Deyan Sudjic: Whatever happens to Britain, London will remain a city state

Britain, or rather England, is in no position to give London the sack. But when it voted to quit the European Union it was suggesting that, given half a chance, it might try. Like most capital cities London is seen as spoiled and cosseted, looked upon both jealously and dismissively by those who live elsewhere.

The referendum result was a punishment for the capital. It was a reminder that the boom the city has enjoyed for much of the past two decades cannot be taken for granted.

But, give or take a bit less mayoral triumphalism, that is no reason for London to stop being London.

It is more than a capital city. It is also a kind of city state, which is both a strength and a vulnerability. City states are different from capitals, which benefit from the symbolism of national prestige and have first call on taxes.

A city state is more like an infant prodigy, equipped either with an enormous brain, in the manner of Singapore, or else a vast fortune in natural resources. But both are vulnerable when the neighbourhood bully turns nasty. Hong Kong is a case in point. So was Kuwait. Qatar might still be.

And though the circumstances are different, for London to continue to be successful it needs to bear this in mind as it operates as both a national capital and a world city.

London has existed for far longer than anything that could remotely be described as England. To call yourself a Londoner, or for that matter a New Yorker or a Muscovite — two other cities with equally complex relationships to their respective national hosts — is different from describing yourself as English, British, American or Russian.

It’s a more welcoming version of identity. To call yourself a Londoner or a New Yorker is not to suggest that anybody who doesn’t is a foreigner. But the very concept of national identity is based on creating a sense of difference between those who belong and those who don’t.

Londoners’ shared identity depends on a complex set of mutual understandings, some deep-seated and fundamental, others apparently superficial. At its heart is a continually evolving language.

Londoners recognise each other by the way they use words. Cockney has absorbed the way newcomers speak. There have been Jewish or Yiddish words in the mix for more than a century and Caribbean rhythms are making themselves felt in estuary English.

And there are the social antennae that come with residency that allow Londoners to navigate a street with Orthodox Jews at one end, Rastafarians at the other, and Brazilians in the middle, without skipping a beat.

In similar fashion they can navigate a crowd in which many have abdicated their responsibilities as pedestrians by concentrating on a small screen, rather than interpreting the nuances of human interaction to avoid collisions.

To be a Londoner is to have a mental map of a city cut in two by a river, with an east and a west with radically different characters. To be a Londoner is to have noticed, perhaps only subliminally, that street signs in Westminster look different from those in Acton. Londoners know that the difference between NW10 and SW10 is about more than the legacy of a 19th-century post office sorting system.

Cities never stay static. Like so many other mature western capitals London spent most of the 20th century steadily losing people.

From a peak of 8.1 million in 1938 the population fell to 6.8 million in 1991. Then, in the next decade, something startling happened. It increased by more than a million, and by 2011 was back to its pre-war peak.

The turnaround can be traced to the end of a government policy that encouraged people to leave for the new towns in the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang banking shake-up, and the re- establishment of city government for London.

The unexpected outcome of this was a policy drafted in the Ken Livingstone mayoral era and faithfully followed by Boris Johnson: London was going to become the dominant financial capital of the world, with all the economic benefits that would bring. The impact of half a century of decline could be reversed, and the city could be encouraged to grow eastward by investing in Crossrail and the post- Olympic legacy of Stratford.

This was a strategy that seemed to depend as much on ostentatious visual gestures as on science. If London was going to be the financial centre of the world, it had to look the part. That meant it was going to end up more like Shanghai than any other city in Europe.

Success came at a price. The growth of property as an asset class has threatened to stifle whole areas with affluence even as some outer suburbs rotted.