Six years after Hammersmith Bridge closed to cars, the council has confirmed: “there is no financial option available that would allow the bridge’s full restoration” (BBC News, July 2026).

But visit the bridge today and you will already find a thriving river crossing, with almost 20,000 people crossing the bridge every day either cycling, walking, or wheeling.

Given that the council does not have the £250-300m required for a full restoration, we are advocating for a public transport that solves the real problem by helping elderly residents, disabled residents and families with young children get across the river.

This short film sets out that solution: self-driving electric pods, £10m, running within the bridge’s existing weight limits.

Filmed and edited by Aeron Laffere. Presented by Nick Maini.

Please support our campaign by following @barnes.hammersmith.pods on Instagram and by completing the short questionnaire at this link.

Here is the BHELT website (Barnes & Hammersmith Electric Light Transit).

You can view live traffic data from Hammersmith Bridge on our Telraam traffic monitor, set up and fully funded by our group of local residents.

Finally, for anyone who is willing to hear more than polite society would tolerate on the subject of bridges, I spoke at length on the YIMBY Pod, available here, from the 22:00 minute mark onwards:

With special thanks once again to Ian Pulford & Ohmio UK, Charles Campion & the BHELT team, as well as Leo Murray & Possible.

There is no financial option available that would allow Hammersmith Bridge’s full restoration.

BBC News & LBHF, Cabinet Report, July 2026

With that single sentence, Hammersmith & Fulham’s council ended seven years of promising to bring the cars back to Hammersmith Bridge.

And in the very same week, a tenacious group of local residents have set out to save the bridge themselves by promoting a public transport option.

We are a small group of retired architects, parents, and neighbours from both sides of the river. Together, we are bringing forward a realistic solution to the bridge: self-driving electric shuttle pods, under three tonnes, already carrying passengers on public roads in Milton Keynes.

This Saturday 11th July, come see the self-driving vehicles for yourself at the Barnes Fair from 10am-4:30pm and Holy Trinity Church Castelnau 10am-2pm. Bring your children, bring your questions, or bring your most sceptical neighbour (you can find our invitation with full details below).

Last year, I published a long-read piece arguing that the plan to bring back cars to Hammersmith Bridge would never be funded, and that a better solution was hiding in plain sight.

This week, that story has finally moved on. Three things have changed:

1. The plan to restore the bridge for cars is officially dead

The headline news is this: the report rules out the viability of restoring the bridge to motor vehicles.

On Monday 6th July 2026, Hammersmith & Fulham’s cabinet considered the officers’ report on the bridge’s future. The report confirms the council has spent £54m on the bridge since its closure in April 2019, but estimates at least £300m more is required for a full restoration. The council will still submit a bid to the government’s Structures Fund for a phased repair of “the most critical life-expired elements”, with the aim of keeping the bridge open for pedestrians, cyclists and river traffic. But the report notes that the fund’s completion deadline “rules out a full restoration of the bridge for use by motor vehicles, as the required works are plainly not achievable in that timespan” (LBHF). Or as the council put it in the version released to journalists: “There is no financial option available that would allow its full restoration” (BBC News).1

For seven years, every conversation about the bridge has been framed around a £300m+ restoration for cars. That money does not exist, and neither does funding for a replacement bridge.

Anyone still hoping central government will ride to the rescue should look at the queue. Albert Bridge closed to motor traffic in February 2026 with the same cast iron cracking problem. Westminster, Lambeth and Vauxhall Bridges have now also been placed on the “critical” list.

In fact, across Great Britain, around 3,000 council-maintained road bridges are classed as substandard, unable to carry the heaviest vehicles, with a total maintenance backlog estimated at close to £7bn.

All these projects are competing for the same £1bn Structures Fund. A £300m full restoration of one Victorian suspension bridge is not going to win that competition, now or ever. The politicians still writing letters demanding a full reopening to cars are campaigning for something that cannot happen. But with the council report this week, that avenue has now closed.

We now know the answer to “when do the cars come back?” is: never. The question we must ask instead today is “what is the best use of the bridge that we actually have?”

We have an answer.

2. We have brought the pods to Hammersmith Bridge

On Monday, two self-driving electric shuttles arrived in Barnes.

They arrived on a low-loader brought from Milton Keynes by their operator, Ohmio LIFT, where they are already being operated and carry passengers on public roads.

By Wednesday, the pods had learnt the local route and were driving themselves around Barnes autonomously.

These vehicles are lightweight shuttle pods, weighing under three tonnes when fully loaded. We believe that they are the best way to restore a public transport link across the bridge within its current weight limit.

A fleet of ten would carry 300 passengers an hour, with a protected cycle track and footways alongside, for roughly £10m. The full pod proposal can be explored at www.hammersmithbridge.solutions.

This is not science fiction. These are real vehicles, self-driving on the proposed route, today.

3. We proved that Hammersmith Bridge is already open

Is Hammersmith Bridge really “closed”, as the headlines keep claiming?

Since the stabilised carriageway reopened in April 2025, Hammersmith Bridge has quietly become one of the most pleasant river crossings in London: no engines, no fumes, just a steady stream of walkers, runners, prams and bikes across the Thames.

The question was never whether people still use it. The question is how many.

And remarkably, nobody official could tell you. Counting the users of London’s most argued-over bridge was, apparently, nobody’s job. So BHELT made it ours: we installed a live traffic counter, and you can check the data yourself here.

The answer: around 15,000 crossings a day, without a single bus or car.

This must be the busiest “closed” bridge in the world!

Introducing BHELT

To see this vision through, our group of locals has formed a Community Interest Company, called Barnes & Hammersmith Electric Light Transit (BHELT).

Local resident and BHELT chairman, Charles Campion, spoke to BBC London about the project this week, available here.

You can find our website at www.bhelt.org.uk and you can also follow our campaign on Instagram at @bhelt.26.

Come and test a self-driving pod this Saturday

This is the part where you come in.

Please join us this Saturday 11 July at the Barnes Fair to test the vehicles yourself. You can find us at Entry Point 3, off The Crescent (Google Maps) from 10am-4:30pm or at Holy Trinity Church Castelnau from 10am-2pm.

Our BHELT team of local residents and the pod operators, Ohmio UK, will be there, and we’d love to meet you. Step inside, take a seat, and picture the pod crossing the bridge every three minutes. We are happy to demonstrate every feature of the vehicles and discuss everything from wheelchair access to what happens if one breaks down.

We’ve also invited every local politician to come and ride in the pods: the leaders of both councils, local MPs, TfL representatives, and other relevant policymakers.

All that is needed to move this forward is the council’s approval for a feasibility study.

If you’d like to help make that happen, follow the campaign on Instagram at @bhelt.26 and share this post with anyone who cares about the bridge.

And keep an eye out. There’s a video coming soon…

Same windfall, different outcomes

In the 1970s, Britain and Norway struck oil in the North Sea: a generational windfall.

Norway saved its share of the tax revenues from that windfall. Britain spent its share of revenues as they arrived, borrowed through the boom years, and today has nothing to show for the extraction of a finite national inheritance.

Today, Norway has turned its share into a £1.7 trillion fund for its grandchildren. Every Norwegian, by birthright, owns about £280,000 in the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, and that fund owns 1.5% of every listed company on earth.

Britain has no equivalent figure to quote because Britain has no equivalent fund. The UK’s share of the cumulative tax revenues was larger than Norway’s, but it was not saved, invested, or ringfenced. It went on day-to-day spending: income tax cuts, the welfare bill, the unwinding of post-industrial Britain.

In fact, Britain has been the beneficiary of multiple generational windfalls in recent decades. Each could have been saved into a fund. But all of them were spent. North Sea oil and gas has yielded around £400 billion in tax receipts since the first wells came online in the late 1960s. Privatisation proceeds under Thatcher and her successors raised roughly £100 billion nominal between 1979 and 2015. The 2000 3G spectrum auction raised £22.5 billion in a single year. The Crown Estate has delivered £5 billion to the Treasury in the past decade alone, with much more before that. Quantitative easing transferred a cumulative £123.8 billion from the Bank of England to the Treasury between 2009 and 2022 (but will eventually run as a net loss to the public finances estimated at £100 billion). The UK Emissions Trading Scheme has raised about £12 billion since 2021 and is on track for £2.5 billion a year. Each could have seeded a fund. None did.

What is a sovereign wealth fund?

Society, Burke wrote, is a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn. A British sovereign wealth fund would be a British institution explicitly designed to honour that partnership in capital terms.

A sovereign wealth fund (hereafter, an “SWF”) is a state-owned intergenerational investment vehicle that accumulates a stock of saved capital separate from current spending, with a long-horizon, return-seeking mandate and rules protecting the principal.

The mechanism is simple. A SWF invests its capital and lets the returns compound over decades. Each year the state draws a modest dividend from the fund, say 3%, to spend at its discretion. The principal stays untouched and keeps growing. Norway funds about a quarter of its annual budget this way. The fund never shrinks; the discipline comes from the rule.

The savings-and-draw model is the one with which this essay is concerned. Other models exist; some funds hold strategic stakes in domestic firms, others insulate the country against external shocks.

What is not a sovereign wealth fund?

The label “sovereign wealth fund” sometimes gets used generjxally for any substantial pool of state capital, which lets ministers falsely claim Britain already has one.

The most obvious confusion is the National Wealth Fund (NWF), capitalised at £27.8 billion since October 2024. It is not a sovereign wealth fund in any meaningful sense. It is the renamed UK Infrastructure Bank with a broadened mandate, a public investment bank designed to co-invest in ministerial priorities such as green steel, carbon capture and rail upgrades. Run from Whitehall, funded from Treasury capital, measured by short-term project outputs. Its mandate has been rewritten three times in three years.

Likewise, the UK’s £3 trillion of Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) pension assets cannot form the bedrock of a sovereign wealth fund, even consolidated into the new Mansion House megafunds. That pension capital is owned by members with enforceable claims; trustees owe a fiduciary duty to maximise risk-adjusted returns for members, not to pursue any wider state objective.

Another crucial point: a SWF typically holds predominantly foreign assets. Whereas the NWF’s investments by design flow into domestic projects, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (the GPFG) invests almost entirely abroad. The reason is straightforward. A fund of that scale invested at home would bid up the currency, make exporters uncompetitive, and double the country's exposure to its own economy (economists call this Dutch disease.) The principle is one any sensible saver applies to a personal portfolio: do not load up on shares in your own employer, because if the firm goes under, you lose your job and your savings at the same time. Norway invests abroad to hedge against itself. Conflating domestic investment with intergenerational savings is what has seen the French government redirect certain pension reserve funds in 2010 from long-horizon savings vehicles into vehicles for paying down social-security debt. The Australian Future Fund’s 2024 mandate change suggests a similar mission drift.

