Laura Citron

Caitlin Morrissey

So, Laura, from your perspective, what is the DNA of London, and what forces or key moments do you think have led London to acquire a certain set of traits? 

Laura Citron

It's really difficult to pin down the DNA of any city, as I'm sure you will have found through this exercise, and at London & Partners, you won't be surprised to hear that we've spent a lot of time thinking about it. Just as background for those who don't know us, London & Partners is the trade, investment and promotion agency for London. So our role is to attract visitors, businesses and students to London and to help London businesses to grow around the world. And when we've been researching London's global brand and how London is understood both by Londoners and by people around the world, what's clear is that it isn't one specific thing. It's very multifaceted, which you'd imagine.

But the most common piece of DNA, if you like, that we can find is around mindset. It's mindset and values, and it's the sense of creative energy of London that London has always had, and it's a mindset of openness. And it feels as though those two things together, that creative energy and that spirit of openness, are the DNA of London, and it's what makes a Londoner tick. So if you think from William Shakespeare to Vivienne Westwood to Stormzy, they all encapsulate that incredible creative energy of London. And it's that Londoners spark off each other.

And every generation of Londoners reinvents the city. Londoners never stood still because it's always been open to new people and to new ideas. And in every generation, it has reinvented itself. So the thing which is constant about London is that creative energy and that unique ability, I think, which you see in our urban geography, to balance creative destruction with creative preservation, to be prepared to change and to be prepared to let go of the past, but also to maintain that which is strong about the past.

And if you look at London's built environment, I think it's a great example of that, where you have very old heritage buildings sitting alongside some of the most innovative architecture in the world. And if you look at the way London different districts have regenerated over the years and are continuing to regenerate themselves from Docklands in the '80s-- if you look at recent history - the Docklands in the '80s, the Olympic Park, now, the Royal Docks - it's that ability to be constantly reinventing that I think encapsulates what London is all about.

Greg Clark

Well, it's fantastic, Laura. And I suppose the question is, how did that begin? Do you have a view about this mindset and these values that you described? This intergenerational, constant creativity and reinvention, what led to that? What was the trigger that made London that way and not another way?

Laura Citron

Well, Greg, you're much more of a historian of London than I would ever claim to be. But London has been an international trading city for well over a thousand years. And it's that openness to trade built, largely, around the river, initially, certainly; though, actually, the river remains a major avenue for trade. Nearly 30 million tons of cargo through the Port of London in the first quarter of this year. But that openness to trade has brought people from around the world into London for centuries, and with them, came their ideas.

So the origins of the City of London in Lombard Street were traders from Lombardy. Goldsmiths, I think, who came from Lombardy. Covent Garden Piazza was also heavily influenced by the Italians. So London's been a place where people have come from around the world to trade from the start and by doing that, have shaped what the city has become. 

Greg Clark

Great. Well, let me pick that up, then, and ask you, Laura, if you'd like to talk a little bit about what you think London's greatest inventions or contributions have been. You can imagine there's a huge range of things to choose from here, but when you think about London and when your teams think about London and were asked to name London's greatest inventions, what do you say? 

Laura Citron

I'm going to go for some modern examples, Greg, because we have invented many things over the years, a few which sort of build on each other. London was home to the first underground railway in the world, which really started urban mass public transport, and that still fundamentally shapes the city. And I'm a great fan of that quote, which I'm sure you'll recognise, from the former mayor of Bogota who said that a developed city is not one in which the poor have cars, but in which the rich take public transport. And I think that's very true of London, as a city, where prime ministers and mayors and everybody takes public transport, and that's really shaped the city. So I think being a global city, whose predominant method of urban mobility is public transport, is one thing, and London was a real pioneer of that.

And then building on that is open data, and London's been a real pioneer of open data. It was the first major global city to make all of its transport data completely free and accessible. And as a result of that, hundreds of businesses have sprung up off the back of London's open data. The biggest example of which is, for example, Citymapper, which is now in nearly 40 global cities, but there are hundreds of others. And so I think London, in that spirit of openness and in that spirit of trade, then pioneered open data. And it's not just our transport data that's open; London was a pioneer of opening its civic data in much broader ways and becoming a platform for others to innovate.

On a totally different note, London scientists have been at the forefront of cancer research for many years. And the London Cancer Hub in Sutton that we're building, it builds on decades of work by the Institute of Cancer Research who have developed more cancer drugs than any other academic centre in the world. Part of the reason that London has a real strength in life sciences is the diversity of the population because it makes it an ideal place to test new treatments and run trials because you have such a broad group of people, such a broad gene pool from around the world.

