Sometimes, size matters: what smaller cities can learn from London’s ever-expanding infrastructure
I’m not saying news travels slowly up North, but it took me until this week to finally travel on The Elizabeth Line. The train was noticeably cleaner and nicer than the older trains that I had been on for the first part of my journey, and the sheer breadth of stations that the line serves is genuinely impressive. Given the depilated state of a public realm increasingly beset by staffing shortages, increased waiting times, and deteriorating buildings, it was a welcome reminder of what the British state can achieve when it puts its mind to it.
This is not just a ghost of past governmental ambition and competence but a glimpse into a possible future for London. I boarded The Elizabeth Line in Reading, and despite being 40miles from London, I stepped on a train that looked every inch a tube, with its own roundel logo and route diagram.
That this track of Berkshire suddenly felt like suburban London would be no surprise to those who regularly travel from across Southern England into the capital for work. But of course, it is not London, and they are not Londoners. They have no say in the future direction of the city that provides them work nor do they financially contribute to the public services they rely upon.
This is not a new issue. London’s current boundaries were introduced in 1965 to address the same problem, with the city doubling in size as great swathes of the Home Counties were annexed by the newly dubbed “Greater” London. This was a key moment in one of the most unappreciated stories in Britain’s recent history; London’s post-1960s comeback. The enlarged city had the resources to finally improve the infrastructure in its commercial heart, investment that ultimately drove greater economic activity that created new jobs for Londoners everywhere. The unified city also paid greater attention to the challenges that its peripheral residents encountered getting into the centre, improving transport links used by suburbanites, of which The Elizabeth Line is the latest example.
What had been a city in decline slowly but surely reasserted itself as the motor of the British economy and a world city with few peers globally. Yet almost everyone in British politics has responded by ignoring this incredible success story rather than learning from it. Not only has Sadiq Khan still not reclaimed all the powers once enjoyed by the Greater London Council, but there’s no serious discussion about absorbing the new commuter belt that London’s success has created.
But as in the 1960s, everyone would benefit from London’s legal boundaries being expanded to include more of those who depend on it for work. Nearby dormitory towns like Reading should be contributing to the city they already have a symbiotic relationship with; their residents would benefit from an economic strategy that prioritises their links with London.
But the lessons can be applied more broadly than that. There are unending complaints amongst urban development activists about the lack of investment in English provincial cities, which leads to cities such as Sheffield or Leeds being poorer than their European equivalents. The problem that all these cities and others face is not London, but the same one London solved back in 1965; that too much control and autonomy has been ceded to their commuter belt.
The Victorians’ decision to divide local government between city and county councils, meant few cities other than London control their immediate surrounding area, let alone the wider area that workers travel into from. If these cities gained control of everywhere that depended upon them, that would create the broader tax base and unified political vision necessary to make the most of their potential.
We can see this most clearly in the North-West where the various councils of Greater Manchester have managed to work together to revive a city that like London should have been doomed by the decline of its docks. But a rational system would not rely on separate councils awkwardly working together, but create a single entity that could drive the city forward; indeed, it might start asking questions as to whether Greater Manchester and Merseyside would achieve even more by pooling their resources.
The debate about urban development and local government ignores that small towns stay small and powerless because they lack the capacity to get things done. If people in the North and Midlands want to compete with London then they have to learn the lesson from London’s success; sometimes in life, size really does matter.