Gillian Tett writes: About two decades ago, my brother and I combined all our savings and bought a small, scruffy flat in Gloucester Road, west London. Back then, property did not seem so crazily expensive (in 1991, the UK real estate market had crashed sharply). Nor did the residents of that white stucco building seem wildly cosmopolitan. They mostly considered themselves English and were either young professionals or “Sloanes” (a tribe of upper-class Brits.
London became a modern trading hub; private commercial interests, such as banks, hold sway. And, unlike those Ottoman rulers, the UK government is not very effective at extracting tribute, aka taxes – which is one reason why those French, German, Danes, Italians and Russians flood in. But, like Constantinople, one of the joys of London is that it is wonderfully multi-ethnic and largely tolerant – albeit due to the grubby reality that what unites the multi-ethnic elite is commerce – a desire to make money.
Is this a bad thing? Yes, if you want the UK to exist as a truly cohesive nation state. After all, the arrival of these wealthy professionals has widened the gap between the elite and everyone else. Look at London house prices compared with those elsewhere in England (the flat that my brother and I once owned has surely risen about sixfold in price since we bought it). And when some economists from Deutsche Bank recently looked at the city, they discovered, astonishingly, that there was less correlation in growth patterns between London and the rest of the UK than between the different members of the eurozone; London is driven by global trading flows, not the British economy. “The overall pattern that emerges . . . is one of the rest of the UK dancing to the capital’s tune but out of time,” they wrote.
But if you look at London in its own terms, as a European city-state, it is hard to not feel a sense of excitement. Just like Constantinople, this new urban centre is buzzing with cultural blending and creative collisions; there is entrepreneurial energy and sunny optimism.
To put it another way, just as the US has benefited over recent centuries from the arrival of energetic immigrants from Europe and elsewhere, London flourishes on the energy created by waves of wealthy (and not so wealthy) immigrants from continental Europe.