A British SWF should follow the same principle, owning predominantly foreign assets. That cuts against the political instinct, which wants visible domestic investment with a flag on it, but the structural case is clear: when Britain hits a recession, tax receipts fall and government borrowing rises. A fund holding mostly UK assets would lose value at exactly the same moment, doubling the pain. A fund holding mostly foreign assets would, on average, hold up or even rise, providing a counterweight when the country most needs one. The NWF puts public money into UK projects at ministerial direction; the SWF should do the opposite, building a foreign-tilted portfolio that pays out when Britain is struggling.

In fact, this is essentially the Norwegian model. Norway separates its sovereign wealth into the larger “Oil Fund” (GPFG), the aforementioned vehicle which is invested almost entirely overseas, and the smaller “Norway Fund” (GPFN) which is constrained to domestic and Nordic assets and holds significant stakes in many Norwegian companies.

Saving and spending are different jobs. One ought to be foreign-tilted, long-horizon, and rule-bound. The other ought to be domestic, policy-driven, and answerable to ministers. They should not share an institution.

A fuller field guide to the world’s major sovereign wealth funds is appended to this piece, with founding dates, current asset value, source of capital, and the taxonomic distinction.

Why has Britain not built a sovereign wealth fund?

Before making the positive case, there are three important concessions to explain why the UK did not build a sovereign wealth fund from North Sea oil and gas.

The first is arithmetic. A British fund built in the 1970s would not have caught up to Norway in per-capita terms from North Sea revenues alone. Norway has 5.5 million people; the United Kingdom has 68 million. Even if Britain had banked every penny of its £400 billion in oil and gas tax receipts on the same trajectory as Norway, and even if the political and macroeconomic conditions had been identical, the per-capita result would have been roughly £25,000 a head, twelve times smaller than Norway's £280,000. Norway’s fund is so dominant in per-citizen terms in part because its denominator is small. A British fund of comparable absolute size is plausible, but not a British fund of comparable per-capita. Nonetheless, £25,000 a head is still £100,000 for a family of four, and £1.7tn in absolute terms. That would still be the (joint) largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. Far better than nothing.

Second, the investment case in 1975 was less obvious than it now looks. Norway’s own first deposit was not until 1996. In the late 1970s, gilt yields were in double digits, inflation was a permanent crisis, and buy-and-hold equity investing had not yet entered the political mainstream. A Treasury official in 1980 looking at UK equities in real terms saw close to a flat line for fifteen years. Consuming the windfall was, on the information available, defensible.

Third, and hardest: the windfall was not consumed because Britain was profligate. It was consumed because Britain was in genuine fiscal trouble. The IMF bailout had been three years earlier. The 1979-81 recession destroyed a quarter of UK manufacturing capacity. Unemployment passed three million in 1982. North Sea receipts went to the income tax cuts of 1979 and 1988, the welfare bill of post-industrial Britain, and the debt-interest costs of the early-1980s recession. Norway did not face any of that. It could afford the institutional patience to wait twenty years to deposit. Britain could not.

What is harder to defend is what came afterwards. By the time the intellectual case was settled in the 1990s, other windfalls were arriving: privatisation, the 3G auction, Crown Estate offshore wind, the QE transfers. Each could have seeded a fund. None did.

How could we fund an SWF today?

If the past windfalls are gone, what is left to seed a fund?

Budget surplus

The most relevant precedent is Australia, not Norway. In 2006, Australia built the Future Fund without an oil windfall. The seed capital, around £30 billion, came from accumulated budget surpluses and the privatisation of Telstra. There were no further cash contributions after 2007-08. By the end of 2025 the Board of Guardians managed roughly £170 billion across six funds.

But Britain does not generate a surplus. Far from it: our annual deficit is around £133 billion, or 4.3% of GDP. Britain has run a budget surplus in only ten years since 1948, and only three since 1971. We borrow about £2.5 billion a week to keep the lights on.

Balance sheet arbitrage

So perhaps a more relevant comparator is Canada. In April 2026, Mark Carney announced the Canada Strong Fund: an arms-length Crown corporation seeded with about £14 billion over three years. The opposition leader Pierre Poilievre called it a “sovereign debt fund” because Canada is borrowing the seed capital. He has a point: Canada is not committing to genuine reserves accumulation, but announcing a state investment vehicle and calling it a SWF.

In financial jargon, this is known as a “carry trade”. In plain terms, it is borrowing to invest, or leveraged investing. The logic is straightforward: AAA sovereign issuers can borrow at the risk-free rate and invest in a diversified portfolio earning the global equity premium. The spread, compounded over decades, is worth more than the interest cost. The carry-trade version of a SWF is a useful counter to the impossibility argument, the one that says Britain cannot have a sovereign wealth fund because there is no wealth to put in it at this precise moment in time.

Singapore’s sovereign wealth complex already runs a version of this trade, nominally for reserve management. The government issues regular bonds not for fiscal funding, but to sustain domestic market infrastructure, alongside special government securities that absorb compulsory pension contributions from Singaporeans. The proceeds of the bonds are then routed to GIC (the sovereign wealth fund), where they are invested globally. In effect, Singapore captures the spread between its AAA sovereign funding cost and global equity returns. Likewise, Korea funded the KIC by transferring out of low-yielding US Treasury reserves into diversified risk assets, the same trade dressed as reserve diversification. Neither is a pure debt-financed model, but both run a version of the trade.

The capacity to do this is not infinite, even for AAA sovereigns, and the question of how rating agencies would treat it would need to be tested before any UK fund were structured this way. But relative to total UK fiscal spend, the marginal seed capital required is a rounding error. The £250-300 billion of new gilts the UK issues each year would not measurably move on a £5-10 billion fund seed.

Quantitative easing counterfactual

There is also the quantitative easing (QE) counterfactual, perhaps the most striking missed opportunity of all. Between 2009 and September 2022, the Bank of England’s Asset Purchase Facility transferred £123.9 billion of net cash to the Treasury, all of which funded current spending. Since then the flow has reversed, and the OBR now estimates the programme will end its life as a net loss of around £100 billion. The Bank argues that lower borrowing costs across the fifteen years more than offset this, so the headline figures overstate the fiscal damage. But the counterfactual still stands at the level that matters here: for over a decade, a genuine cash flow accrued to the Treasury, and every penny of it was consumed. Had it been hypothecated to a sovereign wealth fund and invested at global equity returns, Britain would today have a fund of around £200 billion and could have offset the subsequent QT loss transfers. We did not build it because we did not have the institution to receive the flow, nor the foresight to save it.

Small windfalls

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the second-best time is now. A British SWF, built today, would start small and that is fine. The point is not to compound from a windfall we no longer have. It is to set the institutional habit so that the next windfall, whenever it comes, gets banked rather than spent. The flows we already have are real if unspectacular. The Crown Estate’s underlying revenue runs at around £366 million a year, distinct from the Round 4 offshore wind option-fee spikes. The residual Energy Profits Levy yields £1-3 billion. The UK Emissions Trading Scheme auctions raise £3-5 billion, currently absorbed into general revenue. Together with the NatWest tail and other one-off receipts, three to four billion pounds a year is feasible without raising new taxes or compelling pension trustees.

If Britain saved three to four billion pounds a year and let it grow with the global economy for thirty years, the fund would reasonably be estimated to reach somewhere between £290-360 billion. It would put us in the league of Australia and New Zealand. Not yet in Norway’s league, where the fund stands at £1.7 trillion, four times the size of the Norwegian economy. A fund of that size would be worth roughly 13p in every pound of UK GDP. Drawing on it modestly each year would generate around £10 billion for the Exchequer. And, of course, this base case scenario is the floor, not the ceiling.

Compare this theoretical scenario with Norway, where the fiscal rule allows the state to draw 3% of the fund’s value each year; in 2025 those transfers funded around a quarter of the Norwegian state budget. Alaska distributes a portion of its fund’s earnings annually to every resident as a Permanent Fund Dividend, around £1,345 a head in 2024. Australia has so far made no drawdowns at all; the fund is being allowed to compound until 2032. Each country has chosen a different relationship between the fund and the state. None has chosen to consume.

What are the objections?

Why not just pay down debt?

Because debt repayment is reversible (the next government can re-lever) while a SWF principal locked behind supermajority drawdown is not. £1 billion used to pay down debt saves you the gilt rate in interest, year after year. £1 billion invested in a global portfolio at 4% real grows into roughly twice as much wealth over thirty years, even once you account for the foregone interest savings. An SWF buys irreversibility, which the gilt strategy does not.

The Treasury will capture it within a parliament.

Probably yes, if the Treasury writes the legislation. The National Wealth Fund’s mandate has already been rewritten once by ministerial direction, and what the Treasury can change with a letter, a future Chancellor can change back. The fund must instead be created by primary legislation, with an independent board, parliamentary appointment, and a mandate that can only be altered by Parliament itself. Norway’s GPFG works because changing it requires a vote in the Storting; Britain’s equivalent should be no easier to raid.

The principal will be raided in the next crisis.

Probably yes, if the rules let a single Cabinet decision unlock the principal. Ireland’s National Pensions Reserve Fund was directed to recapitalise AIB and Bank of Ireland in 2010 on a single ministerial instruction, and about £18 billion of capital was absorbed into private banks. The answer is a supermajority drawdown rule: a fiscal rule binding ordinary drawings to 3% of rolling fund value over the cycle, as Norway does, and a two-thirds resolution of both Houses required to touch the principal. Rules do not bind absolute sovereigns, but they raise the political price of breaking them. That is enough.

The first decade may underperform.

Possibly yes, in any individual decade. The relevant test is whether global equities, over thirty years, have beaten the interest rate on UK government debt. They always have, in every rolling 30-year window since records began. The Australian Future Fund was set a target of beating inflation by 4-5% a year; it has delivered 8.5% a year over the past decade, comfortably ahead. The discipline is to size contributions so that the fund can survive a bad decade without political panic, and to commit publicly to judging it on a thirty-year horizon, not a five-year one. That is what makes a sovereign wealth fund different from any other pool of capital: it can wait. Markets cannot always afford to, and elected governments rarely can.

The UK financial services industry would outbid a British SWF for talent

A UK SWF should pay first-quartile rates for the people it hires so that it is competitive with the City. This should be defensible to taxpayers because the comparator is the asset-management industry, not the civil service, and would be in-line with other SWFs globally. The argument is not that the SWF will compete by paying less. It is that it does not need to hire many people in the first place.

Consider the Public Employees’ Retirement System of Nevada. It manages a $60 billion fund with just two investment staff and was run for many years by a single investor. Even so, by index investing almost everything it held, Nevada outperformed CalPERS, the largest US pension at nearly 3,000 employees, over every measurable horizon.

The Nevada example is extreme, partly because the past decade has been an equity-favourable regime with low dispersion. But the same logic scales: NBIM manages Norway’s £1.7 trillion fund with just 600 people on a similar majority passive model. A British SWF could be staffed in the low hundreds, paying first-quartile market rates, with active capability in relevant asset classes and specialist mandates outsourced to external managers, in the manner of most large sovereign funds.

