One of the things I miss most during the pandemic is London. About once a month in the old days, I’d go from waking up in Paris to having morning coffee with someone in Soho. Customs were a breeze, you could work on the Eurostar and London was an incomparable one-stop shop for ideas and information. On one of my last trips, I spent the morning at a tech conference at St Pancras, then walked across the Euston Road to attend an academic seminar on rhetoric. The jackets at the second event were more frayed, but the thoughts were just as stimulating. I’d return from the typical 36-hour London visit dizzy from everything I’d heard. But now the city faces a triple whammy of Covid-19, Brexit and the rise of English-language alternatives.
Language was London’s biggest advantage over its European rivals. The world’s lingua franca acted as an equaliser, allowing Germans, Chinese, Americans, Pakistanis and the odd Brit to share friction-free coffees. Ideas and information are the raw materials of London’s strongest industries. The sectors in which Britain had more than 10 per cent of global exports in 2015 (according to McKinsey) were finance and insurance, arts, entertainment, recreation, publishing, audiovisual, broadcasting and education. These industries cross-pollinated: the Bloomsbury professor, the Moorgate banker and the barrister in Lincoln’s Inn all met, often by accident or socially.
Every day, the existing stock of Londoners was supplemented by incomers from the London-sphere of cities a painless train ride away — Paris, Lille, Birmingham, Manchester, Rotterdam, Brussels. (London is one of Europe’s best assets.) Overlapping with this was a ceaseless influx of ex-Londoners, returning like ghosts to our old hangouts. Ursula von der Leyen, a London School of Economics alumna, has fond memories of “Soho bars and Camden record stores”; some of my happiest moments have been spent stuffing myself at the Phoenix Palace Chinese restaurant on Glentworth Street. So many people around the world have two homelands: their own and London.
