Where does a city begin — and where does it end?

Roughly 10 miles north-east of central London, around the corner from Roding Valley, the quietest station on the Tube, you will find a building containing two semi-detached houses. Their occupants share a wall, a roof and a garden fence, yet live on different streets, in different postcodes. More than that, the road outside shows tell-tale signs of having been relaid on different schedules, and a sign welcoming you to Essex hints at why. The northern of these two houses is in the district of Epping Forest; the southern, the London Borough of Redbridge. 

The existence of a building which literally straddles the capital’s border is the result of decades of decisions which paid not the slightest attention to this pair of interwar homes. The block was built on a line between districts, which had once been the line between parishes, and the late 1950s saw both Woodford and Chigwell considered for inclusion in the new Greater London. In the event, though, the former went in, while the latter was left out. 

Once upon a time this probably wouldn’t have mattered, and exclusion from Greater London may even have added to Chigwell’s prestige: numerous other border territories, notably a large chunk of urban Surrey, specifically lobbied the Macmillan government to be kept out of the capital’s clutches. Today, though, it’s not so clear. The residents of one of those houses can reap the benefits of living in London, like free school meals or free travel for pensioners, and could vote in this month’s local elections. The residents of the other have none of these things — which might, should they have strong views on Sadiq Khan, the mayor, be a little irritating.

More than that, our entire sense of the relative prestige of cities and suburbs has flipped. For decades, cities were places of heavy industry, crime and poverty, dirt and smog. The good life was to be found in the suburban villas a comfortable commute away: this was one reason places like Epsom pushed quite so hard to stay out of Greater London. When my parents first married in the mid-1970s, they moved closer to the city for financial reasons, then inched back to the more desirable suburbs as their financial position improved.

There are many places you may associate with a city that lie, technically, outside it. Miami Beach is not in Miami; the Las Vegas strip lies outside Las Vegas

By the time I reached adulthood in the early 21st century, though, things had changed. Deindustrialisation and the expansion of services had made cities cleaner, while a generation of aspirational sitcoms set in Lower Manhattan had made city living look cool. Like many others, I moved to the city because I wanted to; I have spent much of my adult life petrified the housing market may yet force me back to the suburbs once again.

The pandemic and the rise of working from home momentarily did make many who’d made the same calculation think again, and for a time rumours of London’s death were gleefully exaggerated. But as the fad for “Here’s why we’re moving back” confessionals will suggest, and anyone who’s tried to rent in this town will confirm, the trend did not hold. Those urbanites who quit the capital and are now desperate to sell their rural piles and move back, by contrast, are finding the market distinctly sluggish. The city is still where it’s at.

All this does leave open the question of what moving back to London actually means. Official city limits are strange and arbitrary things, and there are many places around the world which you may associate with a city — which even define that city in your mind — yet which lie, technically, outside it. Miami Beach is not in Miami; the Las Vegas strip lies outside Las Vegas. Other cities — New York, Paris —  officially stop some way short of where you imagine they would, if you merely looked at a map.

London, by contrast, has an administrative existence which, with a few exceptions like those above, largely matches its urban form. That border does not, however, necessarily match public perceptions of what London is. Fashionable but far-flung suburbs such as Richmond and Twickenham may be accepted, despite their lack of a London postcode; but a 2020 YouGov poll found that, more than half a century since Romford’s incorporation into a London borough, barely a third of Londoners recognised it as part of the capital.

Where once the location-obsessed may have stressed about finding a home with an 071 phone number, to show they lived in inner, not outer London (081), today the discerning urbanite will probably have a more nebulous set of criteria, taking in postcode, transport fare zone and a sort of indefinable London-ness, too. 

So for those hoping to swap their broken rural idyll for life in the big bad city, a suburban semi at the end of the Tube seems unlikely to be enough. And if the administrative boundaries of the capital can sometimes seem arbitrary, they are hardly more so than our own mental map. 

Jonn Elledge is the author of “A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps” (Published by Wildfire)

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