This is an opinion piece. It reflects the views of the author, not an institutional position of London Loves Commerce.
Every few years, someone writes a version of the same anxious column: London isn’t what it used to be. Usually it’s about a particular industry that feels smaller than it once did, or a particular kind of business that used to define a particular street and doesn’t anymore. I understand the instinct. I don’t think it’s right, and I think it mistakes a city updating its economic identity for a city losing one.
The data behind the discomfort
Start with what’s actually true. London’s economy has moved further, and faster, toward knowledge-intensive and technology-driven activity than most of the rest of the country. Centre for Cities’ Big Cities Outlook 2026 is instructive here mostly by comparison: it finds that Britain’s other big cities, taken together, account for just 13% of the country’s “new economy” firms — a figure the report notes is “less than half of London’s share,” which puts London holding down well over a quarter of the entire country’s innovative new-economy business base, concentrated in one city. The same broader pattern shows up in the startup data: London has reclaimed its position as Europe’s leading tech ecosystem from Paris, climbing to fourth globally, on the back of AI and deep-tech investment specifically.
That’s not a city in decline. It’s a city whose center of gravity has moved, again, toward whatever the current version of “knowledge work” is — which happens to be technology and AI right now, the way it was finance and professional services a generation ago, and manufacturing and trade before that. And it isn’t a single-sector story, either: the same startup data shows London’s advantage spreading across a wider range of industries than the fintech-heavy reputation the city has carried for the past decade, from edtech to space technology, which makes “London becomes a one-industry town” a harder argument to sustain than it might have been five years ago.
Why the discomfort is worth taking seriously anyway
I want to be careful here, because I think the anxious version of this column gets something right even when its conclusion is wrong. A city’s business identity isn’t just an abstraction — it’s jobs, and specific jobs held by specific people don’t transfer cleanly from one economic era to the next. Someone whose career was built around a sector that’s shrinking relative to the rest of the economy doesn’t experience that shift as “London’s aggregate new-economy share is healthy.” They experience it as their own trade mattering less than it used to, in the city they’ve always worked in. That’s a real cost, and a city’s coverage of its own economy should say so plainly rather than treating structural change as costless just because the headline numbers look fine.
What I think the anxious version gets wrong
Where I part ways with the “London isn’t what it used to be” column is the implied alternative: that London would be healthier if it had somehow held its previous economic shape rather than shifting toward what’s actually attracting capital, talent, and demand today. I don’t think that’s true, and I don’t think London’s economic history supports it either — this is a city that has reinvented what it does for a living more than once, and has generally come out ahead by doing so rather than by protecting whatever came before.
The honest version of this argument isn’t “change is always good.” It’s narrower than that: London’s shift toward knowledge-intensive, technology-driven business is happening because that’s genuinely where growth, capital, and talent are concentrating right now — not because of some abstract inevitability, and not painlessly for everyone affected by it. Coverage of London business should hold both of those things at once: take seriously the real disruption that comes with any structural economic shift, without pretending the city would be better off resisting a change that, on the evidence so far, it’s making from a position of genuine strength rather than decline.
