London in the Media
LSE London
London School of Economics
June 2006
This paper is intended to provide a brief summary of the key issues raised by the LSE
seminar on London in the Media. It is not intended to be a comprehensive account of
the issue, but will, it is hoped, help stimulate a wider discussion on questions raised
by the reporting and scrutiny of a great city.
1.
Background
London is Europe’s largest city and continues to generate massive wealth, power and
creativity. It is the home of the United Kingdom Parliament and has governmental
institutions at three levels: national, city-wide and local. It is also the centre of one of
the world’s greatest agglomerations of financial and business services. The capital
has an internationally-recognised cluster of museums, galleries, theatres, cinemas,
opera houses, rock venues and other ‘creative’ activities. It is also a centre of business
and leisure tourism. Inner and central London contain some of the world’s bestknown buildings and monuments.
However, there are concentrations of intense poverty in close proximity to some of
the city’s most valuable real estate. London is one of the world’s most expensive
cities in which to live and yet contains some of the worst housing and social
conditions in the country. Governments and reformers have encouraged policy
initiatives to alleviate such conditions for over 150 years. Yet some neighbourhoods
suffer inter-generational deprivation, leading to continuing high levels of poor social
indicators and, more recently, a willingness to vote for extremist political parties.
Some of these problems are sufficiently great as to imply a need for London-only
policy solutions.
Outer London and its semi-metropolitan hinterland are profoundly different from the
inner and central parts of the city. Almost 20 million people live in London’s region,
the ‘Greater South East’. The central part of this area, in particular the West End and
the City, are the focus of much national and international media interest. Yet, the
population and much of the workforce of the capital’s extended region is distributed
over an area stretching from Milton Keynes to Brighton and from Swindon to
Southend.
‘Londoners’ can live across a very wide area and also have different backgrounds.
Some, of course, were born within the city. But many have come from other parts of
the UK and, increasingly, overseas. Londoners, as they settle into middle age, often
tend to move out to other areas within the region resulting in a very different mix of
population in the city as compared to elsewhere. Britain is sometimes described as an
increasingly fragmented society with changed values. London is an exaggerated,
endlessly fascinating, version of this national picture and a pre-cursor of future
national trends.
One effect of London’s return to superstar status alongside New York since the late
1980s has been the growth of an accessible literature presenting many more of the
‘stories’ of the city, for audiences with interests as diverse and contradictory as the
capital itself . Among the significant books that come to mind, taking ‘London’ as
their subject not just as setting are: Roy Porter’s ‘social history’ and Peter Ackroyd’s
‘biography’ of the city, Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, Iain Sinclair’s Lights
Out for the Territory, Downriver and London Orbital, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Tim
Butler’s and Sukhdev Sandhu’s contrasting takes on London Calling, Joe Kerr and
Andrew Gibson’s collage London: from punk to Blair, Michael Hebbert’s London:
more by fortune than design, Janet Foster’s Docklands, Tony Travers’ Politics in
London and the (Michael) Young Foundation’s recent New East End: Kinship, Race
and Conflict.
This revival of extended writing about the city is a substantial compensation for its
coverage in the national press, which though seen as London-centric, lacks depth of
focus on the city. Yet even in terms of books, casual comparison of the shelves of a
downtown Barnes & Noble with a comparable Waterstone’s in London, suggests that
both the range of, and market for, books about London remains restricted as compared
with the situation in New York and several other high-profile cities.
2.
The Issue for debate
The national media is generally seen as London-centric and as viewing problems and
solutions through their personal or collective understanding of London itself. As
such, London dominates much of the debate – but often in ways that do not identify
similarities and differences with the nation as a whole.
Nevertheless, it is sometimes argued London is ill-served in terms of general media
coverage, paradoxically because the national press is concentrated in the city. For
example, New York has (among other publications) the New York Times, the New
Yorker, the Village Voice and a number of local TV and radio stations concentrating
the region as well as local neighbourhoods. In London there appears to be a gap
between ‘London within the nation’ and London as the subject for locally-focused
comment, debate and news.
The purpose of this discussion is first, to test whether or not this perception is based
upon reality and second, to debate what could or should be done about it.
