Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

I love how delightfully confusing London is. You have boroughs but then you also just have a bunch of other places, some of which are really famous, that are like neighborhoods. And they don't overlap.

Same as New York or Paris, no? Like Harlem (or indeed Soho ) or Montmartre are in but aren't the same as Manhattan or the 18th.

[garbon]

I love how delightfully confusing London is. You have boroughs but then you also just have a bunch of other places, some of which are really famous, that are like neighborhoods. And they don't overlap.

Same as New York or Paris, no? Like Harlem (or indeed Soho ) or Montmartre are in but aren't the same as Manhattan or the 18th.

Manhattan is pretty iconic, babes.

[Sheilbh]

Not saying it's not - but it's also got pretty iconic neighbourhoods too with different names etc. It contains multitudes

[Valmy]

I love how delightfully confusing London is. You have boroughs but then you also just have a bunch of other places, some of which are really famous, that are like neighborhoods. And they don't overlap.

Same as New York or Paris, no? Like Harlem (or indeed Soho ) or Montmartre are in but aren't the same as Manhattan or the 18th.

That might be comparable if New York was divided into 32 boroughs and none of them were named Harlem or Greenwich Village. 

London has all these famous neighborhoods like Marylebone or Notting Hill or Greenwich or Soho and then you look at a map and...they have only one of those places.

Monmartre in Paris is sort of comparable I guess.

[Sheilbh]

Okay I get what you mean - although I suppose on those examples Soho and Marylebone (no idea that was famous ) are both in Westminster which is probably more famous. Same with Notting Hill which is in Kensington and Chelsea.

[Valmy]

Marylebone (no idea that was famous )

Isn't that where Sherlock Holmes, Lord Byron, and Paul McCartney (when he was a Beatle anyway) all lived? I certainly have heard of it. Yes I know one of those is a fictional character.

[Sheilbh]

Looking it up on Google maps and yes - but I'd dispute it

Or this may be a way of London - or any city's neighbourhood's changing over time both with physical barriers and new neighbourhoods.. Because the Google and Wiki version of Marylebone is pretty big and from an ancient parish while in my head it's basically a (very nice) high street. But I think there's two reasons.

One is that historic/Google maps Marylebone is split in two by a dual carriageway that becomes an overpass - it's a very busy, pretty unpleasant, difficult to cross road (Marylebone Road off Euston Road) - I didn't know north of that was still Marylebone. In my head it basically just becomes Regent's Park. So I think mentally that quite big physical divide has split the historic neighbourhood up.

The other reason is that the western boundary of historic Marylebone is apparently Edgware Road. To me that's a distinct neighbourhood. Edgware Road is the centre of the London Arabic community and there's lots of Middle Easterns shops and places around the edges of it. So I think for a modern Londoner because of that community it'd be weird to have Edgware Road as the divide between Marylebone and Paddington - when it's distinct from both and very much its own thing.

[Duque de Bragança]

I love how delightfully confusing London is. You have boroughs but then you also just have a bunch of other places, some of which are really famous, that are like neighborhoods. And they don't overlap.

Same as New York or Paris, no? Like Harlem (or indeed Soho ) or Montmartre are in but aren't the same as Manhattan or the 18th.

Not exactly the same, all XX arrondissements but the smallest in Paris have 4 official administrative quartiers. 

Well, the new park in West Paris, XVII seems to have its own adiministrative quartier from the previous one, Batignolles.
Montmartre is more of a historical quartier, including several parts of administrative quartiers.

[Jacob]

I get what Valmy is saying, but I think it's a bit silly. IMEX most cities have many different types of mutually overlapping location names - there are political and administrative divisions (which sometimes remain in common parlance after they are change, and which don't always aligned across multiple levels of government), street intersections, informal names, named after transit stations or road infrastructure, named after prominent property developments and so on.

That's not unique to London at all, I don't think.

[Josquius]

I find it curious how the names of wards and parishes are often completely unknown by the people who live in them.

But yes this is common Britain and elsewhere in the world too.

[Sheilbh]

Not exactly the same, all XX arrondissements but the smallest in Paris have 4 official administrative quartiers. 

Well, the new park in West Paris, XVII seems to have its own adiministrative quartier from the previous one, Batignolles.
Montmartre is more of a historical quartier, including several parts of administrative quartiers.

Sure - it's a resemblance not exactly the same (as with New York - I mean there are five boroughs there compared with the twenty arrondissements or thirty-two London boroughs)

I think it may have involved a similar process though. So a lot of the "neighbourhoods" that are probably know and recognisable around the world are pretty historic. And a lot of them come from parishes which were the administrative unit for a very long time. Then you have the creation of London County Council which is basically central/inner London now and a recognition that you need a beefed up second layer of local government. So they amalgamate a lot of parishes into 28 municipal boroughs.

