London: human, awful, wonderful. Credit: Leon Neal/Getty

“I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature… I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life.”
So wrote the town mouse Charles Lamb to the country mouse William Wordsworth in 1801. The London that Lamb was describing was very different from the city we know today. For one thing, it stank. For another, it had a population of only one million. The London of 2020 is a global city home to almost ten million inhabitants, and many of them do not feel the warm glow of “intense local attachments” that Lamb so cherished.
An exodus may now be upon us. Home movers have put more property on the market and have agreed more sales in the past month than in any month for over ten years. House prices have risen at their fastest rate in 16 years. And while property prices in London have dipped by 2%, in most other regions they have risen significantly, with parts of Essex, Kent, Berkshire, and Hertfordshire particularly attractive to people fleeing the capital.
There’s a certain logic in their thinking. Lockdown taught many business owners that they could allow their employees to work from home while still maintaining productivity and, from the workers’ perspective, it makes little sense to stump up for London house prices when a greener and more spacious lifestyle is available elsewhere.
Expensive, polluted, and crime-ridden, London not only saps the happiness of many of its residents, but also plays a dysfunctional role in the UK’s economy, generating a vast amount of capital that is selectively parcelled out to the regions, while in return the city sucks youth, talent, and ambition into its ever-hungry maw.
But a word of caution to those dreaming of a rural idyll. I, too, was once tempted by the affordability of the countryside, and the sense of community I imagined there. But my husband and I were quickly disabused of our romanticism when we moved to a small village a few years ago.
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