London in winter is a city of darkness, but you can still see light in the gloom

THE first line of the song Cities by Talking Heads is, "Think of London, a small city/It's dark, dark in the daytime." That is an American perspective, but as Londoners travel to the station or bus stop and then from work to home again, it does feel like being in perpetual shadow. It has been a hard year, and the stress of living and working in London comes in many forms, so reflecting on the challenges of 2023 feels especially gloomy in a city of darkness. It's tempting to ask why we live here at all.

- George Chesterton

London is a coalition of eight million strangers, but this year made the alienation feel more pronounced than ever.

The capital's economy is robust, but increasing homelessness is both a literal and symbolic indicator of how much we fail our disadvantaged. London's borough councils are flirting with bankruptcy or have already been declared so and that manifests itself most painfully in the failure to provide affordable housing, at least housing not rendered uninhabitable by mould.

We have also been let down by the capital's institutions on crime to the point where the fear of crime itself has been superseded by a resignation that nothing can be done to stop it. As well as a pandemic of shoplifting, there is the abject failure to prosecute attacks against women. London is now rightfully and shamefully infamous for teenage knife crime. We do not see the police enough and when they do arrive we are reminded this is the Met, the most discredited and denuded police force in the land, with more bad apples than a supermarket wheelie-bin.

We have a mayor predisposed to do little with what little power he has.