Even a late acorn can grow a strong oak

A civilisation that consumes its inheritance rather than compounds it has not governed. It has borrowed against future generations.

Imagine a generation of British children who grow up knowing that part of their birthright as citizens is a financial stake in the country’s future, not just a share of its debt. That inheritance would not, at first, amount to much in pounds and pence. But the point is not the initial quantum of savings; it is the existence of the institution itself. Its existence would force Westminster to state, in clear terms, whether each windfall should be spent or saved. Eventually, a fund of meaningful size would be a permanent argument against short-termism in government, because every windfall consumed would be a windfall the fund did not receive. It would nurture thinking on horizons longer than a parliament.

2026 is not a uniquely special moment to start a sovereign wealth fund. But every year of delay is another year of compounding lost. Norway’s fund was at near-zero in 1996 and crossed £100 billion in 2007. The Australian Future Fund was at zero in 2006 and reached the same milestone within twelve years.

A British sovereign wealth fund will not turn us into Norway overnight and cannot recover what was consumed in the 1970-80s. It will start small. It will be vulnerable to political attack. None of that is an argument against starting. It is an argument for starting carefully, with the architecture to make capture politically expensive and consumption politically embarrassing.

Who knows what windfalls will wash up to Albion’s shores? Deep-sea resources around the Falklands, mineral wealth beneath the British Antarctic Territory once the Treaty thaws, lithium and tin in Cornwall as the energy transition bites, the next round of spectrum auctions as 6G matures, new carbon storage licences, even assets returning from lunar and asteroid mining ventures: all of it should accrue to the fund. Wherever we are reducing the country’s non-renewable natural capital, we should replace it with financial capital on the national balance sheet, to be invested forever rather than spent today.

The choice is not whether to build a SWF for the windfall we missed. It is whether to have the institution ready when the next one arrives. The Britain of 2026 owes the Britain of 2086 the institution we did not inherit.

To enjoy the oak tree, we must plant the acorn.

Disclaimer: All my disclaimers apply here. These views do not represent my employer or any affiliated organisation. All posts reflect my personal views only and should not be construed as investment, financial, or professional advice. Nothing here addresses individual circumstances or constitutes comprehensive analysis. References to specific companies or markets are illustrative, not recommendations. Past performance does not indicate future results.

Appendix: Notes on major sovereign wealth funds

A note on terminology. The term “sovereign wealth fund” is used loosely. In the strict sense it means a state-owned investment vehicle holding predominantly foreign assets, separated from current spending, with a long-horizon return mandate. In practice the label gets attached to sovereign development funds, public investment banks, stabilisation funds and pension reserve funds. Where useful I flag the distinction. AUM figures are the most recently disclosed and converted to sterling at recent spot rates for ease of comparison; current values move with markets and currencies.

Norway: Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) Started 1990 (first deposit 1996). AUM ~£1.7 trillion at end-2025, about £280k per Norwegian. Source: petroleum tax receipts and Equinor dividends. The canonical SWF. Managed by Norges Bank Investment Management on behalf of the Ministry of Finance. Fiscal rule limits drawings to 3% of value over the cycle. Independent Council on Ethics; mandate changes go through a Storting white paper. Holds an average 1.5% of every listed company on earth. Real return 4.1% per annum since inception. Recent ethics suspension (November 2025) and Russia divestment difficulties (2022) show even the gold standard has stress points.

Singapore: GIC Started 1981. AUM estimated ~£640 billion (Singapore does not disclose). Source: foreign reserves of the Monetary Authority and surplus government revenues. Manages Singapore’s foreign reserves with a long-horizon, return-seeking mandate. Owned by the Minister for Finance; constitutional reserves protection runs through the Elected President framework. Highly opaque by design.

Singapore: Temasek Started 1974. AUM ~£237 billion at March 2025. Source: legacy government-linked enterprise stakes, retained earnings. A sovereign development fund, not a true SWF. Holds strategic equity stakes domestically and internationally. Suffered a £218m write-down on FTX in 2022. Senior PAP figures rotate through the chair (most recently Teo Chee Hean from October 2025).

Japan: Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) Started 2006 (predecessor body 2001). AUM ~£1.5 trillion ($1.87 trillion at September 2025). Source: Japanese public pension contributions. The world’s largest pension fund. Strictly a pension reserve fund, not a SWF, but on scale alone it functions as one of the largest pools of state-managed long-horizon capital in the world. Roughly 50/50 stocks and bonds, half domestic and half international. Reports to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

South Korea: Korea Investment Corporation (KIC) Started 2005. AUM ~£127 billion ($169 billion end-2024). Source: Bank of Korea foreign reserves and Ministry of Economy and Finance allocations. A true SWF, mandated to “preserve and enhance the international purchasing power of sovereign assets”. Korea launched a second sovereign wealth fund in January 2026 with a strategic-investment mandate, distinct from KIC’s reserve-management role.

India and Taiwan: notable absences India has the National Investment and Infrastructure Fund (NIIF, ~£3.5 billion), a sovereign development fund of modest scale; nothing in the SWF category. Taiwan has the National Stabilisation Fund (~£15 billion), a market-intervention vehicle, but no SWF despite long-running political debate about creating one. Both economies run the trade surpluses that elsewhere have produced SWFs, but their domestic political settlements have not produced the institutions.

Australia: Future Fund Started 2006. AUM ~£127 billion (the board manages ~£170 billion across six funds at end-2025). Source: budget surpluses 2005-08 and Telstra privatisation proceeds; no contributions since. The most relevant precedent for Britain because it was built without a resource windfall. CPI+4-5% mandate; 8.5% per annum delivered over the past decade. Mandate revised in November 2024 to “consider Australia’s national priorities”. Drawdowns deferred until 2032-33.

Canada: Canada Strong Fund Announced 27 April 2026. Initial endowment ~£14 billion over three years. Source: federal contribution (financed by borrowing); planned retail investment product. A live experiment. New arms-length Crown corporation reporting to the Minister of Finance and National Revenue. Mandate is to invest in domestic projects in clean and conventional energy, critical minerals, agriculture and infrastructure. Critics, including Pierre Poilievre and Globe and Mail commentators, argue it is a state investment fund mislabelled as a SWF. The honest assessment is that it is a sovereign development fund with retail features, not a true SWF, but its trajectory will be instructive for any UK proposal.

United Arab Emirates: ADIA (Abu Dhabi Investment Authority) Started 1976. AUM estimated ~£780-£850 billion (no official disclosure). Source: Abu Dhabi oil revenues. Among the oldest and largest SWFs. Highly diversified globally; conservative governance. Limited transparency despite Santiago Principles signatory status.

United Arab Emirates: Mubadala Started 2002 (current form 2017 after merger). AUM ~£260 billion. Source: Abu Dhabi government capital. Active, deployment-focused sovereign investor. Top global sovereign deployer in 2024 at ~£23 billion across 52 deals. Strategic stakes in technology, semiconductors and life sciences.

Saudi Arabia: Public Investment Fund (PIF) Started 1971; transformed 2015 under Vision 2030. AUM ~£720 billion end-2024. Source: oil revenues and government asset transfers. Vehicle for Vision 2030. Funds giga-projects (NEOM, Diriyah), domestic ecosystems and global stakes (Heathrow, Newcastle United, Lucid). Target raised in 2025 to ~£2.1 trillion by 2030.

China: China Investment Corporation (CIC) Started 2007. AUM ~£1.05tn. Source: foreign exchange reserves. Sovereign investor mandated to diversify Chinese reserves out of Treasury holdings. Combines public-markets, alternatives and direct investment. Subject to the same opacity caveats as other Chinese state institutions.

Kuwait: Kuwait Investment Authority (KIA) Started 1953 (oldest SWF in the world; current legal form 1982). AUM ~£765 billion. Originally created to invest pre-independence oil revenues. Two funds: the General Reserve Fund (current revenues) and the Future Generations Fund (10% of state revenue annually).

United States (Alaska): Permanent Fund Started 1976. AUM ~£67 billion at June 2025. Source: 25%+ of state mineral royalties (constitutionally mandated). Pays an annual Permanent Fund Dividend to every Alaska resident (2024: ~£1,345 including energy relief; 2025: ~£790). The cash dividend creates a personal stake in the principal but generates perpetual political conflict over the earnings split.

Canada (Alberta): Heritage Savings Trust Fund Started 1976. AUM ~£17.5 billion at end-2025. Source: provincial oil and gas royalties. A useful sub-national counterpoint to the federal Canada Strong Fund. Founded with ~£825m; has compounded slowly because the Alberta government has periodically diverted royalty flows to general revenue. A demonstration that without statutory ringfencing of inflows, even an explicitly intergenerational fund grows much more slowly than its founders projected.

New Zealand: Superannuation Fund Started 2001. AUM ~£36 billion. Source: Crown contributions to pre-fund New Zealand Superannuation costs. Pension reserve fund. Suffered a contribution holiday from 2009-2017 under the Key government. Withdrawals not scheduled until 2035-36.

Ireland: ISIF (formerly NPRF) NPRF started 2001; reconstituted as ISIF 2014. AUM ~£14 billion. Source: original NPRF endowments at 1% of GNP; redirected post-2010. A cautionary tale. The NPRF was directed to recapitalise AIB and Bank of Ireland during the 2010-11 banking crisis, with about £18 billion of capital absorbed into private banks. The remainder was reconstituted as ISIF, a domestic-focused sovereign development fund. The closest cultural and constitutional analogue to the UK and the clearest illustration of what happens when a fund has no supermajority drawdown rule.

France: Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR) Started 2001. AUM ~£18 billion. Source: original endowments to pre-fund baby-boom retirement costs; mission redirected 2010. The textbook example of mandate creep. Reformed under Sarkozy in 2010 to amortise social-security debt at ~£1.8 billion per year; new contributions stopped. Now functionally a pass-through to CADES.

France: Bpifrance Started 2013 (merger of OSEO, FSI and CDC Entreprises). AUM ~£42 billion. Source: state and Caisse des Dépôts capital. Public investment bank, not a SWF. Provides loans, guarantees, equity and export credit (including £5 billion Sizewell C support in 2024). Mandate has steadily widened, illustrating how policy banks expand to occupy whatever industrial-policy space ministers want filled.

United Kingdom: National Wealth Fund Started 2024 (renamed from UK Infrastructure Bank, est. 2021). AUM £27.8 billion capitalisation; £3.8 billion committed by September 2025. Source: HM Treasury capital injection. A sovereign development fund, not a sovereign wealth fund despite the name. Mandate set by the Chancellor’s Statement of Strategic Priorities; revised three times in three years. Its existence is the principal reason the case for an actual British SWF needs to be made carefully and on its own terms.