Caitlin Morrissey

Following up to that, is this spirit of innovation and invention and openness and freedom and belief in people's ideas, is that something that you think's come about more recently or is more recently visible? Or is this an accumulated kind of trait that London has had for many years?

Laura Citron

I think it's fundamental to London's DNA. London's been open and's been a city of inward international migration for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So that's not new. It has a very long history of religious tolerance, as well, as you pointed out in your essay.

But it's also been a place, which bounces back from challenges, which I'm trying to take heart from at the moment as we look at what's happening with coronavirus. But we had the plague, we had the Great Fire of London, but we also know that we bounced back from those things. And they've made us stronger because we've been able to innovate over the top.

So the Great Fire of London is, in many ways, what sparked the birth of the modern insurance industry, and I think, for me, that's fascinating. And we don't know yet what great new innovation will come as a result of coronavirus, but I believe there will be. I'm confident that the spirit of London to innovate and to overcome will mean that whilst what's happening at the moment is desperately sad, we can find some good from it as a city.

Caitlin Morrissey

That sort of brings me onto a question that I was hoping to wrap up with, but it is all about, what is the future of London as you see it? And in particular, how is London & Partners preparing to tell London's story as it kind of navigates this new cycle of change? 

Laura Citron

I think you're absolutely right that we are in a unique moment of change, not only for London but for global cities more broadly, as I'm sure will be clear in your series and in the book. What we're seeing among Londoners themselves is a really strong sense of pride in the city and a strong desire to reconnect with locals and with the community. So I think one of the things we'll see is a London that's more community-minded. London's a city of villages. Unlike some of the other big global cities that were centrally planned on a big master plan, London isn't like that. It's a load of villages that blended into each other. 

And there's a lot of talk at the moment about the 15-minute city or the 20-minute city; that's more from a mobility point of view. But I'm talking about from a community point of view and where people feel that their social links are. I think we'll see people being more focused on supporting local businesses, supporting their local communities and a strong sense of very hyper-local identity. Then there's a question about what happens with cities globally, and obviously, a lot of that is wrapped up in the future of work and how people come together to work. London's great strength, certainly, over the last hundred-or-so years, has been as a convergent city.

So it's a city which has global scale in a whole range of industries. At the moment, particularly, technology and other industries. So London is a global leader in FinTech because it is the world's biggest financial centre and has great strength in technology. But we see that across the boards, and we see great strength around medical technology because we have life sciences and tech; creative technology, whether it's gaming, augmented and virtual reality, advertising technology, e-commerce, fashion tech. All of those are convergent sectors which arise from an area in which London had historic strength: architecture, advertising, fashion, design and technology. So our ability to have those clashes of minds, if you like, to bring together people in unique and different ways, to bring together people who wouldn't meet anywhere else, to mould ideas together that wouldn't meet anywhere else, that's fundamental to us.

And the question is, as the world of work changes and as the patterns of the ways people interact change both in real life and virtually, how can London continue to play that role and offer that service? That's the service that London provides as a city: as a place that can bring ideas together and turn them into something bigger. 

Greg Clark

Laura, what you just said is something I absolutely agree with and believe. And I think that, in a way, you're saying something else that you're not quite saying, which is that, also, London is a place of enterprise and entrepreneurship. And it's kind of obvious in what you say, but it's not just that we've got financial services and we've got technology, and therefore, we get FinTech or MedTech or PropTech or any of the others. But actually, it's something about the enterprise model of London, I believe, that means that we're a bit peculiar in that, although, we're stuck within a kind of British and European framework, we've got much more of an American approach to enterprise, which is-- actually, there is a bit of a have-a-go type of approach here. But also, there's the ability, I think, quite quickly in London to capitalise promising ideas. I wonder if you just want to comment a bit about that. Is there an enterprise system that's distinctive from your point of view?

Laura Citron

I think you've touched on something that's really fundamental. Ideas scale because people take them up that have the power to reach the audience to scale them. And so certainly, for B2B start-ups, the ability to work with a much larger global client is the only way they can really scale. And we know that that's why founders of young, fast-growing companies from around the world choose to come to London because it has a very dense concentration of global headquarters of multinational companies and European headquarters of multinational companies. And so people come to London with their ideas so that they can find much bigger partners with whom to scale those ideas.

