Skylines, the CityMetric podcast

Casablanca is 102 minutes long. Citizen Kane runs for 119. This, the 150th and final episode of Skylines, the CityMetric podcast, is longer than either, at 124. You lucky, lucky people.I’ve loved doing this show over the last four and a bit years – it’s been a great opportunity to chat to interesting people about everything from transport and housing to smart cities and regional identities, with the odd argument about the tube or episode about ancient history thrown in for flavour. But for all sorts of reasons – not least of which is that I’ve stepped down as editor of CityMetric – this felt like the right time to stop.I wanted to go out with a bang, though, and to hell with worrying about self-indulgence. So in this final, feature-length episode of Skylines you will hear:Barbara Speed, my first co-host and the opinion editor of the I Paper, on her enduring love of baked goods chain Greggs;Our founding producer Roifield Brown, on the podcast’s origins, his native Birmingham and his love of San Francisco;New Statesman political correspondent Patrick Maguire on the rise of the metro mayor, and a movie about both zombies AND public transport;The Guardian’s media editor Jim Waterson, one of our more frequent guests, on why Britain’s transport network is quite good, actually;New Statesman political editor Stephen Bush on the best and worst cities for party conferences;The New Statesman’s former environmental writer India Bourke on the joy of nature;The Centre for Cities’ Paul Swinney on the town/city divide;Our current producer Nick Hilton on the fun he’s had turning my rubbish into a podcast;An interview with myself, about my favourite things about doing the show, conducted Agnes Frimston (who, when not being my wonderful and tolerant partner co-hosts the Chatham House podcast, Undercurrents);And last, but very definitely not least, Sommer Mathis, CityMetric’s new editor in chief, on how she got into urbanism and her plans for the site.All that, plus some clips from listeners, and some previously unreleased bits of my entirely excellent former co-host Stephanie Boland.Thanks for tuning into Skylines these last few years. I’m gonna miss you guys.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman’s cities site. It’s presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Partly because of the crisis, partly for reasons we’ll come to in a moment, our production schedule on Skylines has got a bit lax. So the first of this week’s interviews – with my pal Claire Cocks in Palermo, about what lockdown, Italian-flavour, looks like – is already a little out of date. Italy, unlike the UK, has begun lifting its lockdown. But it’s still a fascinating insight into both what a stricter lockdown looks like, and also into how great Palermo would be if she were allowed to see it at all – so I’ve kept the interview, but added a brief update from Claire about what the situation there is like now.Our second interview is with Hala El Akl, a senior associate at PLP Architecture and chair of the ULI’s UK Urban Art Forum. She tells us exactly why cities should be paying more attention to the role of arts and culture, and what she hopes to do with the role.Before I go – the explanation for the lax schedule I mentioned. In case you’ve missed the announcements on social media: Skylines is coming to an end. I’ve handed over the reins at CityMetric to the new editorial team, led by the outstanding Sommer Mathis, and the next episode will be number 150. For those and a host of other reasons, this felt like the right time to stop.But don’t worry, because our final episode is going to be an absolute monster, in which I speak to all sorts of people who’ve been involved in the show in some capacity over the last four and a bit years years, about their favourite episodes, what they would have liked to have spoken about but didn’t, and also, inevitably, the tube. It’s the messy self-indulgent send off this podcast deserves, and I hope the final product is as much fun to listen to as it was to record.Incidentally – as part of that I’m going to include some clips from listeners, being nice and/or mocking me in an amusing fashion. If you’d like to be one of them, email me your clip to jonnelledge at gmail dot com under the subject line “Final Skylines”.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman’s cities site. It’s presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’m still locked down, and so, I assume, are you, so this week’s show is a game of two-halves.In the present, I speak to my lockdown companion, my partner Agnes Frimston – who, as it happens, co-hosts the newly weekly Chatham House podcast Undercurrents – about how much fun she’s having being shut in a one-bedroom flat with me with no end in sight. We also talk about the various coping strategies the world at large is developing to help it get through lockdown; how public services are faring; and how the crisis might change the world and its politics.We also put on mousturising face masks. While recording. It was that kind of day.After that, an interview, from the before times. Back in March, I spoke with Donna Hall, the former chief executive of Wigan council and chair of the New Local Government Network. We talked about the interlocking crises – budgets, social care, and so forth – that were afflicting England’s councils even before the pandemic arrived. Once we’re out of this mess, such issues are, I fear, only going to get worse.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman’s cities site. It’s presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Apologies for the fact this week’s podcast is a little bit late. But in my defence, both time and the calendar have lost all meaning.Anyway. Something like a third of the world is currently in lockdown to deal with the coronavirus crisis, including Skylines’ little corner of it. So on the assumption that she didn’t have anywhere more fun to be right now, this seemed a good moment to invite my former co-host Stephanie Boland to Skype back into the podcast for the first time in about a year and a half. We discuss the strangeness of London, and its entirely empty transport system, in lockdown; how the UK government is doing at handling the crisis; and how it may, or may not, change the world and its politics.If you enjoyed this one and are a relatively recent subscriber to Skylines, then why not check out some episodes from Stephanie’s era as co-host? You can hear more of her in episodes 15-38, plus 51, 63, 100, and probably some more that I’ve forgotten because it was ages ago.On a different matter – the pandemic has meant a year’s delay to all this year’s English mayoral elections. That sadly means that the mayoral walks series is almost certainly finished, for the moment. But I nonetheless hope to persuade Sadiq Khan and Shaun Bailey to go for a walk with me at some point in the future. It’s good to have goals, isn’t it?Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The mayoral walks mini-series began in an act of trolling. Rory Stewart launched his campaign to be mayor of London through the unusual strategy of walking all over London and tweeting about it; I have spent large chunks of my life walking all over London and tweeting about it; Twitter at large suggested we combine forces, and maybe turn it into a podcast. And, once a couple of other candidates had helpfully put the pressure on by offering to go for a walk with me too, Stewart agreed. And suddenly what had started by taking the mick on Twitter because I was bored had become an actual thing.Alas, when the day finally came we were defeated by London’s famous weather: on the appointed morning, Friday 28 February, it was bucketing down, which isn’t really a good match with the Skylines recording equipment, also known as “my phone”. So instead this podcast was recorded in a cafe in South Kensington.During its course, I asked Rory why he felt London was crying out for a former Tory Cabinet minister as its independent mayor; why he had chosen to campaign by walking and, more recently, asking to sleep one night a week in other Londoners’ houses; and whether he thinks he really has a hope of defeating Sadiq Khan. All that, and we also chatted about his proposals to sort out the capital’’s housing and transport systems, and Rory ate some porridge, too.Incidentally, there’s a moment in this one when the candidate is unexpectedly enthusiastic about my proposals that we start giving the Overground network different line names and we have to stop talking about it before it takes over the entire podcast. Though we did discuss it for ten minutes after recording.This may be the last of my mayoral “walks”. I’m talking to the staffs of both Khan and his Tory rival Shaun Bailey, and am open to approaches from other candidates desperate for coverage... But at time of writing nothing else has been agreed. We shall see. If you happen to see someone running for mayor, send them my way, would you?Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In all the excitement over the London mayoral election, and Brexit, and coronavirus, and the end of civilisation as we know it, it might have escaped you that there are mayoral elections due in other English cities in early May. So, on this week’s podcast, we're looking at one of those. The last time Skylines spoke to Jen Williams, politics and investigations editor of the Manchester Evening News, it was to talk about exactly what had gone wrong with the northern rail network. Since that's still going wrong (lol), that’s our starting point this week, too. But we swiftly move on to talking about our real topic: Greater Manchester’s upcoming mayoral election and Andy Burnham’s record as mayor, as well as homelessness, policing and, my personal favourite, bus regulation. If you’re on Twitter and you don't follow Jen already, by the way, you’re doing it wrong: she’s on @JenWilliamsMEN. Next time, all being well, I’m off for a walk with independent London mayoral candidate Rory Stewart.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, it’s the second in our mayoral walks mini-series. Sian Berry is the co-leader of the Green party, a member of the London Assembly, and is currently running as the party’s candidate to be mayor of the capital for the third time. A few weeks before Christmas, we spent a gloriously crisp winter afternoon together walking from Manor House station to Dalston together, a route chosen mostly because it took us along Green Lanes (geddit?). Along the way we talked about, among other things, air pollution, and how to fix it; how London can reform regeneration schemes so that they don’t screw over existing residents; and, something which Sian still has personal experience of, the capital’s private rental sector. We also ended our walk at a community “parklet” – a parking space, converted into a teeny, tiny park – and talked about how to take back space from cars.My next walk, all being well, will take place later this month, and will be with the man who inspired the whole project, Rory Stewart.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's recorded and presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In just over three months, England goes to the polls, again, for local elections. This time round the big story, at least so far as we’re concerned, will be the mayoral elections in London, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and various other cities and city regions.To find out what to expect, I invited the New Statesman politics editor Stephen Bush back to Skylines to tell us what to look out for. At one point he genuinely argues that the exciting thing about these elections is that all the incumbents might win. Seriously.Also, while we’re here, we use our chat as an opportunity to trail our new podcast, Prime Ministerial, which looks back over 40 years of recent British political history.Lastly, a PSA for those who may have missed it: this is my last week on staff at the New Statesman. I’m off to freelance and work on some personal projects for a bit. I’ll be contributing to both the NS and CityMetric for a while yet, however, and Skylines will continue, at least for the moment... Stay tuned for further announcements.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rory Stewart likes to walk around London. So do I. And so, a few months ago, someone on Twitter gave me an idea for a fun wheeze: that we could walk together and turn it into a podcast.That walk will, hopefully, happen soon. But in the mean time I've been out and about with a number of the other candidates to be mayor of London.So this is the first of a mini-series. My companion on this walk, which took place last November, is the Liberal Democrat candidate Siobhan Benita. She took me to the Latin American market in Seven Sisters, which is currently under threat from developers, to talk about gentrification, housing, and all the things she'd hope to achieve as the mayor of this fine city.The next walk – though not necessarily the next episode – will see me wander through a different stretch of North London with the Green candidate and that party's co-leader, Sian Berry.