A city that sleeps too much

(in a nation that pins itself too much on that city)

The UK economy has always been (too) London-centric, in that most corporate head offices are still in London and all nationwide job boards show considerably more job vacancies in London than in any other UK location.

When COVID-19 lockdowns forced nearly everyone in an office job to work from home, I figured this might encourage many businesses into finally believing they did not have to rely as much on the office as much as they did, and that certainly they did not need London as much as they thought they might. I was wrong.

The exodus out of London that happened once people no longer needed to be here has since reversed. In part that may be down to people who regretted moving out who chose to return, but in my opinion, not all of the reversal may have been down to people's personal choices.

Opportunity

Below is a screenshot I took today from uk.jooble.org:

Side note: I am not a fan of using job boards for serious research or statistical purposes, because, for starters, any number of vacancies advertised does not represent that same number representing the actual number of job openings. (There's more, but I won't elaborate on that here, though I may reserve that as a subject for a future post.) I'm not doing serious research here, nor relying on specific numbers: all I want to do here is illustrate how relatively London-centric the UK jobs market is for the purpose of a personal blog post, not science.

As a career freelancer and contractor of many years, I've always had to keep my finger on the pulse of the economy and my personal experiences do not equal science, but the jobs market right now does feel as challenging as it did post-2008-crisis.

Just like then, employers are trying to make the most of it by trying to drive down wages: I'm contending for jobs that pay as much in 2025 as I earned in similar jobs twenty years ago (as if I'm not having to twice the rent for half the space, commuting by public transport isn't setting me back one-and-a-half times as much as back then, and bills and groceries haven't gone up considerably, either). It's unfortunate but not unexpected.

What I did not expect, however, was London's workplace culture to regress in the way that it has done. The 2008 crisis did not appear to affect workplace diversity and flexibility negatively, if anything they might have even improved in the years that followed because they tended to enhance workplace (cost) efficiences.

Lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 showed how much more seemed possible, and yet here we are in 2025 with workplace diversity and flexibility apparently reduced and commodified into being more about lip service and outward branding than about actual day-to-day operations.

The rot in the UK's economy and (workplace) culture had already set in ever since the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, so of course things were never going to be the same as they were in pre-lockdown 2020.

But what I didn't expect was the cultural and attitudinal narrowing of mindsets that writes off so many of us people, hinders (cost) efficiencies, and thus disregards so much of the country's potential. I expected a mixture of stagnation and progress, not de facto degeneration.

Workplace diversity

In my opinion too many of London's workplaces – and in many years of contracting and freelance I've witnessed and experienced a lot of them – are now less diverse and more segregated than they were, say, ten years ago.

It's 2025 and nearly every company website contains marketing language about diversity making brands stronger, nearly every careers sites flaunts "disability confident" hiring schemes, and I can barely complete an online application form without being asked about what type of state or private education I had in childhood, what kind of jobs my parents did when I was a teen, and what level of education they had. But when I make it through the form-filling and into a workplace, more often than not do I witness no representation of most possible answers in those questionnaires, whereas I might have experienced exactly that in times before those questions were even asked.

Being a career freelancer/contractor, I sometimes have the privilege of working different projects or assignments in the same workplace several months or years apart. I remember one where the first time around, the office was old and quirky but homely, and the workforce was not only culturally diverse but also covered a wide age range and included several people with visible and invisible disabilities; on a later assignment, the company had moved into a seemingly more practical but soulless, sterile office space, I seemed to be the only one there over the age of 35, almost everyone there had strikingly similar body types, no one had visible disabilities, and everyone speaking English sounded as if they'd come from the same private school. In too many workplaces I enter nowadays as someone over 40, I appear to be one of the oldest workers there. When I find a workplace that's not like that – which is rare – it seems because almost the entire workforce is over 40.