Sources: Norges Bank Investment Management Annual Report 2024 and end-2025 fund value disclosures; Norwegianpetroleum.no (per-capita figure, end-2025); Future Fund Board of Guardians Portfolio Update 31 December 2025; Atkinson and Hamilton, “Sustaining wealth: Simulating a sovereign wealth fund for the UK’s oil and gas resources, past and future”, Energy Policy 139 (2020); Bank of England Asset Purchase Facility Quarterly Reports (cumulative cash flow figures); OBR analysis of QE fiscal impact; HM Treasury and Institute for Government NWF analysis; APFC Annual Report 2025; PIF Annual Report 2024; Treasury Committee report HC 806 (October 2025); Government of Canada press release, 27 April 2026; Globe and Mail and CBC reporting on the Canada Strong Fund; John Penrose MP, “Time to think big: A UK Sovereign Wealth Fund” (Reform, February 2020); Klemperer, “How (not) to run auctions: the European 3G telecom auctions” (European Economic Review, 2002).need

Bibliography

• Penrose, J. (2025) A UK Sovereign Wealth Fund. Re:state.

• Penrose, J. (2020) Time to think big: A UK Sovereign Wealth Fund. Reform.

• House of Commons Treasury Committee (2025) National Wealth Fund, HC 806.

• Norges Bank Investment Management, Annual Report 2024.

• Bank of England, Asset Purchase Facility quarterly reports.

• Atkinson, G. and Hamilton, K. (2020) “Sustaining wealth: Simulating a sovereign wealth fund for the UK’s oil and gas resources, past and future”, Energy Policy 139.

• HMRC, Statistics of government revenues from UK oil and gas production, September 2025.

A view from Lombard Street

Planting a Magic Money Tree

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a year ago · 1 like · A view from Lombard Street

‘John Barleycorn’ is a good song to sing with a pint of ale or cup of whiskey. Or in a field of crops. I find cows also like it.

Will Parsons

The combine harvester crawls across the Wiltshire barley field. Dust hangs golden in the slanted afternoon light. Warm chaff-thick air blasts out from the blades, scratching the skin under my collar.

Aged eighteen, I am spending a long weekend on my uncle’s farm. This will be my first and last contribution to British agriculture. Between the roar of the blades, a melody surfaces, and old words with it:

There were three men come out of the west their fortunes for to try,

And these three men made a solemn vow: John Barleycorn should die.

They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in, thrown clods all on his head.

Then these three men made a solemn vow: John Barleycorn is dead.

I’d learned these words at school from the music teacher, Mr Tim Frost. At the time, he’d seemed pleasant but miscast. The tandem bicycle, the corduroy waistcoats and the obsession with old songs marked him out as somehow different from his colleagues. Only years later did my reminiscing adult mind decipher the childhood memory: he was a devoted folk revivalist.

They’ve hired men with scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee,

They’ve rolled and tied him by the waist, serving him most barbarously.

They’ve hired men with the crab-tree sticks to cut him skin from bone,

But the miller has served him far worse than that, for he’s ground him between two stones.

One afternoon, Mr Frost taught our class ‘John Barleycorn’ and then asked: what’s really happening in this song? At nine years old, we were baffled by the clodding, harrowing, and scything, but I distinctly recall the moment of realisation: John wasn’t a person at all, he was barleycorn itself and his death was the harvest. In that moment, I began to grasp the concept of a metaphor, though not the substance of this one. That came later, soaked in a pint of ale.

Turning to my uncle on the combine harvester, I ask: “Do you know ‘John Barleycorn’?”

My uncle shakes his head and assures me that there isn’t no John Barleycorn round these parts, but perhaps I mean old John Winterbourne what farms up Amesbury way.

‘John Barleycorn’ was the song that introduced me to traditional folk music, but it also led me to wonder: what makes a song ‘traditional’, or ‘folk’?

The brutality of the lyrics’ imagery, the strangeness of the language, the rhythms and metre were so at odds with our modern music. Above all, there was that feeling of accessing a tradition with deep antiquity, of discovering a cultural memory compressed into melody, and of unfurling centuries of English life from each verse.

And so it was that I went looking for more. The Celtic music scene offered a natural starting point. They’ll find you before you find them: the skirl of Irish jigs, the billowing Scottish reels, and the roar of a session will pull you in from the street. By contrast, the English folk tradition is much stranger in its plainness; you have to seek it out. Where Gaelic music conjures wild landscapes, English folk is rooted in farmland and the turning of the seasons.1

Time and again, I found myself drawn back to those English parish songs. To Peter Bellamy, whose voice brays as if dragged out of the Norfolk flint and personally affronted by the passage of time. Then, to Magpie Lane, with their unhurried Oxfordshire harmonies. From there, I traced the song-lines out from the fields into the ports and pits: sea shanties hauled up from the Cornish coast, shipyard ballads hammered on the Tyne, mining songs blackened by the coalface’s dust. Later, the Roud Folk Song Index served as an aleatory map to trace a path through its twenty-five thousand collected tunes.

Several years later, on a warm day in late summer, an old friend and I walked along a chalk stream in the Thames Valley. Led by Sam Lee, we were part of a small group, a sort of pilgrimage. Sam is known for singing with nightingales in Sussex woods and learned most of his repertoire directly from elderly Travellers and Gypsies. Our idea was to follow the stream from where it met the Thames all the way upstream to the source, a full day’s walk. We traded folk songs while we rambled along the riverbank.

As the afternoon softened into evening, we climbed a quiet hill. There, nestled in a clump of trees, beside a field of golden grain, we found the stream’s source. As the sun settled into a reddening sky, we sang a final song together: ‘John Barleycorn’. Surrounded by ears of grain that swayed in the evening breeze, the song felt less like a performance and more like a homecoming. But when I glanced back, I noticed the field was wheat, not barley.

That experience led me to suspect that to be truly ‘folk’, a song must be in some sense shared but also in some sense antique. The first of these was easy to identify; we had shared the song by the river. The latter was more obscure: how ancient was ‘John Barleycorn’ really? How far could the thread be traced back through time?

And so it was that I began my search for little John Barleycorn, that hero bold.

As I began to wade upstream, I discovered soon enough that Edwardian folk collectors had long ago panned the same waters. In the early 20th century, they had fanned out across rural England with notebooks and phonographs, seeking old songs in vicarage gardens, village inns, and workhouse wards.

In the British Library, I listened through Percy Grainger’s field recordings from Lincolnshire: old men born before Queen Victoria’s coronation, the vernacular surfacing between the crackles of wax cylinders. Joseph Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints, George Gouldthorpe of Barrow-upon-Humber, George Wray of Brigg. Among the cylinders was William Short singing ‘John Barleycorn’ in 1908, his voice funnelled into the phonograph’s horn.2

At Cecil Sharp House in Camden, I encountered the folk song archive, tucked away in an upstairs library, a room lined with dark wooden card catalogues and manuscripts in fading ink. The institution’s namesake, Cecil Sharp, noted his first folk song in a Somerset vicarage garden in 1903. Sharp overheard a local gardener singing ‘The Seeds of Love’ to himself while mowing the lawn. In exchange for a pipe and tobacco, the gardener agreed to sing the tune a second time. The gardener’s name, in a triumph of nominative determinism, was John England.3 Among the manuscripts, I also came across Sharp’s own transcription of ‘John Barleycorn’ which had been noted down from an 83-year-old shepherd in the village of Bampton-in-the-Bush in 1909, suitably named Shepherd Haden.

As I delved into John Barleycorn’s manuscript tradition, I found the song relatively well-attested. But the melody grew fainter at each step back through the centuries. I discovered that, when Robert Burns had turned his hand to the song in 1782, he had christened John by replacing the three men from the west with three kings from the east. Before Burns, a printed ballad sheet from 1624 presented ‘The Bloody Murder of Sir John Barleycorn’ as bawdy burlesque. The manuscript trail ran cold with the Bannatyne Manuscript, a compendium of Scottish verse compiled during an Edinburgh plague in 1568.4 There, the character is Allan, not John, the mood is celebratory rather than sacrificial, and the song overall bears limited resemblance to Sharp’s later version.5

It appeared, then, that the song was a product of the sixteenth century: some five hundred years old, with no single source, and layers of invention all the way down. Old, perhaps, but by no means ancient. John Barleycorn was not, as I had secretly hoped, a venerable heirloom from the dawn of England; rather, he was a sort of simulacrum, cooked up by penurious latter-day balladeers.

What did this mean for John’s status as a traditional folk song?

This is where my theorising began. For, despite the manuscript evidence of the song’s relative recency, John Barleycorn still seemed to me to carry half-remembered resonances from before the written tradition began. In particular, I was certain I had detected echoes that its composers seemed unlikely to have put there consciously.

Why do the three men come out of the West? Could it be mere coincidence that in Celtic mythology, the West is the direction of an Otherworld known as Tír na nÓg (‘The Land of the Young’) whither the dead depart with the setting sun across the western sea? Three is also a sacred number: triple war goddesses, triple spirals carved into megalithic stone millennia before written history, while the Welsh Triads organise all knowledge into threes.6 When Burns changed the lyric to ‘three kings from the east’, he subverted Otherworld geography with biblical narrative, inverting sunset with sunrise, death with life.

Why does the figure of John Barleycorn, sung in a Lincolnshire field in 1908, resemble Beow, the dying-and-rising barley figure in Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies a thousand years earlier? Beow, an Old English word for barley, was the grandson of Sceaf, the Old English word for sheaf, in the lineage traced back from Alfred the Great, associated in scattered sources with the god of the harvest, whose death feeds the next year’s grain.

This reminded me of a similar problem encountered when reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the fourteenth‑century Middle English Arthurian romance. The tale begins at King Arthur’s New Year feast, when a mysterious Green Knight proposes a ‘beheading game’: Gawain strikes one blow now, and the Green Knight returns it in a year and a day. The final scene of reckoning takes place in a Green Chapel. But, as it turns out, the Chapel is not a Christian building, but a much more ancient holy place albeit an unusual one; ‘selly hym þoʒt’ (‘it seemed a wonder to him’). Specifically, it is a long barrow, a Neolithic burial chamber: ‘a balȝ berȝ bi a bonke’ (‘a rounded barrow by a bank’).7

How did the fourteenth-century poet know to send his hero to the Green Chapel? The poet could surely not have known the long barrow's true antiquity or original purpose, yet somehow he intuited that the old places were holy.8

A related pattern recurs in the form of foliate heads. They are carved into British medieval church corbels as well as Iron Age Celtic stonework and the ancient Kirtimukha of Hindu and Buddhist temple architecture. The pattern is hard to dismiss: a motif resurfacing across Eurasia and the Indo-European cultural sphere over thousands of years.