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’ve barely been in the office since we released the last Skylines, so this week it's a guest episode. Commonwealth Voices is another podcast series from our founding producer Roifield Brown, of Map Corner fame. Last year it produced a lovely episode on the air pollution crisis currently afflicting Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. Here's Roifield's blurb:What happens when air quality is so dangerous, it brings businesses, schools and other services to a close and hundreds of people to the doors of public health clinics? The Jamaica Environment Trust were already calling on the government to tackle the public health risks of contaminated air and water. In 2018, when the decades old problem of fires at the Riverton city Dump resurfaced, their calls got louder.It's a lovely story – if you enjoy it please do check out the rest of Commonwealth Voices and Roifield's other podcasts. I'll be back with a normal episode of Skylines soon.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I realised earlier that this is the fourth Skylines Christmas Special, which apart from being a marker of quite how long I've been doing this thing now, presumably explains why there are giant steampunk robots marching across Victorian London again. Anyway. On this week's show, we're not going to talk about the election result – partly because I'm too depressed, partly because we've now got about four and a half years to think about that, but mostly because this episode was recorded 10 hours before the exit poll came out so we had no idea what the result was even going to be. (If you've just joined us: the left lost.)Instead, we're going to have a lovely conversation with Jay Foreman, distinguished host of such YouTube series as Unfinished London, Map Men and other things that frankly I wish I'd thought to do before he got there first. Jay tells me how he came to make a career making videos about London; how he and his co-host Mark Cooper-Jones had a blazing row about their favourite map projections; and why he's now six months into an online argument with a man who wrongly believes that Woking is in Greater London. It was, frankly, tremendous fun to record, so I can only hope it’s as fun to listen to. Not least because I realised afterwards I’d screwed up the recording and am nervous about how it sounds.Anyway. Happy Christmas, everybody – we’ll see you in 2020.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Well, here we go again. We’re seven days out from polling day here in the UK, and I don’t know about you but I’m not feeling great about it.So as a form of therapy I dragged Patrick Maguire, who’s been travelling around the country as part of his role as the New Statesman’s politics correspondent, back to the podcast to offer some reassurance. He couldn’t offer any.Anyway - we did have a fascinating chat about regional differences in voting patterns; how parts of Wales and the North East have never been the anti-Tory heartlands which they’re sometimes portrayed as; whether housing, transport and other similarly wonk-ish concerns are coming up on the doorstep; and how Napoleon III’s stay in Southport helped it win the title of “the Paris of the North”.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This podcast has been a bit parochial of late (read: London-bound) so this week we're going abroad. Max Rashbrooke is a journalist, author and policy wonk based in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, with whom, a very long time ago, I used to work. We chat about the cities of his homeland, how one might travel between them, and how they came to have the sort of housing crisis that can almost make London look good. We also talk about New Zealand's politics and history more broadly - as well as its relationship with its bigger, better known neighbour Australia.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Skylines is out and about again this week. Epping Forest is a 13 mile long strip of wooded land straddling the border between London and Essex. I often visited during my childhood, have walked bits of it since, but I've never done the whole thing.So last week, I did, with a man who's just written the book on the subject. Luke Turner, with whom I worked briefly a depressingly long time ago, is the co-founder of the culture website The Quietus. He's also the author of Out Of The Woods, which he modestly describes as “a critically-acclaimed memoir of sexuality and nature”. He kindly agreed to spend an autumn day walking with me from Manor Park to Epping, all the while telling me about his book, the history of the forest and its place in the psyche of the city, and how it came to be owned by the City of London Corporation. We also talk, variously, about hermits, hallucinations, cows and our former boss Jeremy Hunt.Some excellent production work courtesy of our producer Nick on this one incidentally – while the podcast was recorded on location, the woodland sound effects are sadly a later addition.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, I finally invited someone I should have asked years ago onto the podcast. Anoosh Chakelian is a long time colleague of mine at the New Statesman – she joined the staff literally two days before I did – whose work focuses largely on public services and the state of the public realm. She also earlier this year replaced Helen Lewis as co-host of the main NS podcast, on which she is doing an excellent job.Anoosh joins me to talk about a subject very dear to her heart: outdoor gyms, which offer free community classes, and many of which are now under threat. While she's around we also chat about austerity, London's best parks, and why west London is not frankly very good.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In roughly the same manner as the Greenland Ice Sheet, the London mayoral election is hotting up. Ex-Tory Rory Stewart has entered the race as an independent and is chatting about it to anyone who goes near him. Continuing Tory Assembly Member Shaun Bailey gave a speech to the party's conference, and is refusing to chat to pretty much anyone. (No change there: during the selection race last year, he was the only shortlisted candidate to refuse to talk to us, forcing us to replace him with some music.)To discuss what all this means for the race, and whether it threatens Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan in next May's contest, I'm joined by New Statesman political correspondent Patrick Maguire, who, it's fair to say, has views. Also this week, the sort of Liverpudlian Patrick and sort of Londoner myself debate a question for the ages: which is better, Birmingham or Manchester?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

One of the more exciting things to have happened in the already fairly exciting world of housing and planning policy in recent years is the rise of the YIMBY movement. Intended as a counterbalance to the "Not in my back yard" lot, YIMBYs aim to show politicians that there's support for policies that would get more housing built.They also, on occasion, write for CityMetric – so I invited two of them on to tell us about their work. John Myers is leader of the London Yimby group, while Sam Watling is director of Brighton Yimby. They tell me about the movement’s origins, its policy goals and how exactly they're going to solve the housing crisis.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The present is terrible and the future may be worse, so let's take refuge in the past. Monica L. Smith as an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, whose latest book is Cities: The First 6,000 Years.In it she investigates why cities first emerged, how they have evolved, and why people are drawn to them. She was kind enough to pop by New Statesman towers to give us a flavour, and tell me why cities first emerged, where you can find their ruins and what they have to teach us today.If you like this one, by the way, you might want to check out episode 19, from way back in September 2016, when I spoke to the US history podcaster Rob Monaco about how it was we came to invent cities in the first place.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’m on my summer holidays, so here’s a guest episode.Skylines’ founding producer Roifield Brown recently teamed up with Luton’s own Claire Astbury to launch a new podcast. Map Corner covers maps, cities, transport systems, and all the other things that Skylines listeners are into.They were kind enough to invite me on to talk about maps, Spain and Helsinki the other day, so this is that episode. It isn’t just me though - there’s also an extensive discussion of the British road number system, along with much, much more. If you like Skylines, you’ll like this, and you should subscribe immediately.All being well I’ll be back in two weeks.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A few weeks ago, a man called Samir Jeraj got onto the Northern line of the London Underground at Bank station, promptly got his bag strap caught in the doors, and then spent the next 15 stops hoping in vain that the next would be the one where the doors in question would open again, freeing him again. He ended up at the end of the line in Edgware.This struck me as very funny, and since Samir is a housing campaigner and the author of The Rent Trap, I thought that a fun thing to do for the podcast would be to recreate the incident and then interview him about rent controls while trapped in a tube train’s doors. The result was… well, you’ll find out.I’m about to go on my holidays, by the way, so the next one will be a guest episode from friend of the podcast Roifield Brown. I'll be back with your next regular episode of Skylines in early September.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, it’s two interviews, unified by being at the intersection of politics and business, and also of my not really, if I’m absolutely honest with you, knowing what I’m talking about.First up, it’s Centre for Cities boss Andrew Carter, in our final “ask the expert” slot for the moment. This week, he’s telling me about Enterprise Zones, areas in which businesses are given special tax incentives to encourage them to invest. So, the question is – does this actually work, or just it just suck money from elsewhere?Then I’m off to City Hall to speak to London’s chief digital officer Theo Blackwell. He tells me about the city’s use of data, how it can improve life for Londoners and also, well, what a chief digital officer actually does.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

So does “cultured-led regeneration” actually work? Can a shiny new museum ever be enough to fix a struggling post-industrial city? Or a particularly big sports day?Carolina Saludes of the Young Fabians has been looking into these and other questions, and kindly agreed to come and answer them for us. We talk about Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture; her home city of Barcelona’s regeneration after the 1992 Olympics; plus, inevitably, Bilbao and its Guggenheim. And a good time was had by all.Also this week: Andrew Carter, chief executive of the Centre for Cities, gives us an urban policy wishlist for Britain’s new Prime Minister.By the next episode of Skylines, that job will almost certainly be held by Boris Johnson. May god have mercy on our souls.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Finland, Finland, Finland, as Monty Python once sang: Finland has it all.Well, it has some things anyway, and more to the point its embassy in London was kind enough to invite me to visit, and to learn all about the country’s smart cities projects.And so I did. We visited Helsinki; Espoo, a rapidly growing city in the suburbs of the capital, which is something like a cross between Silicon Valley and Milton Keynes; and Tampere, effectively Finland’s second city, an industrial hub about 100 miles to the north.We went to Kalastatama, a new smart district being built from scratch in Helsinki’s Docklands. We went to the Nokia office park to learn about smart lampposts, and what you do when your biggest most profitable company suddenly stops being the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile phones. We even went to some museums, because who doesn’t love a national history museum?So, this episode, we’re talking about everything we learned. To do that I’m joined by one of my fellow travellers and a friend of the podcast: Agnes Frimston, deputy editor of the Chatham House magazine The World Today, and co-host of its podcast Undercurrents. If you’re interested in international affairs, you should definitely subscribe to the latter, because both she and it are brilliant, even if it did take us three goes to record the intro because she kept laughing at my podcast voice.(Agnes' comments, of course, reflect her own views, not those of Chatham House.)Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week's guest is John Boughton, teacher, historian and author of an excellent housing-flavoured blog, which last year appeared as a full-blown book. Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing is an incredibly readable look at the history, politics and architecture of public housing in Britain, from those first estates in the late 19th century to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017.It is genuinely one of the best books I have ever read on such a wonkish subject, and the paperback edition has just been published. So this seemed like an excellent moment to talk to John about what got him interested in this subject, what he learned from writing the book, and whether he is optimistic about the future of housing in this country.Somewhere around the New Labour years, we take a short break in that conversation to talk to Paul Swinney, head of policy at the Centre for Cities, about a different aspect of the housing crisis: what the divergence in house prices between the London area and the rest of the country has done to the wealth divide in this accursed nation.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire broke out in a west London tower block; 72 people died in the resulting conflagration, many of them, tragically, because they had followed the official safety instructions to remain in their homes.At the time the Grenfell fire felt like a turning point in Britain’s attitude to social housing. Two years on, though, precious little seems to have changed.Stuart Hodkinson, an associate professor at the University of Leeds, has spent a decade talking to estate residents about their experience of regeneration and maintenance of social housing estates at the hands of private firms. He tells me how a disaster like Grenfell could have come to happen – and whether something similar could happen again.Also this week: Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities tells me about Sheffield’s world-leading Advanced Manufacturing Park, which brings experts from different industries together with academics from the city’s universities to undertake joint research. The park is already a leader in its field – so can it help pull Sheffield out of its economic doldrums?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, two disparate segments linked by the idea of trading with the world. Well, vaguely. It’s there, but you have to squint.First up: I make my regular visit to the Centre for Cities office for the Ask the Experts slot with head of policy Paul Swinney. This week, he teaches me why cities need businesses that export internationally to truly thrive.After that, we’re off to Liverpool, with New Statesman politics correspondent Patrick Maguire. He tells me why the local Labour party tried to oust mayor Joe Anderson; how the city became the party’s heartlands; and how it ended up with quite so many mayors.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week it's one of those two-for-the-price-of-one episodes where I'm not even going to pretend the conversations are connected. They are, however, both interesting, so here's more about them:In the first half, I talk to Skylines regular Paul Swinney, head of policy at the Centre for Cities, about what should really have been one of the big UK urbanism stories of the moment. Last week, the North of Tyne region – what would once have been called Newcastle and Northumberland, but not, vexingly, Gateshead or Sunderland – elected its first metro mayor, Labour's Jamie Driscoll. Surprisingly few people noticed. So Paul and I discuss why that is, and what effect the region's strange geography – excluding, as it does, what is effectively the southern half of a city – might have on the post.I the second half, we change gears as I nip out to Somerset House to chat to curator Karishma Rafferty about her work using festivals, installations and other cultural offerings to raise awareness of climate change. We also find time to talk about Somerset House itself, and – not at all parochially – Westminster council's proposals for pedestrianising part of the Strand.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week it’s another live episode, of sorts. In early April I was lucky enough to chair an event at the Cambridge Literary Festival with the journalist and novelist John Lanchester. John was mostly there to promote his latest novel, The Wall, a “cli-fi” book about a Britain trundling on after catastrophic climate change has wiped out much of the planet. In the past he’s also written about other vaguely CityMetric-y topics like the housing crisis and the tube - so he’s a guest I’ve been hoping to get on for a while, and was kind enough to allow us to record our chat for posterity and podcasting purposes.Incidentally, I didn’t find a way of turning the conversation to the tube. We do lose ten minutes to talking about Game of Thrones, though.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Last year, Burhan Wazir wrote a lovely piece for the New Statesman under the headline, “The changing shape of Britain’s mosques”. In it he talked about how the country’s Islamic community had initially co-opted sitting rooms and former pubs for its places of worship, but had gradually, over the decades, begun to build bigger, more communal mosques on the scale of churches or even cathedrals.All this sounded like it might make an interesting podcast, so I asked if Burhan fancied a chat. He suggested we go one better, and visit the stunningly beautiful New Cambridge Mosque, which is currently nearing completion.So that’s what we did. Dr Timothy Winter, chair of the Cambridge Mosque Trust, gave us the tour; then the three of us sat down and recorded a podcast about it. This, as you may have gathered, is that podcast.Also this week: Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities, on the skills gap in UK cities.The reason I was in Cambridge, incidentally, was to speak to the writer John Lanchester, about his new novel of climate dystopia novel The Wall, as well as other topics including Brexit, the housing crisis and, er, Game of Thrones. You can hear the recording of that event on the next Skylines.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The last few of these things have been quite serious, so let's mix it up a bit with some spurious nonsense. And what better way to do that than to invite Sarah Manavis back on, to answer a question I've been pondering for a while: why, exactly, does she hate London, the city in which she has chosen to live? This takes a while, because she keeps banging on about her dog.To mix things up a bit, we also have our regular Ask The Experts slot with Paul Swinney of the Centre for cities. This week: why are exports so important to cities?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’ve been on holiday, and when I came back the entirety of British politics was on fire. So, on this occasion, I’ve fallen a bit behind with my podcasting. Sorry, gang.No matter, though, for here’s a guest episode. City Talks, as you may know, is the monthly podcast from our friends at the Centre for Cities, hosted by chief executive Andrew Carter. Last December it released an episode posing the now depressingly topical quesiton: how will Brexit affect British cities? He’s joined by Naomi Clayton and friend of the podcast Paul Swinney in an attempt to answer that question.We’ll be back with a full-blown episode of Skylines next week.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s podcast is a live show, recorded at the New Local Government Network’s annual conference on 26 February. (We did this last year, and nobody got fired, so here we are again.)The topic under discussion this time is inclusive growth – who is losing out from our current economic model, and how we fix that. To discuss that I was joined by Paul Najsarek, the chief executive of the London Borough of Ealing; Tamar Reay, who works in procurement at Preston City Council, and has worked on the “Preston model”, in which councils do more to support local businesses; and Stuart Field, the founder of social enterprise Bread Funds UK.Live shows are FUN and we haven’t done enough of them, so in the no doubt highly likely event you’re reading this as someone with both a venue and some recording equipment, why not drop me a line?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Two interviews this week, which are both about the future of our cities but are otherwise unrelated except for allowing me to come up with a sort of pun on the word “high”.First up: drones, the remote-operated buzzy flying things that recently managed to shut down several of London’s airports. The innovation charity NESTA has produced a report looking at what drones will do for our society, how we need to regulate them, and what role local government is likely to play in that. I spoke to the report’s author Kathy Notstine about all those things and asked: is it worth it?In the back half, I talk to Skylines regular Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities about the future of the high street – that, for non British listeners, is what towns generally call their central retail area (the name is roughly analogous to “Main Street”). Paul tells me how cities can regenerate their high streets in the age of Amazon.Next Tuesday, incidentally, I’ll be recording the second live edition of Skylines at the New Local Government Network’s annual conference in London. If you’re a local government professional, why not pop along?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Baby it's cold outside – or at least it was, in certain parts of the world, when we recorded this, ho hum.Anyway, that's the week's topic. Inspired by the polar vortex, which has seen temperatures of -30C in the US Midwest, we're chatting extremes of weather, with the New Statesman's US editor Nicky Woolf and its in-house midwesterner Sarah Manavis. We also talk about extreme heat and, this being CityMetric, manage a long and detailed argument about which temperature scale is actually better.(I'm not going to lie to you: everyone was in a particularly unruly mood that day, and at one point I had to leave the recording for a moment to deal with an editorial problem, so I'm a bit nervous of what they said behind my back. What's more, there was a problem with Nicky's mic that means his words are accompanied by a low hiss as if he's speaking parseltongue, and the process of editing that out means he sounds like he was literally phoning it in. All things considered, I am slightly terrified to hear the results of this one, but there we are.)Also this week, I talk to Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities about the other big freeze (DYSWIDT?) affecting British politics: austerity. Just how much damage has it done to our cities?The conversation was inspired in large part by this year's addition of the Centre's annual Cities Outlook report. You can find that here.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, we’re off to China. Now the U.S. bureau chief for the South China Morning Post, Robert Delaney spent many years as a foreign correspondent reporting from the world’s most populous country.He now has a novel out: The Wounded Muse, based on real events that played out in Beijing as the 2008 Olympic Games approached. He spoke to us about how China, its economy and its cities have changed over the past two decades.This episode we also go back to the Centre for Cities’ Paul Swinney to ask another big question. If agglomeration – being able to get more people to more jobs – is the key to economic success could lack of good transport be the thing that’s holding England’s cities back?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s podcast is a bit of a sandwich. In the middle, you’ll find an informative and nutritious conversation with Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities, in which we try to answer a big question about cites. Generally speaking, in a phenomenon known as “agglomeration theory”, bigger cities are richer and more productive than smaller ones. That, though, doesn't seem to hold true in the UK, where - London excepted - the most productive settlements tend to be smaller.So, does size matter? And if so, why doesn't the rule hold in the UK?On either side of that though you'll find a rambling discussion about food in cities with Sarah Manavis and Nicky Woolf. What's with the midwest and fast food? Which cities are the best places to eat? And most importantly of all, will Sarah ever stop torturing our producer Nick by swearing?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, 'tis the season for large chunks of the population of any major city to up-sticks and head back to whatever small town they grew up in. Also this week, the racing driver Lewis Hamilton alienated his entire hometown by saying that he always wanted to get out of the slums. Lewis Hamilton grew up in Stevenage. At any rate: this feels like a good excuse to talk about, for want of a better phrase, shit towns, of the sort people tend to run away from so that they can live in the big city. To do that, I'm joined by two of my colleagues: Rohan Banerjee, who grew up in Thanet, the Kentish island which has twice now failed to choose Nigel Farage to be its member of Parliament; and Sarah Manavis, a refugee from Dayton, Ohio, who requires an enormous amount of bleeping out. We talk about the economic and cultural forces that drive people to move away from their hometowns, and what, if anything, could make them move back.I'm about to break off for Christmas, so this will be the last Skylines of the year. We'll be back in 2019. Thanks for listening - and god bless us, every one. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Good news, everyone: this podcast doesn't even glance at Brexit. Bad news: it is about environmental catastrophe, or at least, the infrastructure that might save us from it. First up, I talk to the New Statesman environmental writer India Bourke about her recent trip to Oslo, where she learned all about carbon capture and storage, and visited a very exciting energy from waste plant. (Christmas has come early to the CityMetric offices.)Next, I talk to Sebastian Maire, chief resilience officer for the city of Paris, about what the French capital is doing to prepare itself for a changing climate. One of its biggest projects at present is grassing over its school playgrounds – a scheme with as many social as environmental benefits.And then, we're back in the podcast bunker again, to talk about vertical forests and other forms of green infrastructure.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.Skylines is supported by 100 Resilient Cities. Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, 100RC is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, I’m chatting about the housing crisis with the Centre for London. Last summer, research manager Victoria Pinoncely was co-author of the think tank’s report, “Borough Builders: Delivering more housing across London”. She tells me about the role the capital’s 32 boroughs could play in solving its housing crisis, and the barriers preventing them from doing so. We also talk about the lessons all this holds for the rest of the country, as well as the housing market in her native France.Also this week, I talk to Andrew Carter, chief executive of the Centre for Cities, for our regular Ask the Expert segment. In a sort of sequel to our conversation in episode 110, I ask something that’s been bothering me for a while. Every other industrial revolution has created jobs and raised incomes – so why is everyone fretting that the automation one be any different?Lastly, some housekeeping: after nearly two years of producing this thing myself, this week we have a new producer, in the form of Nick Hilton (@nickfthilton), which should improve the sound quality markedly. Please make him feel welcome, but please don’t tell him how much better at this he is than I am.We’ll be back in a fortnight. Tara.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You'll be delighted, I'm sure, to learn this podcast is not about Brexit.I've been in Newcastle, capital in the north east of England, for a couple of days: partly for work, partly just because I wanted to get out of London for a bit, and it was the largest British city I'd never been to, and people kept telling me it was cool.And it is. It really, really is. Stunning architecture, great cultural offering, some seaside, a metro and the best collection of bridges you will find pretty much anywhere. You should go there at once.So – why did it take me so long? Or to put it another way: why don't we talk about it more? To find out, and to discuss the region and its politics more broadly, I spoke to local journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, and recorded it on my phone.While I'm here, some housekeeping. This is sort of a good news/bad news thing. The bad news is that Skylines is going fortnightly: I'm moving to a new role, and just won't have time to put out a podcast every week any more. If there's enough of an outcry - or even better, desperate promises of cash - we may reconsider this decision in the new year; but for the next few months at least we're cutting back.The good news is that it isn't going anywhere: we'll still be talking about cities, transport and other such nerd ambrosia. And the even better news is we're getting a proper producer, so it should sound better than it does when I'm in editing it.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

110. The rise of the robotsThis week, it’s about work, automation, fear and loathing in god’s own county of Essex.New Statesman tech writer Sarah Manavis has been to Tilbury to visit an “Amazon fulfilment centre”, which is almost exactly as fun as it sounds. She tells me what the experience taught her about modern corporate culture, as well as complaining about having to get up in the morning and also about her puppy Martha.Dove-tailing neatly with the issues raised by that conversation, this week’s Ask The Experts segment with Centre for Cities boss Andrew Carter concerned what automation will do to Britain’s cities – and how government can avoid repeating the mistakes it made in the 1980s.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is a repeat – sorry gang, I’ve been horrendously busy.But, there are quite a lot of episodes of this thing now. And as the audience has grown, that means a lot of you haven’t heard our early work. So, to plug the gap, here’s an example of it. What follows is the original blurb, from August 2016.On this week's podcast, we're talking gender. Which of course is not actually the same as sex – the former is social, the latter biological – but until such time as HBO makes a hit sitcom called “Gender and the City”, this is our title and we're sticking to it. Anyway. This week's guests: Caroline Criado-Perez is the writer, journalist and feminist campaigner, who wrote a fantastic feature for us on why cities need to take women into account when planning. She gives us a whistlestop tour of her findings, from playgrounds in Vienna to toilets in Mumbai. Lauren Elkin is the author of "Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London", recently serialised on BBC Radio 4. She tells Stephanie about the origins of the book, and why walking can be a radical act. Sarah Coughlan and Marissa Santikarn are two-thirds of the Berlinials podcast. They tell us about the joys and hassles of ex-pat Berlin. Lastly, Stephanie and I discuss how her experiences of London differ from mine (most notably: I get cat-called surprisingly rarely). And we talk about how cities could be made more welcoming for women. Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and Stephanie Boland, and is a Roifield Brown production. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, it’s all about mayors, and also someone who the smart money says will never become one.I’ve dragged Stephen Bush back into the podcasting catacomb to discuss Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate to be the next mayor of London. Bailey, alas, declined an invitation to appear on Skylines earlier this year - but given how well his contact with journalists is going at the moment, it’s by no means clear this was a mistake.Anyway: Stephen and I discuss his faltering campaign, explore why it’s going so badly, and ask if the Conservative party has any way out.Also, in this week’s ‘Ask The Experts’ segment with the Centre for Cities, I ask director of policy Paul Swinney: do mayors actually matter?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, we’re off to an English city that, to my shame, I’ve been neglecting: Bristol, the largest city in the south west, and indeed the largest city in the south outside London.I’m joined by Sian Norris, founder of the Bristol Women’s Literary Festival, to talk about the city she’s lived in since her childhood. She tells me what makes Bristol so liveable, why it’s struggling with inequality, and how it’s coping with the recent influx of London expats bidding up house prices.Since we’re on his patch, I also spoke to Marvin Rees, who since 2016 has been the elected Labour mayor of the city. He tells me why he was so keen for Bristol to host the Global Parliament of Mayors, and why local politicians need to work together after Brexit. Oh, and he talks about his transport plans, too.