Big Cities

Do you know which is the largest city in Europe? London, isn't it. It’s obvious.

Well, I thought that too. It's been said so frequently and is demonstrably true. Just google "Europe cities population" and you'll get a raft of league tables, virtually all of which put London at their head. It's obvious: but not true.

I was reminded of this last weekend. My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary with a trip to the Kent coast. The London we whizzed through on the High Speed line (normally used by Eurostar) is very different to the London most of us live in. It feels bigger, more industrial and more sprawling. The landscape is dominated by large factories, major roads and estates of cheap housing. The city spills to an end around the Medway towns; the green belt doesn't seem to apply here. It all feels so unlike the normal London boundary (an abrupt transition from fifties semis to rolling fields) and rather reminiscent of the Paris banlieue.

It was being on holiday in Paris last year that made me realise that there was something wrong with my traditional assumption that London is the largest city in Europe. After all, when you leave Paris by train (in almost every direction) there seems to be a lot of sprawling city to travel through, long after the périphérique has been passed.

In fact, if you didn't know, you'd think you were passing through a very large city indeed. Larger than London? Surely not; London's the largest city in Europe; isn't it?

Well, no. It is if you define the city as the population of its political area. However, if you use the rather more human definition of the number of people who live in the same, contiguous urban area, then it definitely is not. Paris is the largest with 10.8m people; London has ony 8.5m (believe it or not, just the 34th largest city on earth).

What is fascinating, however, is how close the population of London's urban area is to the political population. i.e. the vast majority of people that live in the London urban area, also live in the political entity we call London. Yes, there are a few anomalies. The poor folk of Watford, Rickmansworth and Ewell are clearly residents of London, but don't get to vote for the Mayor. Like them, the citizens of Staines, Shepperton and Dartford avoided the tax precept for the Olympics but get to live in the host city.

However, these people are exceptions. There are 8.2m people in the political London; not far off the 8.5m in the urban area (Watford ain't that big).

By contrast, the urban area of Paris contains 10.8m, but the political Paris contains just 2.1m. The city of New York contains 8.2m people (wow, they're so like us!) - but the urban area contains an astonishing 20.4m. The world's largest city by urban population is Tokyo (37.1m!) but only 8.9m of them actually live in Tokyo. There are 16 different places on earth in which more than 15m people live together, but only one city has an official population of more than 15m (Shanghai - unlike Western cities, Chinese cities' geographies tend to be larger than their urban area, not smaller).

There are obviously thousands of reasons why London has been so successful, but I would hypothesise that one of them is that it has ensured that, roughly, the political city is kept up-to-date with the human city it is designed to reflect.

London is full of relics of past borders. Bits of the old Roman wall remain around the City of London that for centuries constituted the political city. Read Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year for some evocative descriptions of the "Liberties" - the various areas of urban London that fell outside the City boundaries in the seventeenth century. By the 19th century, these anomalies had been swept away, as the border caught up with the growth of the City. Walking on Hampstead Heath recently, I came across a rather overgrown boundary post, marking the then edge of London and the start of Middlesex. Today, the Heath is entirely in Zone 2.

You only have to walk the streets of St Denis in the underprivileged Paris suburbs, or witness the extraordinary deprivation of Newark, immediately across the Hudson from Manhatton (the most valuable island on earth?), to realise why this matters. Londoners really are all in it together; we vote for the same Mayor, we pay the same taxes (much of your local council tax is actually a GLA precept) and we appear on the same maps. You look at any map of Paris and New York, and you'll find the banlieue or Newark aren't even shown; there's a dotted line and then blank space. There be dragons, perhaps - or poor people.

We don't have no-go areas, unlike both those cities. When things do go wrong (as they did last year), it is recognised as a problem for the whole city, not just for the lawless others. I very much doubt the affluent of Paris or New York would feel a sense of ownership or interest if there was a riot in Aubervilliers or Union City, despite both being just a couple miles from the cities known from the tourist guide books.

Perhaps I'm being overly idealistic, but I am sure that one reason why London works (socially, economically, politically) is because it's one city. I can’t prove it, but if you’re reading this in London, and you don’t live in Ewell, then we are common citizens of one community – and that wouldn’t be the case if this was Paris.