London Report: We Investigated London for Six Months and Found More London Than Expected

After Six Months of Research, Our Team Can Confirm: It Is Complicated, Expensive, and We Are Still Here

Our London Report team spent six months investigating the capital across five key performance indicators: liveability, affordability, transport reliability, cultural access, and the general ambient sense that things are, broadly, alright and the city is working as intended. We consulted official data, independent research, and seventeen Londoners at various levels of coffee consumption. We present our findings without further editorial comment, because the findings do the work themselves.

Finding One: Liveability — Complicated

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Global Liveability Index, London ranks consistently among the world’s most liveable cities, scoring highly on stability, culture, environment, education, and infrastructure. We presented this finding to seventeen Londoners on a Tuesday morning. Fourteen responded with the phrase “yeah, it’s good, but—” followed by between four and nine minutes of specific grievances about rent, the commute, the cost of childcare, and in one case the loss of a particular Turkish restaurant in Stoke Newington that closed in 2022 and whose absence is still felt acutely. Two respondents said they were thinking about leaving. One asked us to move because we were blocking the barriers. All seventeen are still in London.

Finding Two: Affordability — No

London is not liveable in the affordable sense of that word. Our research finds that the city is highly liveable if you arrived before 2010, own property, or earn above £75,000 per annum. If you arrived after 2018 on a median salary, liveability is what our data team describes as “aspirational” and what our therapist consultant describes as “a source of low-grade chronic stress that residents have normalised to the point where they no longer recognise it as stress and simply call it London.”

Finding Three: Transport — Mostly

The TfL network runs. Mostly. When it runs, it is genuinely impressive — frequent, extensive, covering 270 stations across eleven lines with a daily ridership that would constitute the fourth-largest city in Britain. When it does not run, which is also some of the time, it generates a specific variety of collective suffering that bonds strangers on platforms in a way that good service never quite manages. The Elizabeth line has raised the bar so dramatically that existing lines now appear to be suffering from a kind of infrastructure inferiority complex. The District line is aware of this. It is not handling it well.

Finding Four: Culture — Exceptional, Expensive, Occasional

London’s cultural offering is world-class and largely unaffordable on a regular basis. Theatre tickets start at £30 and ascend without visible ceiling. Gallery entry is often free but somehow still costs money by the time you have left the gift shop with a tote bag and a book about an artist you had never heard of before today. The city produces more cultural events per week than any comparable city in the world. The average resident attends fewer cultural events than residents of comparable European cities. The events are available. The time and money are the limiting factors. This is the central cultural paradox of London life and nobody has solved it yet.

Conclusion

London works. Not for everyone, not at all times, and not at prices most people can sustain indefinitely. It is, per our lead researcher, “a spectacular city for a spectacular minority, a genuinely impressive city for the majority, and a difficult city for the minority who cannot access its benefits while fully experiencing its costs.” We stand by this conclusion. Bohiney Magazine’s London Report series reaches broadly similar conclusions through the additional lens of humour, which helps with the difficult parts.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk