Jo Riley is charging ahead — the brisk pace of a busy headteacher. The small heels of her ankle boots clip the echoing corridors of her school. Once in her office, with its higgledy-piggledy piles of papers, decorated with postcards of book covers, photos of pupils and family, Riley’s demeanour softens as she admits to the stress and heartbreak of overseeing the primary school in Hackney, east London, that is expected to close next summer. “I’ve said it was like a bereavement, but actually . . . it’s more like a terminal illness.
Every time a child leaves, it’s another symptom . . . Actually, there is no cure and it’s just waiting. There’s been waves of anger, waves of real sadness . . . We are such a community . . . One of our core values is love.” Randal Cremer is one of several planned primary school closures and mergers in inner London triggered by low birth rates, families moving away because of expensive childcare, Brexit, and parents re-evaluating their lives during the pandemic. The biggest factor, says Riley, is that “housing is just becoming unaffordable”.
Philip Glanville, mayor of Hackney, calls it “the acute affordability crisis”. Retaining children in the area, he says, requires an intervention from central government, to provide “meaningful investment in social housing, match welfare support with the real cost of housing, and put controls on rocketing rents”.
Hackney is not the only area in the capital that is losing children. London Councils, which represents the 32 boroughs and the City of London Corporation, predicts a 7.6 per cent decrease in reception pupil numbers across the city between 2022-23 and 2026-27, the equivalent of about 243 classes.
A future with dwindling numbers of children is one many cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, are grappling with. In Hong Kong, for every adult over 65 there are, to put it crudely, 0.7 children, and in Tokyo it is even fewer (0.5). Even before the pandemic, Joel Kotkin, author of The Human City wrote a decade ago about the prospect of a childless city, saying that US cities “have embarked on an experiment to rid our cities of children . . . The much-ballyhooed and self-celebrating ‘creative class’ — a demographic group that includes not only single professionals but also well-heeled childless couples, empty nesters, and college students — occupies much of the urban space once filled by families. Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich.”
Forecast fall in reception classes across London before 2026. Jon Tabbush, senior researcher for the Centre for London, a think-tank, worries about the capital becoming a “more segregated city, less culturally vibrant and, in the long run, a less productive city.
High house and rent prices causing poor and middle-income residents to move outwards and leave the city would likely increase racial segregation, and damage the city’s shared culture that has made some of the most popular music, art and film of anywhere in the world.” Childlessness, wrote the urbanist Richard Florida in 2019, “reflects how certain neighbourhoods come to specialise in certain kinds of residents by income and stage of life”. In London, children are spread unevenly, with families moving to the outer edges. Data from the Centre for London shows that in the 20 years to 2021, there was a decline in households with at least one dependent child in the inner London boroughs of Hackney (9 per cent), Islington (7 per cent), Lambeth (10 per cent) and Southwark (11 per cent). Further east, in Barking and Dagenham, there was a 34 per cent increase over the period, spurred by low land prices and an enormous programme of housebuilding.
This segregation, where poorer families are forced out to the furthest reaches of the city or, in many cases, out of the city entirely, says Tabbush, “is one with less social mobility and more calcified hierarchies of wealth and class”. Whether a neighbourhood can be all things to every age group is a huge challenge, says Paul Swinney, director of policy and research at the Centre for Cities, another think-tank. “Some things are direct trade-offs: the size of property or noise,” he says. “It’s difficult to provide world-famous amenities and [publicly funded] schools.” The presence of children in a neighbourhood shapes the public and private provision of local facilities. Enrico Moretti, professor of economics specialising in urban economics at the University of California, Berkeley, notes the “demand for improvement in school quality is positively correlated with the number of families with children in an area, while the demand for entertainment — restaurants, pubs, and museums — is negatively correlated with the local number of families with children”. Changing your lens to that of a three-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 16-year-old radically expands what designing a good city means Gil Penalosa, urbanist Yet children’s presence in the city may benefit all adults, not just parents.
Gil Penalosa, an urbanist, describes children as an “indicator species” — designing cities to work for children means they work for everyone else too. Alexandra Lange, author of The Design of Childhood, expands on this point, arguing that if you design cities to be safe for adults, they would be “typically designed for abled young men — who can cross the street quickly . . . who don’t need to rest after 10 blocks. “But that’s not most people. Changing your lens . . . to that of a three-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 16-year-old — not to mention an 80-year-old — radically expands what designing a good city means and allows a more diverse population to live, work and play there.” Jerome Frost, UK, India, Middle East and Africa chair at engineering company Arup, agrees. Children encourage the design of an urban environment that is “safe, supporting walkers”, he says. “If you move to the suburbs, you’re travelling by car to the park, or driving from one enclosed environment to another.” Children can also spur innovation. “Kids have an irrationality about them,” Frost says, adding that they “are more accepting of change”.
