Second Thoughts from a London Chauvinist

Peter York is a deep London Chauvinist. Raised, educated, shaped by London – and with one long line of Londoners in his DNA – he’s always wanted London to be Top Dog amongst world cities. Jealous of New York’s wealth and European capitals’ sophistication from the Seventies onwards, he always felt that it wasn’t enough to have invented Punk and New Romanticism. We should have the credit and the money too.

But now we’ve got it – London is, at very least, the twin-pole of world cities with New York and, arguably, on a number of counts, more global, more open and more interesting. And he is a beneficiary. So are many of his friends in the nice jobs that London does for the world in money and media, the Arts and the ‘Creative Industries’. But he finds himself wishing we hadn’t achieved it in quite this way. The new ‘settlement map’ of Central London and the ‘big projects’ planning permission map tells the story.