More recently, phylogenetic work on folk tales has begun to systematise our understanding of this kind of long-distance recurrence across time and space. By tracing tale-types through population history, scholars have found that certain narratives recur through generations and across geographies and that a few have survived five or six thousand years of oral transmission. 'The Smith and the Devil', a story about a blacksmith who strikes a bargain with a malevolent supernatural figure, is found across Indo-European populations and has been traced to the Bronze Age, to a Proto-Indo-European common ancestor.9

Sir James Frazer noticed these patterns long ago. In his magisterial, much-disputed Golden Bough (1890), he argued that the most ancient religions were fertility cults built around the sacrifice of a sacred king who incarnated a dying-and-reviving vegetation deity. Under different names, peoples across the ancient world had personified the yearly decay and revival of life. Frazer called this hypothesised sacred king ‘a divine John Barleycorn’. His grand theory has not survived modern scholarship, but his cultural influence has been vast, encompassing Eliot’s The Waste Land, Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, and several generations of folk revivalists.

And, in a fundamental sense, Frazer was right: the death-and-return pattern is ubiquitous. It can be found in religions, folk tales, and mythologies across time and culture. Christ is crucified and rises. Greek Orpheus enters Hades and emerges, while Adonis, killed by a wild boar, returns each year from the underworld. Egyptian Osiris is dismembered, then reassembled by Isis, and reborn as ruler of the underworld. In the Indonesian Moluccas, Hainuwele is killed and dismembered; from her buried limbs, the first tuber crops grow. In North American Penobscot tradition, the Corn Mother asks to be killed and dragged across the earth; where her body passes, maize grows.10

Nowhere is the pattern’s persistence more vivid than at Eleusis. For nearly two thousand years, initiates gathered there to enact the Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone: the grain and death-return cycles encoded as abduction and grief. Each autumn, Persephone descends to the underworld and her mother Demeter’s sorrow makes the earth barren; each spring, Demeter is reunited with her daughter and the wheat grows back. At the ritual’s climax, initiates drank a potion to achieve profound revelation.

The oldest literary document which narrates the myth is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter dating from 700BC. The Mysteries only ended a millennium later, when Theodosius closed the pagan sanctuaries in 392 AD. But when Edward Daniel Clarke visited Eleusis in 1801, he found a colossal statue of Demeter still venerated by local farmers who called her ‘Saint Demetra’, uncanonised and unknown to Greek Orthodoxy. They crowned her with flowers and piled manure at her feet, believing the harvest would suffer if the statue were removed. Unadmirably, Clarke put the theory to the test: he paid off the Ottoman governor, extracted the two-tonne marble, and shipped it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The next year, the Eleusinian crops failed.11

The Victorian balladeers surely had no knowledge of the Proto-Indo-European material. How, then, did they come to incorporate features of it into the story of John Barleycorn? How do these same patterns reappear in places that had never heard of one another, in centuries that did not overlap, in tongues that share no common ancestor?

Carl Jung had an explanation for this cross-cultural phenomenon. Beneath the personal unconscious that Freud had mapped lies a deeper stratum shared by all humanity: the collective unconscious, populated by archetypes, primordial images inherited ‘with the brain structure, indeed they are its psychic aspect’.12 The dying-and-rising god was one of his central archetypes, a figure that surfaces independently in every culture not because the myth has been transmitted but because the pattern is already embedded within the human mind. In other words, John Barleycorn may not himself be ancient, but he fits an ancient shape.

Modern academic psychology has largely set Jung aside. His specific mechanism of inherited primordial images is judged definitionally vague and empirically unsupported, the verdict of a discipline that prefers what it can measure to what it can only intuit. A similar fate has befallen Chomsky’s universal grammar.13

But the underlying intuition in both cases has proved hard to discount: humans seem to bring innate structure to story-telling rather than learning the skill from a blank slate.

What if every culture that has planted grain has independently produced some version of the same story, not through transmission but because our cognitive architecture, shaped by deep evolutionary time, generates narrative in predictable forms? The seasons, the inescapability of death, the yearly miracle of grain that dies in autumn and returns in spring: these press the pattern into us. John Barleycorn is less a song composed than an imprint the world has left on human minds over an immensity of evolutionary time.

But if narrative grammar does exist, then surely the dying-and-returning pattern should appear everywhere that humans tell stories?

Well, perhaps it does. Consider Breaking Bad: Walter White dies with his cancer diagnosis, and Heisenberg rises in his place. The Lion King has it too: Mufasa is killed, Simba goes into exile, and returns to take his place as king (the Hamlet structure). Inevitably, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings fits: Gandalf the Grey falls in Moria fighting the Balrog, descends into the depths, and returns transformed as Gandalf the White. Even Adele’s breakup ballads have it, if you squint: love dies, the soul grieves, and the self returns transformed.

Tolkien had a metaphor for this. In his lecture On Fairy-Stories, he describes the Cauldron of Story: a pot always boiling, with new bits continually added over time, dainty and undainty. To be added to the cauldron is, as Tolkien writes, “a considerable honour, for in that soup are many things older, more potent, more beautiful, comic, or terrible.”14

John Barleycorn, though not himself ancient, embodies a much older pattern: the narrative logic of creatures observing a seasonal, mortal world. Does this narrative grammar predate agriculture? Is it as old as language or behavioural modernity? As much as 70,000 years old? As yet, we do not know, but you can follow the next footnote to enjoy a John-Barleycorn-themed theory of the birth of civilisation itself.15

Whatever its merits, my claim for an innate narrative grammar is contentious. I have not attempted to establish it empirically; it rests on intuition, pattern-recognition, and amateur observation rather than on any formal proof or academic literature.

More pressingly, for our purposes, narrative grammar fails at adequately defining folk song. If the dying-and-rising pattern is ubiquitous, it will not do the discriminating work we need. And, from the other direction, the pattern is too narrow: it excludes instrumental dance tunes, work songs with minimal narrative content, and melodies whose power lies in repetition rather than story, all of which we would intuitively call folk.

So let us return to the other definition, the more prosaic one that occurred to me on the chalk stream pilgrimage: a folk song is a shared song, collectively held, passed on, and sustained through use.

What distinguishes a folk song is not age, anonymity, or rural origin, but circulation. Narrative grammar may explain why some songs recur and are shared while others are not, but the sharing is the definition. In this sense, a folk song is less a fixed artefact than a social practice. It exists where voices overlap, where transmission matters more than origin, and where the act of sharing is itself the tradition.

Agricultural songs are a clear case. Harvest songs were sung at suppers where labourers drank from a communal horn, verses repeated until all had been served. The Copper family of Sussex and the Waterson family of Hull carried this mode into living memory. In the 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, Julie Christie sings ‘Bushes & Briars’ not simply as performance, but as the marking of the season, woven into the rhythms of harvest and sheepshearing.

The industrial tradition took the same form. Coal miners sang together in the villages, as memorably depicted in the 1941 film How Green Was My Valley. Navvies carried songs with them along the routes they built, from the ‘Settle to Carlisle’ line to the canals of the Midlands. In the Hebrides, women sang waulking songs while fulling tweed, the cyclic rhythm of the music mirroring the physical turning of the cloth. At sea, shanties were not songs about work but songs for work: capstan shanties for steady rhythmic labour, halyard shanties for irregular hauling, the shantyman leading and the crew answering in chorus. The song shaped the work; the work shaped the song.

Folk song also lives in rituals, family or social gatherings, and rites of passage. Wassailers travel from orchard to orchard at midwinter, while carol singers in Sheffield’s pubs have more than thirty different tunes for ‘While Shepherds Watched’, each from a particular village. Irish sessions in London pubs sustain a diasporic repertoire. A folk song need not even require company. The shepherd calling across a hillside, the worker humming under her breath, the mother singing her child to sleep: none of them is outside the folk tradition. Their songs shared because they were learnt from others and are passed on to be sung by others.

Indeed, if we take a folk song to be a song that is shared, mutated, and sustained through use, then the strongest living folk tradition in England today is sung on stadium terraces, in pubs after closing time, and on coaches returning home from away fixtures. Football chants are collectively authored, altered within a single season and shared by thousands in the moment of song. By my own criteria, they are more folk than John Barleycorn.

Which raises another question: if a song is defined by being shared, why is an Adele ballad or an Ed Sheeran track or a Beatles song, sung loudly in pub or stadium, not a folk song? Aren’t these also collective experiences, known by many, sung communally, and emotionally shared?

I am tempted to develop my argument here based on aesthetic preference: something about modal melody, dialect, seasonal subject matter, or that peculiar English tone of plainness. But these are not properties of folk as such. They are properties of a particular flavour of the folk tradition that I happen to love.

Nevertheless, I suspect that we can be more precise in our definition. It seems to me that Adele is not folk today, but she could well be folk in a few decades or a hundred years. The only requirement will be that one or two of her songs survive the greatest filter of all: time. Those songs will sound, to future listeners, uncannily like ‘folk songs’, because that is what surviving the filter means.

The folk tradition is not a fixed canon but a filter. The songs that keep being sung are the songs that keep earning their place in the singing, with all the survivorship bias that implies. The Roud Index is not a record of the full folk repertoire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a record of the winners: the songs that were remembered, collected, and transmitted to us. The actual repertoire sung in Norfolk kitchens in 1750 was almost certainly full of disposable material that no one mourned losing.

Bob Fox is one of the great folk singers of the North East, a man who has spent fifty years inside the tradition. He put it best while performing at Hebden Bridge in February 2010: “Even the oldest of the traditional songs that we sing today was a brand new song at some time.” Nowadays, Bob looks for “people writing songs that we might think of as traditional in 150 years’ time.”

Fox found one of these new old songs in Jimmy Nail's ‘Big River’, about Nail's father, who worked at the Neptune Shipyard at Wallsend on the Tyne, one of the last to close in the era of de-industrialisation. Fox wove it together with ‘Waters of the Tyne’, a traditional song about a young man trying to cross the river to see a girl. The combination is beautiful precisely because of the friction between them: a love song and an elegy for an industry, separated by centuries, joined by the water they both describe.16

What defines a song as folk is not its age or its pedigree, but its capacity to be inhabited, sung as if it matters, by people who mean it. It is the performance of continuity: the collective act of singing as if we are preserving something ancient while creating it anew.

Peter Bellamy forged new old songs from Kipling’s poems: ‘Oak & Ash & Thorn’ among them. In 1981, Sydney Carter wrote ‘John Ball’ in deliberate folk-ballad style, so that question ‘when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ might ring in 1981 as it had in 1381.17 Cecil Sharp did it too, in his own way, when he bequeathed his transcriptions to schoolchildren who have sung them in assemblies across the country for the century since.18

And here is the irony at the heart of the Edwardian folk revival. The collectors encountered songs in Somerset cottages and Norfolk pubs, but the communities that had sustained those songs were already dissolving under industrialisation, emigration, and the World Wars. In trying to preserve a fading form, the collectors produced transcriptions, teaching materials, and concert performances that created a new form. The Edwardian revival was itself an act of tradition-making disguised as salvage, contingent upon what came before, but distinct from it.

