The naysayers are wrong – London remains a truly great city

Has London fallen? We’ve all heard the anguish. Knife crime and high taxes. Shoplifting and unchecked radical Islam. Entrepreneurs fleeing to warmer climes. The young priced out of housing.

In 1840, the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay imagined a far future when “some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s.” Could 2025’s toxic cocktail of high prices and low trust be the start of the fall?

However Tripadvisor, aggregating a billion reviews of 8 million places in 40 countries, has just crowned London the world’s “most popular destination” thanks to its “unique blend of history, innovation and culture.”

Foreigners visit more than 20 million times per year, making London the most visited city in Europe and the third most visited city in the world. Eternal Rome, beautiful Paris and magical Venice aren’t close. London must be doing something right.

So, which is it, a crime-sodden hellhole or a tourist-tempting honeypot? Perhaps it is both. Since the dawn of man, cities have attracted and repelled in equal measure: Sodom, Gomorrah, Nineveh and Babylon, “the mother of Harlots and the Abomination of the Earth”, are the Bible’s shorthand for cruel evils and unnatural vices.

London has always scandalised. William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress charted the decline of innocent and pretty Moll Hackabout from seamstress through prostitution and prison to a syphilitic early grave in 1730s London. “I found nature topsy-turvy,” wrote one Georgian visitor, “women changed into men, and men into women… ladies of the night into saints, people of the first order into beasts or birds.”

We have always loved to clutch our pearls. It is easy to forget how recent and profound London’s renaissance has been. Those of us alive in the Seventies can remember a London that was far shabbier, a London whose sudden emergence into the cool world city of Love Actually and the 2012 Olympics was less a revival than a phoenix-like transformation from the depression and despair of stagflation, modernist architecture and socialist taxation.

Are the Metropolitan Police misallocating resources and failing to use intelligence and technology to control phone theft? Are taxes too high? Are there major challenges of identity and neighbourhood cohesion? Frankly, yes. But London is still much safer than most American and many European cities. (Paris scores worse in international crime indices). London will survive this squall. It always has.

In my lifetime, London re-discovered its role as a global city at the heart of a mercantile world economy. This was a role partially forgotten during the long post-war decline and one which it had arguably not played since the twin disasters of the First World War and protectionism ended the international capitalism of the 19th century.

The result? A city which may not be as old as Rome, as high as New York, as beautiful as Paris or as symbolic as Athens but which is bigger and better than most of them at most things, most of the time.

Londoners, as well as tourists, should re-learn to visit their city. There is something for everyone from every century. Are you seeking Roman London? Descend from tiny Walbrook (named after one of the City of London’s lost subterranean streams) into the reconstructed third-century Mithreaum where bored Roman soldiers feasted and recited their obscure catechisms.

Do you want to recall lost Saxon London? Walk along the Strand, which preserves its Anglo-Saxon name. It still means beach in German. You will be walking along the top of the steep bank rising to the old Roman Road where Friesian sailors pulled their sixth-century boats up the beach and away from the tidal river. After Londinium’s complete collapse this is where the continuous history of our capital restarted.

Did you enjoy Wolf Hall? If you want to give your imagination a workout, visit Whitehall and catch any bus heading north to Trafalgar Square. Sit upstairs. You won’t be more than a few yards away from the lost linenfold panelled room with blue and gold moulded ceilings where, early one morning in January 1533, Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn.

Odd though it seems today Henry VII’s favoured sanctum was in a gatehouse (later called Holbein Gate) spanning the public highway, rather as if Buckingham Palace bridged the Mall. Holbein Gate was demolished in 1759 to ease traffic. Some pressures are eternal.

Are you seeking London’s most important contribution to world architecture? Visit her squares: the oldest is Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Explore the Sir John Soane Museum there. It defies description. The most aristocratic squares are Bedford and Grosvenor which hid terraced houses behind co-ordinated palatial façades.

My favourite square is modest Cleaver in Lambeth with its incongruously French pétanque sets. During a late spring afternoon there is no better place to sample a beer than Cleaver Square’s Prince of Wales pub. Talking of pubs, read about the culture of London’s boozers in Maurice Gorham’s 1949 classic Back to the Local charmingly illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. It’s just been reprinted.

No northern European city has a finer collection of Baroque churches. Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor somehow squeezed sumptuous interiors into incredibly modest spaces. St George’s Bloomsbury is a particularly impressive ecclesiastical TARDIS.

If you have children, read them This is London by Czech émigré Miroslav Šašek to get them London-ready. Then take them across the Thames 135 feet up in the castellated steel-framed gothic of Tower Bridge. It’s the masterpiece of Sir Horace Jones, the architect you “should have heard of but probably haven’t”, as his biographer admitted.

Are you seeking London’s best new building? It’s beside one of the oldest. The joyful steampunk gothic of Westminster Abbey’s new Weston Tower by Ptolemy Dean takes you to the new museum in the Abbey’s triforium, or upper-level gallery. Stare into the eerily life-like death mask of Henry VII.

Cities need not be eternal. Uruk and Babylon are dust today. And I don’t know if Macaulay’s New Zealand traveller in the far future will visit London’s ruins. But I don’t think my home city is collapsing quite yet.

Nicholas Boys Smith is the founding chairman of Create Streets. His history of London’s streets No Free Parking is available from Bonnier books.