I suppose it’s fair enough that London should rank behind the cities of Spain, Turkey and Sweden at — let’s say — the quality of national cuisine. We do have world-class restaurants — and London’s high-end dining scene is only getting better — but let’s face it, the capital is unlikely to ever become globally renowned for its own native fare. With the possible exception of Sweden in winter, I’d also be perfectly relaxed if we are generally outdone by those countries in hours of sunlight, the UV index, sunglasses sales per capita and other such metrics.
But to be consistently and substantially outdone by the solidly mid-table economies of Europe in stock market flotations is frankly embarrassing. The genius of our relentless, sometimes harsh, often brilliant sprawl of glass and steel — from the City to Canary Wharf — is to generate prosperity by such means, including, but not limited to, the creation of shareholder value. Not to mention the AI start-ups populating repurposed warehouses and the latte-wielding fashionistas. The entire project is — and has really been since medieval if not Roman England — an agglomeration and distribution of wealth powered by a globally dominant concentration of talent, technology and reliable law and trade. So what went wrong?