Some scholars have made a stronger version of this argument. Dave Harker’s Fakesong (1985) and Georgina Boyes’s The Imagined Village (1993) argue that English folk music as we know it is essentially a late-Victorian invention, sustained by middle-class revivalists and institutions, which works because it convincingly performs ancientness. These academics sit within the framework of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983), which argued convincingly that Scottish tartans, royal ceremonies, and much else now considered immemorial were Victorian fabrications. By their account, the folk revival constructed an idealised rural England that served particular ideological needs: perhaps national identity or anti-industrial nostalgia.

Who am I to dispute this? I didn’t learn ‘John Barleycorn’ in a field, but in a classroom from the whimsical Mr Frost, that exemplary folk revivalist. And yet I shall dispute it! For although the scholars may have demonstrated that the folk revival is constructed, they have not yet shown that it is not ‘folk’.

Today, the indigenous singing communities of the British Isles have all but disappeared. Those people who sang shared songs because they shared the same conditions, and for whom singing was the natural by-product of work, life, and gathering. By contrast, the folk revival is a constructed tradition, an ‘imagined village’, and offers a chosen community. That is the form that a tradition must take when it is no longer carried by the conditions that produced it, and must instead be carried by the people who choose it.

And so it was that, earlier this year, three hundred miles from the combine harvesters rolling across the Salisbury Plain, thirty people sang ‘John Barleycorn’ with admirable conviction for town mice whose only harvest comes from supermarket shelves.

For the evening, we stripped our front living room of furniture and in came the instruments: percussion, keys, strings, horns, and an accordion. My two oldest friends and I had settled on a song-list in advance. But, as we briefly rehearsed ‘John Barleycorn’, it became clear that we were each carrying slightly different versions. Was John ‘cut down’ or ‘struck down’? Did the three men ‘swear an oath’ or ‘make a vow’? We negotiated these differences in real time, borrowing verses from one another and settling on phrasings that felt right.

By the end, we had arrived at a new version that was, still, unmistakably ‘John Barleycorn’. After that, we sang our own version of ‘Santiano’: weaving together French, English, and Welsh versions of the verses to produce an entirely new rendition, never before sung. Finally, we dimmed the lights and each held a candle high to breathe new life into ‘Hold the Lantern’.

With thirty people squeezed onto chairs, instruments wedged into every corner, and lanterns flickering against the windows, a clarifying thought struck me: this is what it means for a song to be a folk song. This is how it works. This is how it has always worked.19

The cauldron is still simmering. We’re singing John Barleycorn as if he’s ancient, knowing we’re changing him, enjoying both the continuity and the invention together.

Every old song was a new song once.

Special thanks Will and Bryony, peerless folk musicians. And very special thanks to my old friends Quentin and Bob. You can hear us singing our version of ‘John Barleycorn’ from 2023 here:

Thank you for reading. This piece has been in gestation for many years, and I am glad that it is finally out. As always, your thoughts and feedback are warmly welcomed.

John Barleycorn

Lyrics

There were three men come out of the west, their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow: John Barleycorn should die.
They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in, thrown clods all on his head.
And these three men made a solemn vow: John Barleycorn is dead.

They let him lie for a very long time till the rain from heaven did fall,
Then little Sir John sprung up his head and soon amazed them all.
They let him stand till midsummer day till he looked both pale and wan.
Then little Sir John, he’s grown a long along beard and so become a man.

They’ve hired men with scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee.
They’ve rolled and tied him by the waist, serving him most barbarously.
They’ve hired men with the sharp pitchforks who pierced him to the heart.
And the loader, he’s served him worse than that for he’s bound him to the cart.

They’ve wheeled him round and around the field till they came into the barn
And there they’ve made a solemn mow of poor John Barleycorn.
They’ve hired men with the crab tree sticks to cut him skin from bone,
And the miller, he has served him far worse than that for he’s ground him between two stones.

Here’s little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl and brandy in the glass!
And little Sir John in the nut-brown bowl proved the strongest man at last.
For the huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox, nor so loudly to blow his horn,
And the tinker, he can’t mend his kettles nor his pots without a little John barleycorn.

Roud 164; Song Subject MAS907.

Bibliography

Alexander, Scott. Fake Tradition is Traditional, (2024); Clarification on Fake Tradition, (2024).

Bannatyne, George, compiler. The Bannatyne Manuscript, Written in Tyme of Pest, 1568. Edited by W. Tod Ritchie, 4 vols., Edinburgh, Scottish Text Society, 1928–34.

Boyes, Georgina. The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993.

Burns, Robert. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. Edited by James Kinsley, 3 vols., Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968.

Frazer, Sir James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Abridged edition, London, Macmillan, 1922.

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London, Faber and Faber, 1948.

Harker, Dave. Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day. Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1985.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, editors. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Jung, Carl Gustav. “Mind and Earth.” 1931. Civilization in Transition, translated by R. F. C. Hull, Collected Works vol. 10, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964, para. 53.

Kriss, Sam. This Green and Growing Earth: Against Tradition.

Roud, Steve. Folk Song in England. London, Faber & Faber, 2017.

Sharp, Cecil J. English Folksong: Some Conclusions. London, Barnicott and Pearce, 1907. Third edition, revised by Maud Karpeles, London, Methuen & Co., 1954, pp. 17–31.

Stallings, A. E. , “The Eleusinian Mysteries.” London Review of Books, (2023).

Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” Originally delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture, University of St Andrews, 8 March 1939. Published in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1947. Reprinted in Tree and Leaf, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1964.

Tolkien, J. R. R., and E. V. Gordon, editors. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1925. Second edition, revised by Norman Davis, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1967.

Wood, Peter. “John Barleycorn: The Evolution of a Folk‑Song Family.” Folk Music Journal, vol. 8, no. 4, 2004, pp. 438–455.

Renditions of John Barleycorn

A selection of my favourite recorded performances:

A fortnight is long enough to notice, but not long enough to understand very much.

Having explored very little of Asia, I suspect my observations may seem pedestrian to more experienced travellers. Above all, I struggled to distinguish the everyday from the atypical. Is it surprising for a wild elephant to reach into my car window, or to see a crowd of young men righting a toppled tuk-tuk?

Forgive the blurred photographs. I was mostly shooting from a moving car and insufficiently shameless about photographing strangers.

Lennie & the Hundred Acre Isle

For part of the journey, my guide was an amiable Sinhalese man from the south coast who referred to himself as Lennie. He had the air of an avuncular Winnie the Pooh: smiling, unhurried, and possessed of a benign uncertainty about the nature of the world. Whether I was Piglet or Christopher Robin remains unclear.

Though Sri Lanka is no Hundred Acre Wood, Lennie navigated it with the same equanimity. Whenever I asked about Sri Lankan history or culture, Lennie would smile, ponder for some time, and produce a sentence that had all the shape of an answer but none of the content, like a honey pot with nothing in it. But Lennie’s honey is a spicy pol sambol. I liked him enormously.

Culture & people

1. Ethnically, Sri Lanka is roughly three-quarters Sinhalese Buddhist, with Tamil Hindu, Muslim Moor, and Christian minorities making up the rest. These are not abstract categories. They map onto language, dress, diet, and caste.

2. Sri Lankan people are generally very laid-back, perhaps reflecting a Buddhist outlook on life. Almost no one tried to rip me off, which was surprising after experiences in Turkey and India. Items lost were returned. Exact change was given.

3. The Sinhalese civilisation is very antique. The Sinhalese are genetically and linguistically North Indian Indo-Aryan. The oldest infrastructure and culture dates back to the 3rd century BC, around the time Alexander’s successors were carving up his empire. By the 12th century, King Parakramabahu was constructing enormous man-made lakes at Polonnaruwa that still function today, while England was tearing itself apart in the Anarchy between Stephen and Matilda.

4. Tamils have been on the island for millennia. The Tamils are South Indian Dravidians: darker skin tone, more rigid caste system, traditional Hindu clothing. The Chola dynasty's invasion from South India around 1017 was a conquest, not an arrival. The ethnic fault line has endured the ensuing millennium culminating most recently in a 26-year civil war between 1983-2009. That conflict produced the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) and the brief inauspicious Indian military intervention that ended with the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by a Tamil suicide bomber.

5. There is a significant Muslim Arab Moor minority in the central region. “Moor” is an archaic European term for Muslims that has stuck. They descend from coastal Arab traders forced to the inland Kandyan Kingdom by Portuguese colonisation in the 16th century. The word “serendipity” derives from “Serendip”, a Persian name for the island.

A brief history

6. The Fort at Galle is a microcosm of the island’s layered colonial history: Portuguese, Dutch, British, and now a place where a Chinese restaurant advertises in English, Chinese, and Russian. Further along the coast, Hambantota Port was built more recently with Chinese money the government failed to repay; it is now “leased” to China for 99 years.

7. The maritime museum inside the fort was charmingly deserted. The exhibits boasted captions that were magnificently long-winded. The contents ranged from Parthian amphorae recovered at Anuradhapura to Tang Dynasty jars from Jaffna.

8. The British Empire conquered the last independent Sinhalese kingdom in 1815 after taking control of the region (then Ceylon) during the Napoleonic Wars. The British legacy is everywhere. Sri Lankans drive on the correct side of the road, play cricket very well, use proper three-pin power sockets, and are very keen on tea.

9. Nuwara Eliya, roughly 6,000 feet up in the central highlands was the most striking example of the British imperial legacy: a mock-Tudor post office, Victorian lampposts, manicured lawns. It is a Home Counties village transplanted into the tropics.

10. Sri Lanka has endured several crises over the last two decades. The 2004 tsunami killed over 30,000 people. The civil war only ended in 2009. In 2022, there was a sovereign default after the government ran out of foreign exchange, fuel ran out, the president fled. Visiting in 2026, it is remarkable how little of this is immediately visible. The roads function, the shops are stocked, the power stays on. It is only once you know the signs: a watermark on a wall, a half-rebuilt hotel, the dislocation between tourist and local prices.

Buddhism

11. Sri Lankan Buddhism is Theravada, the older school (as distinct from the Mahayana traditions of East Asia and Tibet). There are roughly 15,000 monks in the country. I encountered several dozen in varying shades of orange and red robes worn toga-style with heads shaved. The air near temples carries the scent of incense and frangipani in roughly equal measure.

12. In the 5th century, a monk called Mahanama wrote the Mahavamsa, a chronicle of the Sinhalese from Prince Vijaya’s arrival in the 6th century BC written in Pali. The comparison to the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English written in Latin in 8th-century Northumbria leapt out to me: two monks on islands at the edges of their civilisational worlds, writing national founding myths in sacred languages.

Natural landscape

13. The country’s natural beauty is exceptional, especially once you leave the road network. Dusty lowland scrub gives way to luminous green paddy fields, then red-clay cuttings, then dense rainforest, then vast man-made lakes dating back millennia. Higher still, tea plantations climb impossibly steep hillsides into the cool, misty highlands.

