By Ben Flatman2021-03-16T07:00:00+00:00 ‘London is going to become a lot scruffier,’ Yolande Barnes tells Ben Flatman In 2017 I wrote a piece arguing that we should not take London’s success for granted. Amid concerns about housing shortages and affordability, I asked whether, rather than relentless growth, a bigger risk might not actually be unforeseen decline. Although at that time the threat to the City from Brexit was already clear, I definitely did not anticipate the current crisis and the impact it would have. Now, in the space of a year, covid has made packed Underground carriages and an overcrowded Oxford Street seem like the distant and even fondly recollected memories of a lost London.