The stage is set for one of London’s greatest decades

London rather loses its lustre during a pandemic. The streets are empty, the office blocks all but bordered up; tubes are still running but having a carriage to yourself feels eerie and dystopian. Pubs and bars are stuck in deep freeze — its unclear how many will make it through the other side. The City is so empty you can hear birds tweeting amongst the skyscrapers.

But its all temporary of course, this is hibernation, not The End. The events of the past year have prompted many to finally up sticks and leave London, taking the plunge on a move out to the suburbs or the countryside, the estate agents in areas like the surrey hills or Cotswolds have had their busiest year in recent memory. And the bear case feels obvious: the world is moving to remote work now, whether full-time or most-time, so why would anyone stay and pay the exorbitant London prices? What would you pay the best part of a million pounds for that 3-bed with a pokey garden? Suddenly everyone wants space, indoor and outdoor, we all need home offices now. How much better to be out in the countryside away from all the pollution and noise and crush of people. And the shift to remote working, which seems obvious will stick in some form, means that many hundreds of thousands, can reasonably assume they don’t need to live within half and hour of the office anymore; already that concept has started to feel dated. Will the return of office life in 2021, which necessitates some clarity from every employer on how they will treat remote work in the long-term, lead to another wave of urban flight, as a new swathe of the London population feels empowered to make the leap?

Well I say: let’s hope so. The property market would slump but in the long-term this could spark the beginnings of a new cycle of creative and social regeneration in the capital; not a renaissance, but certainly a reset and refresh of the demographics, tilting more towards the young and the outgoing, and away from the older and more home-life-oriented. Because who will it be who leaves? Surely families mostly. And really anyone for whom the scales only land in favour of London because their job is here i..e. they don’t have much choice. For these people the things the city offers — a social life and an Aladdin’s cave of bars, restaurants, exhibitions, pop-up markets, immersive theatre shows, gigs, pubs, galleries, daytime festivals — are not enough to tip the scales in favour of living here, weighed against the bustle and noise and pollution, the lack of proper green space, the crime, the costs. The geographical untethering of your workplace from your home invites a full-scale re-evaluation of whether you are living in the best place for you from a lifestyle point of view, and it is far from clear we have felt the full effects of this yet.

So an outward migration, a wave of urban flight, what then? Well this is the opportunity for all those (generally) younger folks who always loved the idea of London but couldn’t justify or afford the costs. Rents have slumped generously already, interest in central London rentals is down around 40%. Even Hackney, the hipster hotspot, is down 19%¹. With luck this continues and rents that have climbed to eye-watering figures costs over the past 15 years keep softening to the point that more and more people who’s only constraint is money can make the leap. And it is not only rents, because what will being cooped up at your parents house in the sticks for a year do for your outlook on life? Well you probably have a few quid in the savings account now, that’ll help, but you are suddenly overwhelmingly desperate to be amongst other people! The

The demographic shift would also mark a shift in something much more subtle but hugely powerful, which is — roughly speaking — the propensity to go out and make the most of what the city has to offer: to eat out, not in; to go to parties and theatre shows; to take a chance on wacky new exhibition in hackney wick; to visit a rooftop bar. The simple numerical equation is the number of non-working hours spent in the house vs outside the house. Multiplied by the ratio of new places you visited vs places you’ve already been. The more home-life-oriented, perhaps often with families, will score quite clearly low on this scale, whereas a twenty-something, new in the city, might score very highly. So what might look in the statistics like a demographic shift (30/40 somethings and families leaving, twenty-somethings arriving) is actually just an epiphenomenon for a more powerful trend, which is a changing of the guard with regards to the general population’s appetite to experience the thrills and spills of a big city.

Such a shift would unlock a new wave of businesses in response to the demand: bars, cafes, artistic institutions, clubs, gig venues. And of course the pandemic also lays the groundwork for this supply-side regeneration. Alas many socially-anchored businesses will go under (a popular cafe in my neighbourhood shut last week and every one is a loss), but this will free up premises and sites for the next wave. Office rents have also crashed, and no doubt even some of London’s high-streets are struggling against the onslaught of e-commerce, which opens up the city’s physical inventory more broadly — think co-working spaces, co-living spaces, pop-up retail, and who knows what else? A more transient use of space is also a more dynamic use of space, and this again contributes to the general sense of re-invention and re-imagination.

If cheap rents and a year at home with the ‘rents wasn’t quite enough, you can add a once-in-a-lifetime splash of Yolo. We’ve spent the past year surrounded by morbidity, the airwaves peppered with death. We seem to have some how got de-sensitised to every news broadcast starting with announcement of how many people have died. We don’t even notice anymore, its just more numbers, up or down. But it sinks in on some level, every day you are reminded of the powerful truth of that irreverent, millennial phrase — you only live once. It is actually really true. And just as the roaring twenties were fed by a sense of ‘I could have died just then! I better start living’, this coming decade could be energised by that basic realisation that you do really have to make the most of life; you have to strike out and take a risk, because one day it’ll all be over. All you need on top of this is the social feedback loop of the friend who’s taken the plunge and relays stories back about everything they’re doing, a daily reminder of what your missing on your instagram feed. The pull will become irresistible.

We Londoners should welcome this great reset, this shuffle of the demographic pack, because with it comes new energy, new lifeblood for the grand old metropolis. Let’s quietly hope — without judgement — for a flushing out of those people who never really wanted to be here, chained as they were by their jobs, to be replaced by people who really do want to be here, for the city itself, not only for the meetings rooms and printers. Its like when you have a few people at a gathering who don’t really want to be there, everyone can feel the ever-so subtle drain on energy this creates, you can’t point to it precisely but its there; and when they take their leave the collective social energy lifts, relieved of the weight of their presence. It is this same pattern with the city writ large — the magic of the city is not the buildings and bridges and bars exactly, but that they human energy and dynamism they embody. A city is really just about energy in the end — almost like up-cycled energy in physical form, that’s what people go for and that’s what people stay for. So let’s throw open the doors to all those who by their very presence help the city become the very best version of itself.

¹https://www.standard.co.uk/homesandproperty/renting/london-rent-demand-drop-43-per-cent-b920911.html