An International City Going ‘Global’: Spatial Change in the City of London

Abstract

Social and spatial change in the City of London from the 1960s to the end of the 1980s are described. From the mid-1960s there have been wide-ranging changes in flows of international finance through the City's financial markets. Despite these outside changes the City remained almost spatially intact. Through a distinctive social power, built on generational layers of ‘invented traditions’ and an interpretation of ‘Englishness’, the City has been able temporally and spatially to regulate incoming financial capitals to the trading mores of the ‘Square Mile’. In this way the City has been able to innovate its way through change in international financial markets. Yet to ensure its survival in the financial league tables of the late 1980s and beyond, not only did the City have to deregulate its securities markets, it had to deregulate its social space. Informed through an understanding of the gender and class composition of the City, this paper is an attempt to capture this social and spatial transition.