3.
London in the media
Because London is by far Britain’s biggest city, life within it often embraces extremes
of different kinds. The most expensive houses, the newest immigrants, the nastiest
crimes and leading-edge lifestyles are all prone to be found in the capital. History,
coupled with the endless churn of people from elsewhere in the world, ensures
considerable international interest in the city.
London is also the national capital, dominating political coverage in one of the
developed world’s most centralised democracies. The fact that virtually all important
political decisions are now made by the Cabinet has the effect of focusing the media’s
political coverage on Whitehall sources and, Parliament. As a result of this
centralisation, the word ‘London’ is often – elsewhere in the country – used
pejoratively to mean the centralised core of government in Whitehall, thus
complicating the rest of the country’s view of the capital and its people.
The exotic nature of London makes it an obvious subject for continuous media
attention. However, the national basis of both Fleet Street and broadcasting has led
some commentators to claim Britain is ‘London-centric’. This accusation, in turn, has
produced self-conscious efforts within the media to demonstrate that news is gathered
from across the UK. It is hard to make a fair judgement about whether or not the
media are too metropolitan-centred or whether, alternatively, London actually loses
out because of the need to give prominence to life in other places.
People will have different views on the subject of London-centricity depending in part
on where they live in the UK. But there is evident resentment in parts of the country
about London’s dominance within many walks of life and the perceived arrogance
this is held to generate. Some of the gritted-teeth reaction to the capital’s Olympics
success provides a good example of the awkward nature of London’s position within
the UK.
British national newspapers (all based in London) have not launched ‘metro’ sections
of the kind published by the New York Times. London ‘local’ news is carried
alongside equivalent pieces from the rest of the country. The London-specific media
is led by the Evening Standard which is itself to a significant extent a national paper –
certainly in terms of leading the next day’s headlines. Metro has been successful as a
major new London-wide free-sheet. There are suggestions that other proprietors
would like to open competitors to this new form of publishing.
The BBC and ITV (also based in London) each have a ‘regional’ news output of daily
news ‘opt-outs’, plus Sunday lunchtime and occasional mid-week current affairs
programming. But there is a massive relative concentration of resources and time on
national rather than local/regional programming within television broadcasters.
Local radio can be very much more local. There is also a powerful array of local
newspapers and free-sheets. In addition, the long-established listings magazine, Time
Out, continues to fulfil a valuable function as an entertainment and cultural
networking outlet.
4.
The media in London
It is important to be aware of the massive concentration of media activities and
employment in London. All the national newspapers and all broadcasters have the
headquarters (and most of their staff) in London. The capital is also a major
international centre for the media, notably for Middle East agencies and broadcasters.
Over half of all the UK’s television and radio employment is in London, an estimated
total of 25,000. Overall publishing output in London has been estimated at £3.4
billion, over a third of the UK total and employing about 38,000 people. The wider
‘creative industries’ are the second biggest sector within the London economy – after
finance & business services1. The media and related industries are thus an important
and rapidly-growing element within the London economy, generating a need for
particular skills and training. Increasingly, higher education institutions are turning
their attention both to the economic impacts and training needs of the media in
London.
5.
Key questions
The brief consideration of the subject contained in this paper provokes a number of
questions:
1

is London’s position as the national capital with virtually all the
key media based in the city an advantage or a disadvantage for
Londoners wishing to have full coverage of local current affairs?

is it difficult to deliver consistent and coherent media coverage for
a city with London’s geography, commuting patterns and
fragmented government?

how to make news from one part of the city, eg, Ilford interesting
to people twenty miles away in another, eg, Sutton?

does the relentless ‘churn’ of population, bringing in millions of
people from the rest of the UK and the rest of the world make the
creation of a London identity more difficult?

are there attributes of Londoners’ lives (eg the importance of the
City of London, attitudes to leisure/lifestyle, internationalisation
of the population) that determine limits of freedom for the media?

what might change or be encouraged to change?
London’s Creative Sector: 2004 Update, GLA Economics, 2004