Workplaces I've encountered in recent years are diverse to either one extent or another, but not by any overall definition that I would apply. And where I do come across workplace diversity, it doesn't tend to stretch all the way up to the top. I don't have scientific data to back up my claims and can only write from my vast but nevertheless anecdotal personal experiences here. Data is obviously collected – I presume that's why I am asked for a heck of a lot more personal data nowadays than I was years ago – but my issue is that I rarely (if ever) see it reflected and that what I do observe is worse now than what it was before. To me, something doesn't seem quite right, here.

What do brands' boasts about vast numbers of nationalities and languages within their organisations mean if the people behind the nationalities and languages all appear to come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds or sporting similar degrees from a select few (British) institutions? Why do I increasingly experience workforces that may strike as diverse in one sense but oddly homogenous in every other?

Workplace flexibility

It's stunning to me how metropolitan London in 2025 feels less cosmopolitan in terms of (workplace) culture(s) and allowing fewer ways out than it had less than a decade ago. I thought COVID-19 lockdowns would have led to the opposite. I was wrong.

One thing that countered my expectations is the increased rigidity of workplaces after 2021. COVID-19 lockdowns and remote working encouraged some people to move out of London (often to less expensive areas) but few corporations or other organisations followed suit. Work still got done but the powers that be just did not seem willing to give up their grip over people nor their reliance on London. And while some people may have since chosen to move back to London because they missed the city, those still looking to stay away from or wanting to move out of London may not have the option to do so when employment opportunities and employers strenuously tie them to the city, all while incomes neither afford a decent standard of living within the city nor a way out of it.

It doesn't help that concepts of remote or hybrid work and flexible working hours have been redefined to often mean something that really isn't as flexible. (I'm not saying super-flexible opportunities no longer exist; it's just that there seem to be way less than, say, ten years ago.)

"Remote/hybrid" office jobs in 2025 often mean little more than that you don't get to have your own assigned desk/workstation in the office – or get paid London weighting! – but are still expected at least 2-3 days/week in a London (head) office (making moving away and commuting in as unaffordable as living in/near London).

Meanwhile "flexible working hours" in 2025 often mean little beyond having a start time "between 8.30 and 9.30 am" (so on in-office days you're still forced to commute during rush hour).

Once upon a time I stayed in a job I was good at but disliked, purely because I loved the working hours (noon till nine or 1pm to 10pm) that meant only ever commuting off peak. Ditto night jobs (which did involve a rush hour commute home in the morning, but generally in the opposite, non-crowded direction). And it's so nice to work full-time but regularly have a weekend not be Saturday-Sunday. Alternative working times like this do still exist in 2025, but, in my experience, fewer UK/London workplaces seem to offer them than in years past.

Twenty-something years ago I found London areas like the City and Canary Wharf eery due to their lifelessness after hours; they improved with tourist appeal and each increase in residential properties, but perhaps especially once business started appreciating the (cost) efficiency of using office space around the clock and the employee satisfaction – and retention! – of offering people the flexibility of working unconventional hours if they wanted to. (I specifically remember working with colleagues who no longer needed expensive childcare because flexible working hours enabled them to work full-time while sharing care duties with spouses or family or friends. It worked for them as care givers but it also worked for us as colleagues. Work got done.)

I had expected a vast increase of this in our post-COVID-lockdowns era but once again I was wrong and the opposite seems true. As said before, opportunities still exist but the number of them appears to have decreased in recent years and London's office/business districts tend to be less lively (if not lifeless) areas again at night, save for a few souls doing overtime (the only way, really, to avoid the evening rush hour commute, because it's not like you earn enough in 2025 to go the pub or for a meal after work in the same way you might have been able to afford in, say, 2005).

Most flexibility on offer nowadays isn't really that flexible, and the only reason for it appears to be powers that be who've decided it's not needed and certainly not desirable, though with no justification beyond executives with an inflated sense of self-importance and a managerial/corporate demand for control. (It often doesn't even make financial or business sense.)

No city that never sleeps

Truthfully, London was never the kind of city that never slept, and I personally don't expect or even need it to be. But its (white-collar work) culture once used to ooze at least something of a cosmopolitan diversity with a metropolitan non-nine-to-five-ness. That's not entirely gone, but I see less of it now than I have in years, and that's disappointing to say the least.