The first line of the song Cities by Talking Heads is, “Think of London, a small city/It’s dark, dark in the daytime.” That is an American perspective, but as Londoners travel to the station or bus stop and then from work to home again, it does feel like being in perpetual shadow. It has been a hard year, and the stress of living and working in London comes in many forms, so reflecting on the challenges of 2023 feels especially gloomy in a city of darkness. It’s tempting to ask why we live here at all.
London is a coalition of eight million strangers, but this year made the alienation feel more pronounced than ever. The capital’s economy is robust, but increasing homelessness is both a literal and symbolic indicator of how much we fail our disadvantaged. London’s borough councils are flirting with bankruptcy or have already been declared so and that manifests itself most painfully in the failure to provide affordable housing, at least housing not rendered uninhabitable by mould.
