"I left London when I started to feel like a stranger in my own city”
I’ve recently published a series of three articles on Medium exploring London at this moment. Moving away from London has given me a different perspective on the city, now I view it from the outside looking in rather than caught in its all consuming bubble. I am still drawn to it, but I can also see it as a city almost spinning out of control, a potential death spiral. I think I’ve been thrown clear by the centrifugal forces.
The first article, London Belongs to Me No More, explores my own separation anxiety, the sense that London is becoming a playground or an investment opportunity for a nomadic global elite.
In London Must Build Upwards or Outwards, I explore two key factors which keep the housing stock in London in such short supply, and thus so overpriced.
Finally, in London’s Secret Sprawl, I look at the legacy of trying to preserve a rural/urban divide between London and the Home Counties, and how the Green Belt has instead of preventing sprawl, engendered a different kind of urbanism.
This London Trilogy completed, I am turning my attention to my new home in The North, its ambivalent relationship with London, its own rural/urban conflicts; its own identity crises.
(Image by Flickr user Jim Crossley)