Predicting the future of any place is dangerous. It’s easy to end up sounding silly when a different future arrives – and this is especially true of London.
Many predictions about the future of the city have been wrong. In 1884, for example, an article in The Times said that the amount of horse-drawn transport in London was increasing so quickly that in 50 years the city would be completely buried under “nine feet of horse manure”. And in the 1930s, there were plans for wheel-shaped airplane runways to be built directly over central London. These visions never came to be.
So, what will London be like for the visitor in 15 years’ time? I’m not going to make any wild guesses. Londoners won’t all be living underground (as predicted by British author and part-time Londoner E. M. Forster in his otherwise prophetic science fiction short story “The Machine Stops” of 1909).
And we won’t be walking around the city wearing virtual reality headsets. (Sorry, Facebook, sorry, Google – or Meta or Alphabet, or whatever we’re supposed to call you this week.)
Back to the future
While it’s true that the skyline of the Square Mile (London’s financial centre) is constantly changing, as a new glass tower rises almost every month, don’t look to dystopian movies such as Metropolis or Blade Runner for clues about the London of the future. The biggest changes won’t be so dramatic. The city’s going to be quieter, greener and cleaner – but also more fun to live in and to visit.
Part of the reason why London will be better for the visitor in the future is that it’s a city that’s going back in time. Allow me to explain.
London is perhaps best thought of as a collection of villages. In Roman times, the centre was close to the original London Bridge. As the city grew over the centuries, outlying villages became part of it. And the eventual arrival of the railways allowed people from these places, and beyond, to travel to work into the centre of London.
Now, these compact neighbourhoods are slowly transforming to become, once again, more independent communities. Technology is one of the reasons for this change. Another reason is that, during the pandemic, the trend of living more “locally” suddenly picked up speed.
London’s village patchwork
Working from home, or close to home in a co-working space, is an option that more and more of the city’s army of workers are choosing each year.
Fewer Londoners today are travelling on trains and buses from the suburbs, as they did before 2020. Even those who still need to come into town to go to the office do so on fewer days of the week or arrive later just for meetings.
These London suburbs are now increasingly catering to workers operating from home or from a local cafe or co-working space. The suburbs are doing well as a result, with locals spending more money in their own neighbourhoods. New places where people can get a meal, have fun and meet friends are opening for business. This is a happy trend that seems likely to continue.
This is good news for the future visitor, too, as London in the coming years will have new places and new communities to visit. London’s highly flexible approach to Airbnb and similar booking sites has encouraged people to open exciting places to stay, all around London. The chance to sleep in a canal boat in Little Venice, or an Edwardian-era apartment in leafy Dulwich, or a homestay in historic Blackheath, is likely to tempt many away from the anonymous, corporate hotels in the city’s central districts.
Another reason why London’s village patchwork will attract the visitor of tomorrow is the city authorities’ mission to make the air cleaner. The mayor is fighting, and winning, a war on cars. Many of London’s suburban streets are now closed to car owners who don’t live there. Urban speed limits and low-emission zones help. More space is being created on the streets for pedestrians.
What the motorist is losing in London, is the cyclist’s gain. About 400 kilometres of bike lanes line the city’s streets already, and another 1,000 kilometres will be constructed in the coming decade. Exploring London using the city’s public bike scheme is becoming safer and more enjoyable. If these bikes become electric, the ride will be even smoother.
Seamless travel options
Meanwhile, London’s increasingly smart public transport system is making it easier to get around in the city, as well as to travel in and out of it. (It’s often said that Brits love to queue, but it’s not true.) Links to Continental European cities via the Eurostar are improving year by year.
The Queen Elizabeth line, formerly known as Crossrail, finally due to open fully in 2023, is just one of the upgrades to transport that will improve capacity and reliability. It will speed up east/ west journeys from the furthest edges of Greater London, and promises to make the journey into the city from Heathrow, London’s main airport, a pleasant one.
Travel cards have made moving between buses, the Tube and overland trains much easier for many years now. Automation and sensor networks will make things even better. They’ll create new paying options, with passengers simply walking past electronic scanners. In the near future, ticket barriers could be removed completely, preventing crowds and reducing stress. In short, exploring London, whether by public transport, on foot or on two wheels, will be a joy.
Day trips to explore towns near London will become smoother, too, as the city’s travel zones expand to include towns beyond London. A trip to Brighton, the town known as “London by the Sea”, will be easier than ever. A visit to the quiet tidal flatlands and beaches of the Thames estuary, natural feeding and nesting grounds for birds, is rapidly becoming another attraction for visitors. There’s a plan to recreate the estuary’s ecosystem over the next 15 years, by restoring and connecting natural habitats on the edge of the estuaries. These areas were almost destroyed by industrialization and farming.
An end to stink and smog
One feature of the London of the future that you won’t see or miss is air pollution.
The city’s air has become easier to breathe every year, making an outdoor, cafe lifestyle possible. So much so, in fact, that it’s hard to believe that London was an ecological disaster zone, even in relatively recent history. In the Great Smog of 1952, coal smoke and pollution from traffic were so bad that, in some parts of the city, you couldn’t see more than a metre in front of you. At least 4,000 Londoners died as a result.
Like the air, the water has been getting cleaner, too. The river was an open sewer until the Great Stink of 1850 forced Parliament to look at the problem. Despite improvements, high levels of pollution continued for another century, until, in 1957, the River Thames was declared “biologically dead”.
Nowadays, smog is just a memory. Life is slowly returning to the river. The Thames is now home to 115 types of fish, including seahorses and sharks, as well as 92 types of bird.
But there’s much more to do. The air will be even cleaner as London works to meet its net zero emissions target in 2030 and as its fleets of buses and taxis go electric. In 2025, the 24-kilometre-long Tideway Tunnel will open its pipes to the 39 million tonnes of raw sewage that still, unbelievably, flows into the Thames every year.
The improvement to water quality should be great for London’s inhabitants and visitors. After 2025, we can expect London to be like Berlin, Copenhagen or Zurich, with open-water swimming areas. The Thames Bath Lido project is one such vision of this future.
And London’s small spaces are being rewilded, too. Already a leafy city – London is an urban forest of eight million trees that cover around 21 per cent of its land area – there are plans to create new green corners in “pocket parks”, as well as green roofs and green walls that bees love.
Tree cover will grow by 10 per cent of current levels by 2050. This will include 60 hectares of former royal hunting ground, as part of London’s project to make the city greener.
A new dynamic city centre
In this celebration of the wider city, let’s not forget London’s central districts, which are rapidly being rethought. More homes are planned. The streets of the Square Mile, which used to be empty after office hours, are increasingly busy as new city centre housing is built.
The urban population is set to grow steadily. Many more high-rise apartment complexes are either rising from their foundations or being planned. They will be needed. According to some estimates, London’s population may grow to 12 million people by 2050.
Creative small businesses and dynamic start-ups that were once priced out of the city by mega banks and global insurance companies are now beginning to return to create jobs for these new city centre residents. In truth, this is already happening in hip Shoreditch, London’s new playground, just next door to the Square Mile.
And it’s places like Shoreditch that should remind us that, however much technology may change the way people work and play, we remain a social animal. In 2037, London will still be one of the world’s greatest, most exciting social, cultural and ethnic melting pots. I’ll bet my self-flying jetpack on it.