In the King’s Cross district of central London, children clambering in playgrounds and running through fountains have benefited businesses, says Anthea Harries, asset management director at Argent, the developer of the large estate in the area that is home to Sony Music and Google, as well as shops and restaurants. “Corporates enjoy the vibrancy that children bring to a place,” she says. Pockets of London that are full of offices, or mainly for theatre and restaurants, “can feel corporate, very staid, very regimented”, says Harries. They can also feel very empty when workers go home. The City of London, historically home to banks and law firms rather than children, has in recent years been keen to draw visitors outside office hours. Chaotic energy is humanising, argues Tim Gill, an author and advocate of children’s play. Children “exemplify a degree of tolerance and conviviality, the idea that life is about more than work and money and restless grown-up intensity”, he says. “Children are a bit annoying. They don’t know the rules, but that’s part of what makes a city vibrant and life interesting.” If you exclude children, says Gill, you end up with a situation where generations are segregated and never taken out of their daily experience, unless it is paid for and curated.
More than 20 years ago, US sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark described cities as “entertainment machines” for the affluent childless. Today, Lloyd is worried cities are in danger of becoming “rarefied” — if families can no longer afford the city, neither can artists that create some of their cultural appeal. “Kids are a source of connectivity — as you get older and pubs are no longer interesting, that communal attachment breaks down,” he says. Children are also a sign of a neighbourhood’s longer-term health. In Hackney, Glanville sees them as the only way to build “sustainable, future-proof neighbourhoods”. Areas that are full of “transients — [there for] five years and out — don’t get as much back from their citizens”, says Lange, who is based in the US. “Designing cities for families also allows cities to retain those 30-year-old men after they get married and have kids. That means they upgrade to larger apartments, have shorter commutes, pay taxes in town, use the public library, build community through schooling.”
If [children are] not living here, they can’t see what the possibilities of London are Jo Riley, headteacher Having children means people start paying attention and start contributing to their neighbourhood, says Lange. “These are people who fight for protected bike lanes, run for the school board, plan block parties.” It also has an impact on local services. “An increasing number of young Londoners being forced to leave the city by the inaccessibility of home ownership will also impact hiring conditions and the state of public services,” says Tabbush at the Centre for London. The capital has the highest vacancy rate for NHS workers anywhere in the UK, he adds, which is largely driven by a lack of nurses.
In inner London, a staff nurse’s starting salary is £32,466, which means they would have to spend more than 66 per cent of their gross pay to cover local median rents, Tabbush calculates. Problems such as this will only intensify as London’s population ages. What about the children themselves? I recently met up with a friend and her teenager, who had moved out of London, swapping a two-bedroom flat for a three-bedroom house with a garden. The city’s buzz and mix of activities were magical, he declared, a description he had never applied to the fields and woodland a bike ride from his home out of town.
Charlie Bibby/FT The late American urbanist Jane Jacobs saw pavements as safer for children than playgrounds, because the presence of adults will monitor or cajole them into good behaviour. Gill says children have an “appetite for experience and life, and want to understand how places work . . . and learn the art of urban life”. Lange agrees. “They observe so much more in a stroller and on foot than they do from a car,” she says. “Socially, there are tremendous benefits from making your own friends on the playground and then, later, being able to walk to friends’ houses on their own, get a bubble tea, take the subway. “So many of the ills of contemporary childhood can be compensated for by greater independence and access to more diverse people and activities — things that are more possible in urban life.”
At Randal Cremer, Riley is saddened by the prospect that her pupils could miss the proximity to central London. “You can walk out of your front door . . . and see the galleries and see the little tech firms pop up, and there’s lots of things that can give you sort of some inspiration that you can tell you there will be some kind of future,” she says. Riley is worried about social mobility if children have to move out of the area. “If they’re not living here, they can’t see what the possibilities of London are.” She pauses and, for a moment, the sound of shrieks and laughter from children skipping and playing football outside fill the room. Riley rallies her spirits: “We’re going to make sure that the kids have the best year . . . keep it as joyful as possible.”
Emma Jacobs is the FT’s Work & Careers writer