14. Sigiriya is particularly remarkable: a 5th-century fortress on top of a vast rock outcrop, with frescoes, water gardens, and a lion-paw gateway carved into the cliff face. Fifth-century monks climbed the dizzying height daily, reportedly without incident. By contrast, amongst the elderly European tourists ahead of me, I counted two panic attacks and a possible cardiac arrest.

15. The south coast is still authentically Sri Lanka and distinctly beautiful with palm-fringed, golden beaches, but has the beginnings of a tourist overlay: surf schools, yoga retreats, smoothie bowls, young Europeans on gap years. The incongruity of extremely demure Sri Lankan women alongside Western nomads in minimalistic bikinis is striking.

16. I contributed enthusiastically to the foreign encroachment by joining a surf camp in Ahangama. The camp was run and inhabited by Scandinavians of conspicuous good health. The hostel was beautifully designed, but tragically committed to its sustainability credentials, principally achieved by changing towels and sheets once a week. The planet was grateful; I was not.

17. Rainstorms arrive without warning, even in February. One moment you are in blinding sunshine, the next the sky has collapsed. They pass in twenty minutes and leave everything steaming.

Food & drink

18. Rice and curry is the staple. I was particularly enamoured with breadfruit and mango curries. Fish is most common and meat is widely available. Meals were cheap, filling, and (when Lennie was choosing), extraordinarily spicy.

19. Hoppers, the bowl-shaped pancakes from fermented rice flour and coconut milk, are served plain or with an egg cracked into the centre. String hoppers are fine noodle nests with coconut sambol. Kottu roti is chopped roti stir-fried on a hot griddle.

20. Roadside fruit stalls are abundant: pyramids of bananas in several varieties, coconuts, breadfruit, mangoes, melons, and, hanging in a drooping bunch alongside the fruit, inflated bags of crisps that look from a distance like an additional variety of exotic produce.

21. Tea is offered widely, strong and often sweetened with condensed milk. Contrary to my assumption, most Sri Lankans drink alcohol. Several of my tuk-tuk drivers swigged from wine bottles while driving. Presumably these were being used as water bottles, but the styles of driving displayed did nothing to clarify the matter.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Agriculture & industry

22. Trucks laden with produce queue at roadside depots and agriculture is everywhere although often unmechanised. In the paddy fields, a harvesting machine works one plot while the next is still cut by hand. The most important exports include tea (a British introduction), rubber (likewise), cinnamon (traded for millennia), coconut, and garments. The spice gardens around Matale are part educational tour, part sales pitch.

23. Tea deserves its own note. Sri Lanka is the world’s fourth-largest producer. The tea plantations in the hill country have names that read like a Victorian share register: Taylor’s, Rothschild’s, and Glenloch. Sri Lanka’s per capita consumption (about 1.2 kg dry leaf per year) remains lower than Britain’s.

24. The plantation workers are visibly different from the Sinhalese majority population. They are Malaiyaha Tamils, descendants of labourers brought from South India by the British under indentured servitude. At independence in 1948, the new government stripped them of citizenship entirely, rendering several hundred thousand individuals stateless. They were re-enfranchised in the 1980s.

Roads, transport, and population density

25. Sri Lanka is one of the most densely populated countries on earth: 22 million people on an island a quarter the size of Britain. The settlement pattern is continuous ribbon development along every road. There is almost no stretch of main road not lined on both sides with houses, shops, vendors, temples, and power lines. In Sri Lanka, you are never more than thirty seconds from someone trying to sell you something.

26. The ribbon settlement development means power lines track every road. The result: 99.5% of households have grid electricity, a remarkable achievement for a country with a GDP per capita of $4,500.

25. The roadside economy extends beyond food stalls. Every few hundred metres: a tyre shop, a welding operation, a furniture workshop, or an unexplained pile of vehicle parts organised by a system known only to the owner. On the roadside, a lot of local people, particularly older men, sit and observe. It is still unclear to me whether they are waiting for anything in particular.

26. Health and safety, in the Western sense, is virtually unknown. Scaffolding hangs precipitously off cliffs and buildings. Live electrical wires dangle at head height in the street.

29. Driving norms result in lane discipline, signalling, and safe following distances being treated as aspirational. One horn beep indicates: “I am overtaking you.” Two beeps convey: “I am overtaking you very fast.” A sustained blast means: “I have committed to this manoeuvre and whatever happens next is no longer entirely within my control.”

31. In terms of vehicles, on any given stretch of road there are tuk-tuks, motorbikes carrying entire families, bicycles, vans crammed with standing passengers, buses, new SUVs, ancient trucks, the occasional bullock cart. Add to these dogs sleeping in the road, monkeys darting across, cats watching from the verge, and occasionally a farmer who has expropriated half the carriageway to dry rice in the sun. Everyone coexists in a state of negotiated chaos that seems terrifying for the first hour and then becomes the inevitable reality of the road, and you stop noticing it the way you stop noticing weather, until an almighty rainstorm, or bus, ploughs towards you.

32. Speaking of buses, the Lanka Ashok Leyland models left a deep impression as they hurtled past blasting their horns. Red ones are state-run services, white for schools, blue and multicoloured for private operators.

33. Traffic police are everywhere and always in pairs. They sport generalissimo peaked caps with moustaches to match. I was reminded of the military police from various fictional states in Hergé’s Tintin. Lennie was wary of them and diplomatically intimated that they were predisposed towards soliciting unofficial payments.

34. The few tolled expressways are funded by Japanese and Chinese development loans and feel like a different country altogether: empty, smooth, eerily quiet.

35. The scenic hill-country train from Kandy to Ella is supposedly one of the great railway journeys of the world: doors open, tea plantations falling away beneath you. November’s landslides had wiped out parts of the line, so I saw the region from winding roads instead.

36. There are 1.2 million registered tuk-tuks for a country of roughly five million households. No last-mile mass transit exists, so tuk-tuks are the transport network. Ownership enables a form of financial independence: vehicle paid off on loans, income enough to support a family. They are overwhelmingly Indian Bajaj models, decorated according to taste: religious symbols, mottos of uncertain provenance, and, with surprising frequency, skull-and-crossbones badges in the style of Prussian hussars. Lennie could not explain the skulls.

37. Tuk-tuk pricing is its own field of anthropology. Without a meter, the price is determined by a brief negotiation. The driver adds a tourist premium, the passenger attempts a counter-offer, and both arrive at a figure within about thirty seconds that satisfies neither completely.

38. Bakery delivery tuk-tuks announce themselves by playing a tinny electronic “Für Elise” on a loop through a loudspeaker. This is called choon paan, “tune bread.” I often heard it from my accommodation, drifting across a rice paddy at dawn or dusk.

Daily life & wildlife

39. Notable amongst wild animals are Sri Lanka’s roughly 10,000 wild elephants but there are many other species, not least the macaques, langurs, and mongooses. Memorably, during the course of my stay, a land monitor happily lounged by the pool next to me for an afternoon and a small tree snake fell on me in the outdoor shower.

40. On clothing: all schoolchildren wear white, intended to erase visible class and caste difference. You see them commuting home at midday. In Kandy, Muslim girls in white burqas walked alongside boys carrying cricket bats. Older men wear sarongs; younger men wear trousers. The transition appears to happen around fifty, overnight.

41. Air quality is not great. Rubbish burned openly, Lanka Ashok Leyland buses pour black diesel smoke from their side exhausts directly onto pedestrians. And incense from every temple. The combination, cut with frangipani and damp vegetation, is the smell of the country.

42. The stray dogs merit their own study: every dog appears to have devolved toward an Ur-dog or platonic canine form. Medium-sized, tan colour, short-haired, nondescript, sleeping in the middle of the road with the serene confidence that traffic will go around them. It does.

43. The birdwatching was a highlight for me. As an amateur, I often rely on Merlin, a sort of Shazam for birdsong. The app came into its own here. Peacocks produce a sound somewhere between a cat being strangled and a car alarm. The koel trills a loud and abrupt two-note call. I particularly admired the white egrets standing on the backs of bison and elephants in the rice paddies. The kingfishers, silent and serene, were the most striking birds. The bee-eaters, flitting through the undergrowth, were the most enchanting.

Final night in Negombo

44. My final night was spent in a hotel in Negombo run by a retired British expat called Paul, formerly an electrical engineering consultant in China and Russia, who had married a Sri Lankan. Paul had the relaxed fatalism of a man who has lived in enough difficult countries to know things will work out, just not the way you expect.

45. Conspicuously, the hotel was still under construction and I was the only guest. It transpired that, during the recent November flooding, Paul had offered a room to one local family. Word spread and he ended up with almost fifty local people wading across the fields to shelter in his multi-storey concrete building while their single-storey homes filled with water. The stream beside the hotel was fast-moving, mosquito-infested, and beautiful during the dawn chorus. At dusk, the bats replaced the birds, wheeling silently overhead.

On my return, Lennie messaged to ask whether I had enjoyed Sri Lanka. I responded that I had enjoyed it very much, but felt that I had only scratched the surface. After some time, he replied with a smiley face followed by a photograph of his lunch.

Postscript:

After sharing this piece, a friend who knows the country better offered some colourful additions.

He described the coastal train from Colombo to Galle, where the sea laps against the rails, as the most beautiful journey of his life. He also recalled sitting with Western backpackers who were praising how harmonious Sri Lanka was, how everyone just got along, while the one-armed hostel owner who had survived the siege of Jaffna served their drinks. He confirmed my impression that visible ethnic tension is rare, even in Jaffna: no murals, no martyrs’ shrines, nothing like Belfast or Bilbao. The military remained in former LTTE areas after 2009, and the government has not been shy with anti-terror powers. Likewise, he highlighted Arugam Bay (which was out of season during my visit) as practically a colony of post-service Israelis, complete with Hebrew menus and October 7th stickers.

Like many others, he worried about Balification. I suspect that Sri Lanka’s foreign ownership restrictions offer some protection, but the real brake has been the country’s habit of periodic catastrophe: tsunami, civil war, sovereign default. Every time tourism builds momentum, something knocks it back. Whether that counts as a blessing depends on your perspective.

Format inspired by Ed West on Vietnam, Kvetch on Mexico, Will Manidis on Oman, Sophie on the Horn of Africa

My prior post outlined the political gridlock around Hammersmith Bridge. That post has now been read by 20,000 people and may have helped reignite interest in the bridge. For the first time in many years, the Bridge has seen protests involving hundreds of local residents, national news articles, and lobby group campaigning.

In summary, Hammersmith Bridge is now open to pedestrians, cyclists, and wheelchair users but has been closed to motor vehicles for almost seven years. The local council, the bridge’s owner, has spent at least £50 million on repairs. The current proposed long-term solution costs around £300 million, yet it would appear that the council has not formally considered public transport alternatives, not least the most viable solution (autonomous electric shuttle pods costing just £10 million).

