People are fleeing and the hospitality industry is still months from reopening – will London ever recover?

If anyone can save London and the other great cities around the world, it will be the young, writes Hamish McRae

Quiet: a handful of pedestrians walk near Tower Bridge in central London (AFP via Getty)

For the great cities of the developed world, the scars will remain. Boris Johnson’s outline of how the UK will reopen its economy does not, in truth, do much for London. Work from home if you can. Hospitality is one of the last sectors to reopen. Air travel? Who knows?

Anyone who can remember London or New York in the 1970s knows what it feels like when a once prosperous metropolis is in trouble. The glitter is gone; the money is tight; the magnet for talent is weaker.

London is a good proxy for global cities, though New York has similar and in some ways more troubling messages. I will come to those in a moment. On paper, London pulled through the first downturn in rather better shape than the rest of the UK economy – down 16 per cent in the second quarter against about 21 per cent for the economy as a whole. But that is not what it felt like, or indeed feels like now. Central London and the City, in particular, are deserted.