Then in the 60s London is expanded to become Greater London with the Greater London Council - basically it adds a load of "outer boroughs" which are areas that aren't traditionally London but functionally are. They have Transport for London - red buses, tube stations etc and economially they are very much part of London. It varies from fairly urban extensions of London to almost rural suburban towns. So what was the LCC becomes Inner London boroughs and there's too many of them so they again get amalgamated into the boroughs we know today with the new outer boroughs.

But while many neighbourhoods basically come from the old parishes, others don't - Soho has never been a parish - and, of course, some change or totally disappear because of urban geography or community. For example there's St Giles which used to be north of Soho and was the site of the "rookeries" the most deprived, massive slums. They are regular settings for the seedier bits of Dickens' novels, Hogarth prints etc. There's a huge slum clearance program - the community living there dissipates, the buildings themselves are torn down and it sort of fades from the memory as a neighbourhood. It's just fairly generic office buildings in the 20th century. Then they get knocked down and re-developed into a pedestrianised complex of offices and restaurants etc - which the developers have branded as St Giles with a rather different set of connotations (although I don't see anyone actually using that - it is still better than when estate agents tried to brand that area "Midtown")

Interestingly this is sort of Nigel Farage's origin story in that he is from one of those outer boroughs that was added to London. And it was very controversial and unpopular at the time (Labour opposed it as they thought it was the Tories trying to basically rig London elections by adding a load of suburbs, lots of those suburbs felt very much like they were part of Surrey, Kent, Essex and not London). But there is still a lingering Lexit element in some areas - particularly East and South-East facing onto Essex and Kent. I think interestingly these are also the areas where working class cockney East Enders moved to when they were "leaving" London - a pattern that's being slightly replicated with growing communities of British Bengalis and British Nigerians especially moving from East End and South-East inner London boroughs to Essex/Kent facing outer London boroughs. But Farage was hoping for big gains in those boroughs at the local elections playing on a bit of Lexit sympathies (if not outright backing it) - and generally didn't do very well, the Tory vote held up there better than in most of the country. But I think that more salt of the earth, traditional small village/town life being forced into big, scary metropolitan London is a theme that then runs trough Farage's politics.

To be honest with London - a bit like the national press meaning London isnt actually covered very well - I sort of feel the same about local government. The London Assembly has nothing like the power of the historic of the LCC or GLC (abolished by Thatcher) - it's a purely oversight. But similarly the London Mayor actually has very few powers not just compared with international comparisons like Paris or New York but also compared with other Metro-Mayors in the UK like Manchester or Liverpool. In part because the London Assembly and London Mayor were the first (and basically last) foray into devolution to local government in England by New Labour. When the Tories picked it up to create Metro-Mayors they saw that it had worked in London and beefed up the powers of Metro-Mayors (which have grown further recently) while London is still stuck with a really pretty powerless London level mayor and assembly. I think we'd be far better off with national government deciding less but a real, strong Greater London Council and Greater London Mayor (but power is jealous).

[Josquius]

It's a pretty accepted rule that around 200-300k is an optimum size for handling local government. That's why the London boroughs are what they are. Also why the metropolitan counties are set as they are.

[Sheilbh]

But life doesn't follow optimums, crooked timber of humanity etc etc. The reality is that London as an economic and sort of cultural unit is Greater London not just the boroughs. Also the shocking moment of Jos endorsing Thatcherism (Edit: And something very on brand that you endorse Thatcher when she doesn't something very bad for London )

I don't think you need to get rid of the London boroughs - they were the second layer to the LCC and GLC. I think it's a problem that there's not really a meaningful top layer (as in other metro-regions or under the GLC in the past). As I say the London Mayor is incredibly underpowered both in domestic or international comparisons - but I also don't think you should just vest more power for a region as big as Greater London in one person, you should have a powerful democratic top layer too like the LCC and GLC used to be.

[Josquius]

But life doesn't follow optimums, crooked timber of humanity etc etc. The reality is that London as an economic and sort of cultural unit is Greater London not just the boroughs. Also the shocking moment of Jos endorsing Thatcherism (Edit: And something very on brand that you endorse Thatcher when she doesn't something very bad for London )

Totally the opposite. She was the one who took down the metropolitan counties as they had a habit of voting labour. I've often said this is the most under reported example of her serious crimes against the nation.
 
The creation of more logical local government was all the doing of earlier Labour governments.

[Sheilbh]

Not in London's case All the good and bad is Tory London County Council was created by the Tories. The expansion to Greater London and GLC was created by the Tories (over Labour opposition). And then the GLC was abolished by the Tories.

Labour's contribution which was positive was the creation of the London Assembly and London Mayor but, as I say, less powerful than the Metro-Mayors (subsequently created by Osborne and had their powers expanded recently).