That is a strength of London, but we really want to invest in that. And so, in fact, this week we've launched London's Open Innovation Fellowship. Open Innovation refers to the innovation that takes place when larger organisations collaborate with those on the outside to innovate which is typically start-up scale-ups, universities, innovators of different kinds. And we've launched this fellowship to make open innovation in London more effective and more inclusive because it is a competitive advantage of London. If we can make that process of small companies and innovators with ideas scaling with much larger organisations, if we can make that process more effective, we can fundamentally drive the London economy faster.

But what's really important is that that process is inclusive and that those opportunities to partner with larger organisations are genuinely open to the people that have the best ideas because that's the other thing that's always been a strength of London, that we're open to the best ideas, and it doesn't matter whose idea it is. And so one of the real areas of focus of the Open Innovation Fellowship is to help larger organisations not only to run their open innovation programs more effectively, but also to make sure that they are genuinely working with a really diverse set of entrepreneurs that not only reflect the diversity of London, but that they're also open to working with international entrepreneurs such that they can benefit from the best ideas and so that the platform and the opportunity that London offers somebody with an idea to scale is genuinely open to all because that's a fundamental value of London. So, yes, it's really important, and that's why we have launched this Open Innovation Fellowship, precisely to do that.

Greg Clark

So I think you're confirming that, in a sense, it's that enterprise capability because of, as you said very clearly, proximity and engagement with global clients, and access to capital creates an incredibly fertile environment for enterprise. And actually, this is where a lot of my optimism is based at moment. 

There's a kind of core thesis, Laura, that emerges from the literature and also from some of the other interviews, that, yes, London's invented certain things, and it's done that brilliantly, but actually, what London's been even better at is taking inventions that are small and embryonic from other places and really giving them scale. And what Caitlin's really referring to is that phenomena. I'm wondering if that idea resonates with you and if there's anything you'd want to talk about in that regard.

People say London didn't invent banking, insurance or stock exchanges, but it showed how to take them to scale. London didn't invent some of the sports that it codified, but it took them to a new scale. It's this idea that the combination of the size of London and that kind of entrepreneurial and kind of deep, rich market that I mentioned that it has creates this scaling power that almost no other city has had, certainly, in any equivalent way, for the last 500 years. That's the idea.

Laura Citron

Yeah, I'm sure that is true. I think it's important to note, in that narrative, the role of the public sector because it is not only that there's an entrepreneurial spirit among businesses. And if you take the examples that you've mentioned of Stock Exchange, of the Underground, they're fundamentally shaped by government, whether national government or local government. The innovations in smart cities and urban mobility in London are driven almost exclusively by the public sector in the form, nowadays, of Transport for London. The innovations in life sciences, similarly, are very heavily driven by public sector or third sector research, innovation and investment.

So I think it's really important not to have a narrative that suggests that the mindset of openness and the mindset of innovation in London is one that's entirely linked with commercial activity or with businesses. When I think about innovation in London, I prefer to talk about innovation than entrepreneurship because that makes it sound very specific to the private sector and to businesses. And if we look at some of the really big ideas that London has scaled, whether it's public transport, whether it's stock exchange-- we didn't invent the idea of stock exchanges, but we did them at scale in a way that nobody else had done. That's very much enabled by open and innovative thinking by policymakers and regulators and civic leaders. The innovation that we have in urban mobility in London is almost entirely driven by the public sector, not the private sector.

And so when we think about that spirit of London, that openness, that creative energy, for me, it applies to our civic leaders just as it applies to our business leaders. And that, I think, shapes innovation in London and gives innovation in London a very different tone and a very different direction to, for example, Silicon Valley and then, again, very different to, for example, Shenzhen. So that is, I think, unique to London.

The other thing which is related to that, which is unusual, is that London is both the seat of national government, and it is the major commercial centre, and it is the major cultural centre. So in a U.S. context, it is Washington, D.C. and New York and Silicon Valley and L.A. all in one place. So if London's great strength is that convergence, having policymakers and innovators in the same place makes a really big difference. 

Caitlin Morrissey

And are there any myths that are widely believed about London?

Laura Citron

I think maybe one of the myths about London is that Londoners can be quite hard-nosed or a bit uncaring. And I would say this, but I genuinely don't think that that is the case. And whenever we research among Londoners, the sense of community spirit and kindness actually comes through very, very strongly. So that's probably a myth. 

Caitlin Morrissey

And I would say maybe now more than ever that's so kind of tangible, that community spirit and that feeling of looking out for each other and solidarity around what is happening at the moment.

Laura Citron

I agree.

