In 1996, Stryker McGuire launched the age of “Cool Britannia” with an ode to the city’s burgeoning chic in Newsweek magazine:
Right now, London is a hip compromise between the nonstop newness of Los Angeles and the aspic-pre-served beauty of Paris, sharpened to a New York edge. In short, this is the coolest city on the planet.
Thirteen years later, Stryker is back with an altogether more despondent vision. Looking back over the Blair-Brown era, he casts back to the millennial optimism of the 1997 Labour victory and London’s world leadership in fashion, the arts and architecture. The contrast, and it’s a stark one, is with a modern-day London heading into deep recession – the symbols of its former glory now insistent reminders of its current predicament:
Glitzy restaurants and cutting-edge fashion that used to be signs of welcome creativity reek of excess in a time of belt-tightening. Heavily mortgaged homes that looked like brilliant retirement nest eggs when property prices were soaring year after year now just look like basket cases. Construction sites and street works that once raised expectations of things to come now seem like major inconveniences.
