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Good Morning,

After graduating in 1986, I moved to London. I didn’t have much of a plan. I probably thought I’d have a better chance of getting a job here than in my native Wales. London was where everyone seemed to be going. The city was cool and exiting; it had that glistering promise of streets paved with gold.

I never got to be mayor, but thirty years later I’m still here and London continues to exercise a gravitational pull over a new generation of Dick Whittingtons. According to the Centre For Cities think-tank, one in three students move to the capital after college. London now provides a fifth of the nation’s jobs and accounts for a quarter of its economy.

All of which – so the argument goes - is good for London but bad for the rest of Britain. By attracting most of the talent it’s draining the life from rival cities, only five of which have experienced inflow greater than outflow in the last two years. This imbalance could undermine the growth that the UK is currently experiencing, by widening the already considerable gap between the capital and the rest. London’s boom is always someone else’s crash.

T.S Eliot once wondered whether people in cities lived close to each other because they loved their neighbours and wanted to create community or because they wanted to make money from them. Friends and family who don’t live in London, or lived here once and then left for the country, tease me about the material avarice of my adopted home, just as I tease them for their cultural deprivation and spending their whole time in a car. But the idea that people in a city are more interested in money than country-folk is as mythical as the streets here being paved with gold. As Conan Doyle once said London’s vilest alleys contained no more sin than the smiling countryside.

At best a city offers as much, if not more, opportunity for neighbourly interaction than the quaintest village. It also offers close exposure to radical difference – economic difference as well as cultural. But few people living in London would describe it as a New Jerusalem of fairness. Most boroughs have their own microcosm of disparity and this disparity is often visible in the skyline. On a clear day I can see London’s tallest building: the 72-storey, one thousand foot, steel and glass skyscraper known as The Shard. A year after being built it still stands 2/3rds empty.

How curious that the biblical narrative begins in Genesis in a garden and ends in Revelation in a city. The writer of Revelation wrote that the Holy City is paved with streets of pure gold like transparent glass. And, when Abraham made his home in a foreign land, he was looking forward to a city built on foundations of justice, whose architect and builder will be God. The picture of heaven isn’t pastoral – it’s urban. And perhaps, in some way, we are all searching for its golden roads.

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