Capital adopts grander title in what analysts suspect is a sophisticated strategy to explain why a shed now costs half a million
The City Has Given Itself A Promotion
London has, with characteristic modesty, declared itself a megapolis, a word that means roughly the same as city but costs considerably more to live in. As a business journalist, and as a North London renter who recently viewed a flat that was technically a corridor with ambitions, I have followed this rebrand with intense professional interest.
The full announcement and its implications are covered in this report on the capital’s bold new self-description, and I can confirm that the timing, coming as it does amid relentless property price growth, is almost certainly not a coincidence.
The Economics Of A Better Word
There is real power in language when it comes to value, as anyone who has ever sold a flat knows. A neighbourhood becomes a village. A basement becomes a garden-level apartment. A city becomes a megapolis, and suddenly the eye-watering rent feels less like extortion and more like the natural cost of living somewhere that important.
The serious mechanics of the London property market are tracked carefully by organisations like the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, who deal in actual valuations rather than vibes. But even they would acknowledge that perception drives price, and that a city which believes it is a megapolis will charge megapolis money without blinking.
What Half A Million Buys
My research, conducted partly through professional channels and partly through the gentle despair of flat-hunting, suggests that half a million pounds in London now buys you a property best described as cosy, which is estate-agent for you will have to choose between the bed and the door. The broader picture of housing affordability is documented soberly by groups like the Resolution Foundation, whose charts on this subject should come with a content warning.
The megapolis branding does nothing to change the square footage. It simply changes how we feel about paying for it, which, in the end, is the only thing London branding has ever done.
The Most Honest Dishonest Thing London Has Ever Done
I have come to admire the megapolis announcement, in the way one admires a beautifully executed crime. It is London being completely true to itself: confident, expensive, and utterly committed to the bit. We cannot fix the rent, so we have upgraded the noun. We cannot build enough homes, so we have built a grander idea of the place that does not have enough homes.
I shall keep paying my megapolis rent for my corridor with ambitions, and I shall keep reporting on the numbers, and somewhere in the gap between what we call this city and what it actually costs to live here lies the whole story of modern London. It is a good story. It is also, frankly, a liberty.
The Genuine Crisis Hiding Behind The Funny Word
I have had my fun with the megapolis rebrand, but I would be failing my readers if I did not pause on the real and unfunny thing underneath it. London’s housing situation is not a branding quirk; it is a slow emergency that has reshaped who can live here, who can work here, and what kind of city we are becoming. The clever noun is a deflection, and deflections only work because the truth is unbearable.
An entire generation has been priced out of the place that generates the nation’s wealth, forced into ever-longer commutes from ever-further out, and told, in increasingly grand language, that this is the natural order of things. The pattern is documented with appropriate seriousness in the ongoing record of how this city values its own bricks, and the comedy never quite hides the cost.
The structural causes, from planning constraints to land economics to decades of under-building, are analysed soberly by housing experts and by organisations like the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, whose work on housing and poverty should be required reading for anyone tempted to call a corridor a garden-level apartment.
I Will Keep Paying, And Keep Reporting
So I shall pay my megapolis rent for my ambitious corridor, and I shall keep filing copy that tries to put a real number on a feeling the branding is designed to obscure. London has always sold the idea of itself at a premium, and the megapolis label is merely the latest, grandest version of a very old trick. The square footage will not change. The price will not fall. But somebody ought to keep saying, plainly and often, what the lovely word is really there to hide. I intend to be that somebody, between viewings.
More overpriced truth at The Daily Mash.
One Last Note From The Desk
I shall file this and then go and view another flat that is technically a room with delusions, and I shall be told it is in an up-and-coming area, in a vibrant location, in a megapolis, and I shall pay too much for it because there is no other choice, and I shall write about that too. London sells itself a little harder every year and charges a little more for the privilege, and the only honest response left to a business journalist is to keep counting, out loud, until somebody listens.