Greg Clark

There’s one idea that emerges a lot about London: that it's actually a city of self-confidence about itself, and it's a city in which other people have a high level of belief and trust, if you like. Part of London's global reputation is that other people believe that if you go to London, you're going to find a city of opportunity; you're going to find a place where privacy is respected. So there is this kind of reinforcing idea of a self-confident city that knows how to reinvent itself and recover from shocks and then a city which is highly trusted, as well, internationally, in which people have strong beliefs about London's ability to add value. So there's quite a strong psychology there. Do you recognize that? Is that important from your point of view? And where do you see that coming from?

Laura Citron

London's reputation's hugely important, as it is for every brand. And London is a brand, just like every other city is. It matters because it affects the way that people make choices about London. So when people start to think about where they might go on holiday or where they might go and study for their MBA or where they might expand their business, their starting point will be places that are known to them, so that's the consideration set. And they'll also then start from a position of what their initial biases or prejudices or-- that is what the brand is. It's a set of deductions about a place or any product based on your limited impressions of it. They might then start doing a bit more research and digging around and then other factors might come into play.

But at the outset, the brand is hugely important in shaping how people feel about the city and whether they even consider London as the place where they might come for study, to trade, to invest, to build a business, to go on holidays, to come to go to an event. So I think it does matter enormously.

I also think people's understanding of London and the way that they perceive London will depend hugely on how they've interacted with it. So we know, for example, that people who've been an international student in London have a very different relationship with the city. And London has a global alumni network of millions of people who have been educated in London, and that makes a huge difference to our global network.

But equally, because London is such an international city, there are millions of Londoners who have really strong international connections, either their family connections-- two-thirds of Londoners has at least one parent who wasn't born in the UK. I have two parents who weren't born in the UK, for example. So there're very strong family networks but then also business networks and personal networks.

I often think about my role in the London brand, and I'm very clear that whilst we can curate and convene advocates of London, I don't own the London brand. The London brand is created by everyone's interactions with the rest of the world. If you like, I'm the CMO of a product which has nine million marketers, 0.02% of them report to me. So the London brand is extremely diffuse, as it is for every city, but particularly for London, which has so many different global touchpoints.

Greg Clark

Thank you. And that, in a sense, really covers this point about what people expect of London and these kind of beliefs about London. What about this self-confidence? You spoke before, of course, about how things like the plague, the Great Fire of London-- that every time there's a shock, London reinvents itself and London as this kind of organic city. But where do you think this self-confidence comes from? Is it true that self-confidence is a kind of trait of London as you see it?

Laura Citron

I think I would put it as boldness. I think Londoners are particularly bold, willing to try new things, willing to be different. It's very much a culture that embraces difference, and some might call it eccentricity and difference from the norm. It's a culture that encourages people to think big and to try new things. That's partly about self-confidence, but I don't think it's a brash self-confidence or an unplaced-- an unfounded confidence. I think it's more about a boldness and a willingness to take a risk.

Caitlin Morrissey

So in your mind Laura, are there any key leaders that have stood out, either as people who've shaped the city or people who have managed to kind of capture what London is and communicate that to the world? 

Laura Citron

As I said, London is really shaped by Londoners, and there are currently about nine million of us. So whilst it can be tempting to pick out individuals who've shaped the city, I'm quite loath to do it, to be honest, because the way the city works is through the interactions of millions of people with millions of other people. So all Londoners are in some way part of that process of reinventing the city every day.

Of course, London's been the home to many leaders throughout the years. You can start with Shakespeare. We can look at Ada Lovelace. I think it's important, also, to recognize that we have a lot more work to do in celebrating the diversity of leaders who've shape the city and that we won't have a complete picture of who has genuinely shaped London until we're able to better recognize that diversity and to celebrate it through the ages. So I think London's leaders are different in every generation, and I think it's difficult to pick out an individual who shaped London more than others. That's probably not a very useful answer, is it?

Caitlin Morrissey

But I think it's true, though. I think we can totally relate to the feeling that London is made by Londoners. 

Greg Clark

I think it's also a great answer. But maybe it provokes another question, very quickly, which is, what makes somebody a Londoner? This could be a good way to end. What is it that gives you, anyone, a sense of belonging within this city? What is that?

Laura Citron

For me, the wonderful thing about London is that being a Londoner is not a birthright; it's a sense of belonging. Anyone who thinks they're a Londoner is a Londoner. You don't even have to be in London to be a Londoner if you share our values and our mindset. I think Paddington Bear is the most articulate on this subject. Paddington Bear says, if you are a fan of the Paddington Bear film, that in London, everyone is different and that means anyone can fit in, even a little bear from Peru.