Chapter 14 - Where is London? The (More Than) Local Politics of a Global City

Summary

This book is a celebration of Doreen Massey’s life of political action and geographical thinking. For her, of course, it was not just that these two aspects informed each other but that they were inseparable, neither able to exist without the other. Politics without geography was impossible, but it was equally impossible to conceive of geography without politics.

The notion of dialogues that frames the book is fundamental to this chapter. The last time I saw Doreen Massey, we had begun (yet another) discussion about contemporary political possibilities, one which we never had the chance to complete. As a result, Doreen is still present in my head – always arguing, and somehow still winning all the arguments. In other words, it feels as if am in a continuing dialogue with her and her ways of thinking.

In what follows, I want to engage with the sadly absent yet still present Doreen in the context of a debate about the UK’s political geography. Doreen Massey consistently highlighted the significance of uneven development for the UK’s economic geographies, for the grounded specificities of its social relations (of gender, race and class) and for the dominant practices of British politics. She approached these issues from a number of different angles over the years, but my focus is on just one aspect of her writing – namely the position of London and the London city-region within the increasingly uneasy political and economic settlement constituted by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Allen & Massey 1988; Allen et al. 1998; Amin et al. 2003; Massey 2007). Doreen never directly engaged with the political geography of Brexit – the UK’s vote to leave the European Union – because the vote took place some months after her death. But it would have come as no surprise to her. Her work on uneven development, and the role of London in particular, was highly prescient, indeed almost prophetic. In the context of that vote I draw on that work to reflect on some of the geographies of the vote and their implications.