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.Skylines is supported by 100 Resilient Cities. Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, 100RC is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s a bit of a game of two halves this week.First up, I talk to Eric Klinenberg – director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University – about his new book, Palaces for the People. He argues that what he terms ‘social infrastructure’ has a major effect on everything from crime to disaster resilience. Solving the problems of the future, he suggests, is going to mean investing more in infrastructure, public space and community links.After that, it’s our semi-regular “Ask the experts” slot with the Centre for Cities. This time, I drag director of policy Paul Swinney into one of the noisiest debates going on in UK urban policy circles today: have we focused too much on cities, and not enough on towns?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.Skylines is supported by 100 Resilient Cities. Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, 100RC is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Crossrail is running late. The opening of London’s £15bn new railway, also known, horribly, as the Elizabeth line, has been delayed by the better part of a year, to autumn 2019.This came as a bit of a surprise – but, given the horrible tendency of mega-projects like this to run both overtime and over-budget, should it have done?To find out, I decided to walk the length of the new section of track, from Woolwich in the east to Paddington in the west, to see, basically, whether or not the new line looked ready. To keep me company, and give me someone to talk at, I took the Guardian’s Jim Waterson along for the ride.Along the way, we recorded this podcast, describing the state of the infrastructure we say, chatting about the Woolwich tunnel, arguing about the appropriate names for stations, and generally nerding out. It was quite fun using a podcast as an excuse for a day out - so if you enjoy this one, please do let me know to give me an excuse to do it again.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Exciting news, lads: Skylines has been on tour! Well, sort of: this is the first episode we’ve ever recorded primarily outside London.I’ve just got back from Liverpool, where I was attending the Labour party’s annual conference. While I was there, friend of the podcast Neil Atkinson, the host of the Anfield Wrap football podcast who appeared way back Skylines 22, very kindly agreed to let us use his studio next to Albert Dock to record this week’s episode.The two of us are joined by his Anfield Wrap co-host, John Gibbons, and the writer Laura Brown, to talk about Scouse culture. Why does Liverpool has such a strong civic identity? How much did being European Capital of Culture in 2008 change the city? And is the tourism really all about the Beatles?Also, in our new semi-regular “Ask the Expert” segment, I ask our resident expert Andrew Carter, of the Centre for Cities: is England’s north-south divide actually fixable?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

And so to the second of our London Tory mayoral candidate interviews.This time it's Joy Morrissey: an American-born Ealing councillor, former staffer at Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice, and private renter. She tells me how she got into the race largely to talk about housing policy, which lies at the root of the city's other social problems – and how she didn’t entirely expect to make it this far.Ideally there would be a part three of this series, in which I spoke to the third candidate in the race, Greater London Assembly member Shaun Bailey. There won't be, at least for the moment: Shaun has so far not been available. Should that change, however, you'll be the first to know. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

There are three people on the shortlist to be the Conservative candidate for London mayor in the 2020 election. So this week, we're speaking with them.First up: Andrew Boff, a long-serving member of the Greater London Assembly and former leader of Hillingdon council, who has run for this particular gig five times now.Andrew tells me why housing targets should focus on bedrooms, not front doors; why he believes stop and search remains a valuable part of the Metropolitan Police's work; and why Sadiq Khan's war on the motorcyclist is a very real problem for the capital.Tomorrow we'll be back with the second part of this series, talking to his rival, Joy Morrissey. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Leeds! Sheffield! Bradford! Huddersfield! This podcast has, figuratively speaking, not spent enough time in any of them.So, this week we’re off to the ancient county of Yorkshire, Britain’s largest, home to the biggest metropolitan area in England not to have its own devolution deal, to discuss God’s Own Country.To help me out, I’m joined by two Yorkshire-expats of my acquaintance, Halifax’s James Ball and Hull’s Jasmine Andersson. We talk about Yorkshire geography and identity, why the place feels ignored, and what it needs to thrive.Also, this week sees the first of a new regular segment, in which we ask the Centre for Cities’ chief executive Andrew Carter to explain something about cities and cities policy. We’re calling it “Ask the expert”, so no pressure.This week, in keeping with our theme, I’m asking: why doesn’t West Yorkshire have a mayor?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We’re just over halfway through Sadiq Khan’s term as mayor of London – and just under half-way through most of the various other metro mayors’ own terms elsewhere in the country. What better time, then, to drag the New Statesman special correspondent Stephen Bush back into the podcast bunker to ask how this whole mayor thing is going?To that end, we discuss the three candidates on the shortlist to be the Tory candidate in London’s 2020 mayoral election, how good Khan’s record really is, and whether he’s in any way beatable. We also discuss how the Labour primary is destined to become the real contest in Manchester and Liverpool; how the Midlands, Tees Valley and West of England are likely to be up for grabs next time round; and why more mayoralties are unlikely to materialise any time soon. Oh, and also how the Sheffield City Region, tragically, may not be long for this world.On that note: next week, we’re off to Yorkshire. Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.Skylines is supported by 100 Resilient Cities. Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, 100RC is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.