London Roaring

The sudden transformation from the old-fashioned "criers market" to a highly deregulated and high-tech trading system on the London Stock Exchange back in 1986 had a dramatic effect that not many could have foreseen. Not only did it lead to huge profits for the financial institutions doing business there, "Big Bang" also ushered in over a twenty year period of phenomenal growth and affluence for both the City of London and greater London, as well. The introduction of a more competitive and open free market has led to a booming and bustling global market free-for-all on the Thames that still does not seem to have reached its peak.

Always having been a city to exert its international influence, Big Bang London has raised its game yet again and become a place of contrasts even more extreme than those it has known the past. A living microcosm of today's globalized world, where the ever-present black limousines of the super-rich are just as at home as the impoverished Jamaican or African refugee or the grim, knife-wielding youth gangs that battle each other the city's underworld, London has become the international intersection of the global money world. While rival New York City's Wall Street has the powerful American market at its base, the City of London has become a more of a magnet for international banking. There are more foreign banks here than anywhere else, with well over 30 percent of all international currency trading taking place here, twice as much as in New York. New stock market quotations are on the march here, as well, with nearly 20 percent of all new initial public offerings taking off in London, as compared to roughly 17% on Wall Street.

Not surprisingly, London attracts more than its fair share of the ultra-rich with their private jets, bodyguard gangs, helicopters and yachts, in no small part due to the freedom and anonymity they can enjoy in a mega-city like this. Whether it is the dubious Russian who made billions in his country's wild nineties, the Indian industrial tycoon buying his next outrageously expensive mansion in Hyde Park or the Saudi sheikh fleeing the autocratic constraints of his desert home, this is the city where a whole new class of global nouveau extreme-rich has established itself, generally avoiding contact with the traditional London establishment, and usually keeping discreetly hidden from public view.

And yet London is also the "old" London of poverty and social neglect, concrete ghettos, alcohol and drug abuse. It is truly a city of superlatives, its sprawling network of over 25,000 streets attesting to both the many negative and positive aspects such a monstrous place like this can have. It is the multi-cultural Moloch of cultural extremes and ethnic mixes that somehow manages to peacefully coexist with the Queen's London of monarchial pomp and the rich white establishment world at home in Hampstead or Pimlico Road, or with the world's art, theater or rock and roll avant-gardes. On the one hand extremely modern, London has nevertheless also remained the chaotic snarl of hidden parks and squares and ethnic neighborhoods it has always been, as witnessed in districts like Brixton, for instance, where a marked Jamaican and African influence dominates, Neasden where Hindus have established a stronghold or in Southall, the place where Sikhs have found their London home away from home.

The great divide between rich and poor is greater here than elsewhere, in other words. But despite this potentially volatile mix, the friendly East End Cockney familiarity seems to predominate wherever you wonder here, at market places reminiscent of Africa or in a bustling and crowded Pakistani neighborhood. Work can be found everywhere here, or so one says, but living off what you earn in a city where the price for a family home has gone up 300 percent in the past decade is quite another matter. The London middle class, perhaps more over-burdened than anywhere else in the western world, is on the desperate hunt for the last remaining low-crime neighborhood with affordable housing or a school district that might assure their children a decent education.

Even the Tube itself seems to represent the changes that have transformed Big Bang London during these past twenty-plus years of economic boomtown growth. The well-loved London subway system is truly ancient, the first of its tracks lain in the 1860s, but only now after fifty years of neglect, does the government seem willing to pump any money into it. And transporting the estimated one billion passengers a year it does, with the corresponding rush hour crowding, it's more than high time to do so. And this crowded and somewhat aggressive nature of today's London might also contribute to the increased incidence of alcohol excess you witness here on a regular basis. Londoners or known for letting off steam in the afternoon hours in the thousands of pubs at their disposal, but also for their quickness to get violent while under the influence. When London's new mayor Boris Johnson recently tried prohibiting alcohol in the Tube, Londoners openly rebelled by going out of their way to drink there.

The rise of the City of London is indeed one of the most remarkable chapters in recent economic history. Back in the dark 1970s Britain's gross national product was lower than many an East Block country and union disturbances with the government seemed to paralyze the country. But the turnaround in the Thatcher years which came with Big Bang has reinstated London to a level of status that is strangely reminiscent of the imperial glory days of the past. The odd thing about this über-liberalization of the financial markets is that it has placed London in a similar position to that it had enjoyed centuries before, a time when Britain seemed to rule the world with an empire upon which the sun never set. And despite the current economic uneasiness taking place in the global marketplace at the moment, when the current financial market crisis has subsided, London will surely flex its muscles and extend its influence in the globalized economy even more than it already is now.

More than half a million additional inhabitants are expected to come to live in the city during the coming years. And if the latest high-rises and impressive Docklands or Canary Wharf area projects are any indication - not to forget the ambitious building plans which are now coming to fruition for the coming Olympic Games in 2012 - the world within a world of this "new" Big Bang London will continue to the flagship which represents the latest form of or our modern global society, and this in ways we are only now beginning to fully understand.