Locked Down in London

Leaving the re-opened London Library (masks compulsory throughout, all borrowed books subject to sterilisation) in the late afternoon I walk through a West End so desolate it could be the set for an apocalyptic film. All but a handful of its scores of cafes, restaurants and drinking places have closed, many of them permanently. Not only are there no tourists or theatregoers, but most of the businesspeople have not come back, despite the end of lockdown. The staff in the Jermyn Street gentlemen’s shirtmakers, bootmakers and hairdressers try not to look like men and women contemplating unemployment and poverty. 

This report appears in October’s Quadrant.
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Other, more residential quarters of the capital have returned to busyness. But even on the busiest high streets there are bleak stretches of boarded-up shops and restaurants. Things were not good on the high street even before COVID-19. High rates—the business-destroying property taxes on which the…