployed as I decide between the available food options, is that; ‘you can have anything you want but you can’t have everything’. What is true of my dinner is to a degree true of our urban economies. Large swathes of our country that never experienced the buzz of Manchester’s Northern Quarter, let alone Soho, have been encouraged by the loose talk of political populism to look enviously at our cities and reclaim their slice of the economic cake. As I wrote at the outset, we simply have to make a big change in the life chances of our whole population. But for all the aspiration of the foundational economy and small scale policy activism of the towns fund, there is not one shred of credible evidence that our towns are going to become more prosperous if our cities don’t bounce back. Cities are the major organs of our body economic even if it is in our towns that the body politic is being reformed. Our cities and towns will rise together, or they will both fall.
For all the talk of “cakeism”, I suspect that half full cities won’t last for ever. If we are to return to a sustainable growth path we are going to need cities that are fuller. That is not to say we need to return to the levels of misery that people endured on their commute. Building back smarter and more sustainably is a big part of building back better. But we need the people to come back.
As Paul Krugman often comments: ‘the facts have a well known liberal bias’. This is rarely truer than in relation to migration. The overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that migration is good for our economy. Its salience as a political issue rises and falls. The best guess is that the British people are essentially and usually comfortable with migration. They would be more so if the Home Office didn’t routinely mess up the distribution of asylum seekers, if seasonal agricultural workers were housed and treated with more dignity and if populist politicians didn’t seek to make capital out of sowing confusion and discord. In twenty years of free movement of labour, many Europeans have chosen to come to our cities who, otherwise, might not have. Many have returned, but many others remained: we will need these Europeans, and others besides them, to move freely to and from our cities for their tide to rise high again. If the pandemic and Brexit really have turned the bella figura youth of Europe against our cities, we will be all the poorer, economically and socially as a result. Talent from the rest of the world is vital for our future, but as in trade, proximity matters.
As I write this on the train back to Manchester, I remain optimistic. One thing that neither the pandemic nor the xenophobic rantings of some Brexit populists can take from our cities are the feelings of the people of Europe and the rest of the world who have experienced what our great cities have to offer. The same is true for the people of our own country as it was true for me this week. We have had a whole generation of our cities feeling like great places again. It will take more than the pandemic and some pretty rancid politics to change that. We must do everything possible to enable everyone to share in our nation’s prosperity. We need to work hard on the future of towns. But we will succeed in neither if we neglect the needs as well as the opportunities offered by our great cities.