The Sound of Progress
4 years, 2 months, 20 days, 2 hours
2 May 2025
Lately I’ve started noticing something as I walk between meetings in central London.
It is very strange, but at almost any time of day, on some of the most major thoroughfares in the middle of this major global capital city it is … quiet! So quiet you can hear the birds. So little traffic that you can wander diagonally across the road.
You probably think I’ve had a brain seizure and sent you something I first penned during lockdown, when London like everywhere else was truly, disconcertingly, empty. But it isn’t then it is now, and it isn’t empty. It is full of life of students and shoppers and tourists and nomadic workers like me hurrying between meetings.
How is this possible in a highly densely-populated major city, indeed one notorious for being so mono-centric that there have been at least two attempts by government in the last half century to stimulate additional economic centres. Both futile. Is it because post-Brexit and a hundred or so years since the height of the British empire, London is becoming an economic backwater? Far from it. London is thriving. Unfortunately often at the cost of the rest of the country where the economic hardship is being felt.
It is because of decades of incremental but deliberate and mostly consistent urban transport planning. It is the huge investments in public transport, most recently the Elizabeth Line. (In the morning peak I observe in awe the tidal-wave of humanity coursing through the passageways). And a huge bus network that actually carries even more people than the Tube. It is the cycle lanes, that have made it much safer to cycle than previously and which are now crowded themselves in the mornings. It is the one-way systems that drive the black cab drivers crazy, and the gradual hemming of much of the traffic into peripheral routes. It is the bans on trade deliveries during the day, the congestion charge and the Ultra-Low Emission zone. It is pedestrianisation, which now means more of Oxford Street is pavement than road, and in the last months has suddenly severed the Strand, with a really beautiful garden around the church that sits in the middle of it.
It has taken my entire lifetime to get to this point, and a lot of money, and the highest public transport fares in the world. In Nairobi last month we heard from a client who is trying to set about a similar transformation there, and honestly it was hard to know where you would start. Nonetheless I think what London has done is truly inspirational in showing that it is possible for the centre of a major city to be very pleasant if there is the institutional determination to make it so.