(personal underlines)
London is getting worse
Goodbye to the good-time capital
A famously elitist members’ club, a 900-year-old meat market, and a traditional old barbershop may not feel like they have much in common. In fact, they didn’t – not until the last week or two, when they all simultaneously closed in their disparate parts of London. The first closure, that of the Groucho Club, has been widely covered in these pages, generally with an overtone of chortling. After all, it is hard to feel sorry for a place that is notoriously exclusive, boasts a world-class art collection, and charges members £1,500 a year for the privilege of eating near a Damien Hirst – or indeed eating near Damien Hirst.
And yet, as a long-standing member, I will robustly defend the Groucho. Because it is fun. Because it opens late. Because it has been around for decades. Because that art collection is magnificent and soothing. Because – yes, if you can afford it – the Groucho wants you to enjoy yourself. And because it’s a pivotal part of Soho which is potentially closing for good (inshallah, the Groucho survives). Soho is a crucial part of what makes London London. And it is all of London that feels like it is declining, changing for the worse, even dying.
Take the second closure, the meat market. This, of course, is Smithfield in Farringdon, which has been butchering pigs, filling sausages, and swinging cow carcasses like dead gangsters in a Scorsese movie since the time of Henry II. For evidence of how old Smithfield is: if you’ve ever wondered why the pavements of Islington are so weirdly elevated, it is because, centuries ago, they were raised above the dung and mess created by the herds of livestock trampling down to Farringdon’s Gate of St John.
Now, after nearly a thousand years of meat cleavers, burly porters, 8 a.m. pints of Guinness and decades of that brilliant clash between sleek, rich, chic financial London and ruddy, visceral, malty, offal-and-oatmeal London, the market is to shut its oddly delicate Victorian gates forever. Appositely, it will be replaced by a museum: the Museum of London.
And what about that third closure? It is, yes, just a barbershop. But it is my barbers, on the rugged Primrose Hill borders. I’ve known it for yonks, and the amiable boss could make my hair presentable in 16 minutes. Now he’s gone, and one reason he’s gone is the competition from approximately seventy billion ‘Turkish barbers’, which line the streets near me en masse, only outnumbered by vape shops with fascias so garish they would be rejected in Nairobi as unsuitably vulgar.
But am I imagining this whiff of wider decline, and narrowing, even death? Let’s focus on the nightlife, because there we have stats. Between 2020 and 2023, more than 3,000 of London’s ‘night economy businesses’ closed their doors. At the same time, dozens of nightclubs have vanished – Tiger Tiger to Madame Jojo’s. Even sadder for a world city with a great drinking culture, London pubs are shuttering at a faster rate than anywhere in Britain.
Of the pubs that do remain, they face ever more hostile councils and busybodies. The Sekforde pub in Clerkenwell opened in 1829. Now its neighbours have complained so fiercely about the jolly sound of evening drinkers, this historic boozer risks losing its licence. Perhaps the curtain-twitchers should have considered the prospect of street chatter when they bought a house next to a pub? And the Sekforde is hardly unique. Add staffing problems and the cost-of-living crisis, and it is not uncommon to find pubs in central London closing at 9 p.m. or not opening for half the week.
Underlying demographic trends are also, of course, at work. Take London boroughs like Tower Hamlets and Newham, which are now 40 per cent and 35 per cent Muslim respectively. As Muslims don’t drink, it is unsurprising that the pubs in these areas have closed even faster than elsewhere. At the same time, younger people – of any religion, or none – are much less likely to drink than their hog-whimpering parents. Around a quarter of 16- to 24-year-olds don’t drink at all.
Personally, however, I can’t help feeling that the disappearance of good-time London, its slide into depression, even intimations of death, must also be linked to political leadership. After all, for a decade London has been led by a beige, joyless, teetotal homunculus, a man so dedicated to Not Having Fun he bans bikini ads from the Tube.
Mayor Sadiq Khan has also, until recently, been assisted by one Amy Lamé, who was paid up to £130,000 as Night Czar. And what happened under the reign of the capital’s Night Czar? Well, almost 1,000 bars and clubs in London have closed, for a start. Maybe the Night Czar should have been called the Early Evening Czarina, or even the Sultana of Stay Home, Then We Won’t Be Stabbed.
We have a new PM, too, the Honourable Member for Anhedonia, who makes Khan look like Falstaff crossed with a young Elton John. For Keir Starmer (who doesn’t dream, never eats meat, cannot name a favourite book, poem nor Christmas movie), a ‘good time’ is becoming prime minister just so that he and his wife can grift some free designer saucepans – like one of those rich middle-aged couples who can’t wait to book into a struggling historic three-star hotel just to steal the tiny soaps and hand towels.
So, yes, London is more depressing than it was. No getting round it. But as a Londoner, I refuse to yield to despair – or to any sense of death. Why not? Because it is London. It is the Smoke, it is the city that survived the Black Death and the Blitz, the Great Fire and Gordon Brown. When I climb Primrose Hill at dusk, I can look out over a skyline that simply did not exist 40 years ago. Some of the new skyscrapers are gauche and ugly, but some are glorious.
There are also solid reasons for optimism, amidst the darkness. London is easily the best city in Europe for start-ups (‘despite Brexit’), indeed it is second only to New York, globally. London also boasts more tech unicorns (new tech companies worth over £1 billion) than any city in Europe. And, fundamentally, London’s young population is growing, fast. There are good reasons to dislike the changes that can come with this, but on a basic level a growing population is much better than the opposite. New York City, for instance, is shrinking.
As for my own personal feelings, when I heard that my barbers was gone, I stomped down to the high street in a huff – and I went to one of those Turkish gaffs. Inside, the guy gave me an excellent cut, told a funny deadpan joke (‘That will be £90, Sir’), burned the hairs off my ears, and I was out within 15 minutes. So it turns out I found a good new barber quite quickly. In the same spirit, I believe London will throw off her sulks, her glooms, and her grey politicians, and she will return. She always does.
