In sunnier times our great capital city regarded itself as a model for the country that it was, sometimes reluctantly, attached to. Go back 25 years and London was booming: a global centre of finance and the knowledge economy, sucking people in from the rest of the UK and abroad as the population bounced back from a low of 6.6 million in 1981, on the way to today’s nine million.
It had some of the problems typical of any major metropolitan centre, but starting in the 2000s London schools — driven partly by migrant ambition — began out-performing the rest of the country, its globally rated universities expanded fast, serious national politicians vied to occupy its newly empowered mayor’s office and the skyline was transformed by visionary architects.
