London is probably the most dominant capital city, relative to the country it governs, of any major state. In one sense, this has always been so: the seat of political power at Westminster and the financial centre in the City of London have been fixed there since the Middle Ages. This was challenged to some degree by the emergence of huge factory conurbations in the English Midlands and North, in Central Scotland and South Wales, from the early-nineteenth century; but the eclipse of British industrial power since the Second World War has reinforced London’s dominance. The city limits house nearly 9 million, a historic high, which doesn’t count an enormous travel-to-work zone that gives it a metropolitan area encompassing some 14 million people—around five times the size of its nearest uk rivals, Greater Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow. In terms of regional divergence, the results have been stark. As Tom Hazeldine points out, the vast gulfs in wealth, living standards and productivity between the London area and the North, Wales and Midlands make Britain by far the most regionally unequal country in Europe.footnote¹

In terms of scale, Greater Paris and the Île de France may be a match for London, but Parisian dominance is softened by the strength of genuine regional power centres in Lille, Nantes, Lyon, Bordeaux and Marseille. Somewhere like Le Havre, home to 170,000, enjoys a far more developed cultural and public-transport infrastructure than, say, Leeds, with a population of 790,000. Berlin and Madrid, the first and second largest cities proper in the European Union, each have less than half the population of London; along with Rome, Warsaw and Bucharest, they face much stronger regional rivals. And although Athens’s dominance is extreme, Greece is a much smaller country; its sway is more akin to that of the marooned ex-imperial capitals of Vienna and Budapest over shrunken Austria and Hungary, or Riga’s dominance over tiny Latvia. Istanbul, bigger than London, is nonetheless governed from Ankara. Only Moscow, with its rapacious vastness and radical economic variance with its impoverished host nation, is truly comparable; and even then, St Petersburg is more of a genuine rival than Manchester or Birmingham.

This was not inevitable. London shrank dramatically between 1940 and 1980, losing around 2 million inhabitants. This was deliberate, the result of the systematic resettling of Londoners in new towns and as ‘overspill’ across the suburban Home Counties. By the early 1980s, London faced the same problems of unemployment, deindustrialization and ‘managed decline’ besetting cities like Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. What made its present leverage possible—and ultimately created its stark electoral divergence from the rest of England—was a peculiar combination of cultural and economic trends emerging in that decade. On one level, it was a historic consequence of the demand by Thatcher’s Rottweiler, Norman Tebbit, that the Northern unemployed ‘get on their bikes and look for work’; the new jobs came in part from an expansion of business and services, powered by the newly deregulated City of London. But the capital’s growth was also due to its being the centre of the culture industry, a much-trumpeted beacon of sexual and racial tolerance, a post-imperial melting-pot.

Yet London’s character as melting-pot—it has taken in not only millions of people from West Africa, East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, but equally numerous escapees from the stricken landscapes of Barrow-in-Furness, Bridgend, Bradford and Bilston—is a long-term consequence of this ultimate capitalist city having largely been governed, when it has been governed, from the left. The December 2019 general election marked the fourth time in four years that London has veered from most of the rest of the country in a national vote, supporting Corbyn’s Labour in face of a Conservative landslide. In the 2015 election, the Tories lost hundreds of thousands of votes and important seats in the capital. In the 2016 eu referendum, London joined Scotland as the most monolithically pro-Remain part of the uk. In most of England, the 2017 election saw strong votes for both Labour and the Tories, but in London the May government was routed, with even Kensington falling to Labour, and several of the South-East’s commuter and ‘overspill towns’ registering sharp leftward swings, as if London’s politics were seeping outwards.

Conventional accounts of London’s history concentrate on the ‘two cities’—twin centres of wealth and power, each with its monumental buildings—and their explosive growth between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The City of London’s Square Mile is the Roman city, the boundaries of its ‘Corporation’ those of the Roman walls: a financial centre and entrepôt comparable to Amsterdam or Hamburg, with its Cathedral at St Paul’s and its docks just downriver from the Tower of London, a fortress founded in the eleventh century by William the Conqueror, who also created the governmental seat at Westminster, a few miles further up the Thames, identifiable now by the industrial fantasy Gothick of the Houses of Parliament and the spiky accretions of Westminster Abbey. Lovers of Jacobean theatre would add the City of Southwark, just across the Thames from St Paul’s, with its shabby Cathedral set until recently among stinking warehouses.

The standard history then tends to trace from these a semi-accidental spread of suburbs. By the seventeenth century, the City and Westminster were linked by Covent Garden and Holborn along the axis of the Strand; the dockside industrial towns emerging in Deptford, Greenwich and Woolwich would eventually be absorbed by London.footnote² But the real explosion came in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, when imperial London became the biggest city in human history, an accolade it would hold until the 1920s. The flat-fronted ‘Georgian terrace’ began to carpet Middlesex, Essex and Surrey, giving the resulting city its inner districts: aristocratic (Mayfair, Belgravia), bourgeois (Camberwell, Islington, Notting Hill) and proletarian (Stepney, Paddington, Lambeth). These were joined in the mid-nineteenth century by ‘railway suburbs’, similar to those in the industrial North—New Cross, Tottenham, Finsbury Park, Acton—while the City’s East End expanded into an immense, impoverished, sub-proletarian zone of casual dock labourers and ‘informal’ trades.footnote³ In the twentieth century, new-built suburbs stretched out into open countryside—Pinner, Sidcup, Hillingdon, Ilford—until a legal limit was set by the creation of a ‘Green Belt’ in the 1930s.

The legend has it that this was all laid out by the Invisible Hand. Historically, London was never subjected to a plan; after the Great Fire of 1666, Christopher Wren, the principal architect then restyling the City’s skyline with domes and steeples, proposed a rational, ‘continental’ reshaping around straight streets and rond-points; but any construction that would hold up business was vetoed by the City’s burghers.footnote⁴ This was a stark contrast to Absolutist capitals like Paris, Berlin, Vienna or Petersburg; the monarchy and its military accoutrements still occupy large chunks of the city centre, but Buckingham Palace looks like a Victorian hospital compared to the Winter Palace. London’s inner-city terraces were knocked up on the cheap, their ‘classical’ straight façades applied to chaotically built speculative ventures—the famous phenomenon of ‘Queen Anne front and Mary-Ann backside’. So it would continue, up to the ‘mock-Tudor’ semi-detached suburbs of the inter-war era.