The council itself seemingly has limited remaining reserves. Neither the Government nor the Mayor of London has stepped up to solve the issue.

But what if London had a charitable endowment with £1.6 billion specifically established to maintain bridges?

The City Bridge Foundation

London has precisely that: the City Bridge Foundation.

Founded 1,000 years ago specifically for the maintenance of bridges in London, it has amassed a £1.6 billion endowment through tolls, donations, and investments. Now, it generates around £45 million annually.

But today the charity seems to be spending its endowment primarily on social justice causes rather than bridges.

In 1176, after a wooden London Bridge collapsed, Londoners established a fund to build and maintain a permanent stone river crossing.

Today, the Foundation maintains five bridges, all adjoining the City of London. It has twice rebuilt London Bridge (1831, 1973). Later, it constructed Blackfriars Bridge (1869) and Tower Bridge (1894), purchased Southwark Bridge (1868) from its private toll company. Most recently, it funded and then assumed responsibility for the Millennium Bridge (2000).

By the 1990s, through centuries of good stewardship and property accumulation, the endowment could generate far more income than bridge maintenance required. In 1995, the Charity Commission authorised a cy-près scheme permitting surplus funds to be spent on broader charitable purposes.

The primary objective remained the maintenance and support of the five bridges, but the governing document now also stated that surplus income could be applied as follows:

• First: “In or towards the provision of transport and access to it for elderly or disabled people in the Greater London area.”

• Second: “For other charitable purposes for the general benefit of the inhabitants of Greater London.”1

Since 1995, the Foundation has awarded over £840m to charities.

More specifically, in the last decade (2015-2025), an estimate based on publicly available data suggests that the Foundation has spent money approximately as follows:2

• 87% (£520m) on non-bridge grants.

• 10% (£50-60m) on bridge maintenance.

• 3% (£20-30m) on Tower Bridge operations.

From bridges to social justice

How did a bridge charity spend £520m without funding bridges?

Simple: The charity has refocused its grant-giving to social justice causes. According to its own website, its most recent funding policy has four grant themes: “Climate Justice, Access to Justice, Racial Justice, and Economic Justice.”

The Foundation’s own reporting shows the shift. Here’s a snapshot of grants awarded over a six-month period in 2023:

Notably absent from the Foundation’s grants: any funding for bridges or transport for elderly and disabled people.

And yet, they even have a poet-in-residence. In fact, City Bridge Foundation have funded a charity that opposed the construction of a new Thames river crossing!3

Meanwhile, London’s bridges decay. Hammersmith Bridge has been closed to motor vehicles for seven years. Albert Bridge is unable to carry buses. Vauxhall Bridge is approaching its end-of-life. Likewise, half a dozen other Thames crossings require urgent investment.

The 1995 scheme listed transport for elderly and disabled people first, general charitable purposes second. In practice, the Foundation funds almost exclusively the latter whilst deprioritising the former.

The perfect grant: £10m for Hammersmith Bridge

Here is a proposed grant that might align more closely with the stated charitable objectives of the Foundation.

The City Bridge Foundation could fund autonomous electric shuttles across Hammersmith Bridge: £10m to restore transport for elderly and disabled Londoners, just one eighth of the Foundation's annual grant expenditure last year.

Importantly, the Foundation’s policy states it will not fund projects that relieve statutory bodies of their duties. That is entirely reasonable: the charity cannot assume responsibility for every bridge in London, nor should it transfer what could be substantial ongoing liabilities onto its balance sheet.

But surely public transport for Hammersmith Bridge falls squarely within the Foundation’s charitable objectives?

• First, this is not relieving a statutory duty. The council’s statutory duty is highway maintenance, not public transport provision. The council has spent £50m on structural repairs with no remaining budget. An autonomous shuttle would be additional transport infrastructure, not a substitute for highway obligations.

• More fundamentally, the project directly fulfils the 1995 scheme’s charitable object: “provision of transport and access to it for elderly or disabled people in the Greater London area.” The pods would provide accessible transport for elderly and disabled residents currently cut off from essential services, operating between Hammersmith & Fulham and Richmond, and re-connect key public transport nodes.

This project falls neatly within the scope of the charity’s objective: providing a charitable benefit where statutory provision cannot extend.

Implemented well, autonomous shuttles could operate on a commercial basis with fare revenue offsetting operational costs, potentially even generating surplus income whilst demonstrating innovative infrastructure solutions that might be replicated across London.

Another thousand years of London bridges?

There are a multiplicity of charities for social justice causes. There is only one charity for London’s bridges.

The City Bridge Foundation exists because medieval Londoners understood infrastructure as an intergenerational obligation. They built bridges not for themselves but for their descendants.

Will we honour the legacy of prior generations by restoring public transport access across Hammersmith Bridge for elderly and disabled Londoners?

The Foundation could act for the benefit of all Londoners by funding a grant for public transport provision on Hammersmith Bridge.

Today, the charity has the opportunity to return to its core objective envisaged by the generations of Londoners who built the endowment, rather than evolving into a generic philanthropic endeavour.

Many thanks to John Murphy and Joe Hill for highlighting to me key information that inspired and informed this piece. You can read John’s CityAM piece here and Joe’s piece here.

Special thanks also to Ludo for reviewing the drafts and being a steadfast friend.

Disclaimers: For the avoidance of doubt, this article does not (and is not intended to) imply or suggest any potential mismanagement or maladministration of any kind whatsoever regarding the governance, operations or administration of the City Bridge Foundation (charity number: 1035628, formerly Bridge House Estates) or by any of the trustees, employees, advisers or any other individuals or entities.

The author writes in a personal capacity and all views expressed are his own. The information in this article is drawn exclusively from sources available in the public domain including the Charity Commission’s published register and records, the City of London Corporation publications, and the Foundation’s own published materials.

Paris, 15th April 2019, 6:43pm.

Inside the ancient cathedral all is quiet. Afternoon light filters through the stained glass.

A fire alarm pierces the silence.

Within minutes, flames tear through the oak roof. Eight centuries of timber explode into an inferno visible across the city. Parisians gather on the Seine’s banks as the spire collapses through the nave in a cascade of embers.

Hours later, the French President stands before the ruin: “Cette cathédrale, nous la rebâtirons.”

This cathedral, we will rebuild it.

On 8th December 2024, five years and seven months after the fire, Notre-Dame reopens, its spire restored, the rose windows gleaming once again.

London, 10th April 2019, 3:47pm.

Five days earlier, it’s a bright spring afternoon in west London.

On Hammersmith Bridge, traffic inches forward, suffocated by congestion. Above, the suspension chains creak under the weight of queuing cars. Cyclists weave between wing mirrors. Beneath the footpaths, invisible cracks spread deeper into the 132-year-old pedestals.

Engineers monitoring the structure see the warning signs of imminent collapse. The decision is taken: close the bridge to motor traffic immediately.

Barriers go up. The traffic melts away.

Six years later, Hammersmith Bridge remains closed to vehicles. The solution proposed by local authorities costs £250m and has no funding.

One might reasonably object that comparing Notre-Dame to Hammersmith Bridge is unfair. A Gothic cathedral and a Victorian suspension bridge are worlds apart.

Fair enough. Instead, consider this comparison: Hammersmith Bridge itself.

In 1882, a boat struck Hammersmith Bridge causing damage that revealed five decades of deterioration. Parliament authorised a replacement in 1883 and provided for a temporary crossing. Four years later, the Prince of Wales opened a new bridge designed by Bazalgette (of London sewer fame). Cost: £83,000 (£9.5m today).1

In 2019, ultrasound revealed dangerous micro-fractures in Hammersmith Bridge’s structure. The bridge was immediately closed with no temporary alternative provided. Six years later, the bridge is still closed to traffic (but stabilised). Cost to date: £48m, with full restoration estimated at £250m. Long-term solution: none.

Our Victorian forebears rebuilt their broken bridge faster than we’ve failed to find a solution for ours.

Hammersmith Bridge isn’t just a local transport problem, it’s symptomatic of Britain’s broader state crisis.

This is happening in central London. Not in a rural “backwater”, not in a “left behind” urban centre, but in one of the wealthiest communities in Britain, on a major transport artery. If Britain cannot fix Hammersmith Bridge, what is failing in places that nobody is watching?

This essay examines two questions.

• First: how did Britain reach a point where we cannot fix a bridge?

• Second: given that reality, what should we actually do about Hammersmith Bridge?

The first answer reveals a state crisis: every actor can block decisions; none can compel action.

The second is more surprising.

When the bridge closed, about 25,000 vehicles crossed it daily and TfL predicted a severe economic impact.

Six years later, 9,000 of those journeys have vanished - not diverted to other crossings, but simply evaporated. Yet the local economy has adapted, air quality has improved, and overall traffic congestion has lessened.

This counterintuitive outcome begs the question: are we actually solving the right problem?

The “obvious” £250m solution may be addressing the wrong issue. The best solution may cost far less, involve no cars, and turn paralysis into opportunity.

Part 1: State Failure in Microcosm

The history of Hammersmith Bridge

Hammersmith Bridge is a testament to Victorian engineering prowess. The present-day bridge is Bazalgette’s 1887 design: a wrought-iron suspension structure with ornate decorative features and coated in deep green paint that blends into the willow-lined bank.

It replaced an earlier bridge constructed in 1827 by local engineer William Tierney Clark. That first bridge cost £80,000 (approximately £8.9m today), was funded by private investors, and operated as a private toll bridge by the Hammersmith Bridge Company.2 Unusually amongst London toll bridges, it turned a profit. In 1880, it was purchased by the Metropolitan Board of Works and made toll-free.3

Clark’s designs at Hammersmith and Marlow so impressed a visiting Hungarian aristocrat that he was later commissioned to build a sister bridge in Budapest, the Széchenyi Chain Bridge over the Danube, which remains a national symbol today.4

Fifty years later, in 1882, the aforementioned boat collision and concerns about weight capacity on Boat Race days led Parliament to authorise a replacement.5 A temporary crossing structure was installed and just four years later, on 11th June 1887, Bazalgette’s bridge was opened at the cost of £83,000 (approximately £9.5m today).6

Why was Hammersmith Bridge closed?

For over 125 years, the bridge received minimal maintenance.7 This is despite it being bombed three times: by the IRA in 1939, the Provisional IRA in 1996, and the Real IRA in 2000.8 9

Only in 2014 was a comprehensive structural review first commissioned.10

The findings were alarming: decades of unchecked corrosion had created micro-fractures throughout the suspension structure, and the Victorian bearings that allow the bridge to flex with temperature had seized solid.

In April 2019, engineers discovered that the micro-fractures had widened enough to close the bridge to vehicles, though pedestrians and cyclists could still cross. Then in August 2020’s heatwave, sensors detected rapid crack expansion. The council’s senior engineer allegedly gave the council leader just 30 seconds to make the critical decision.11

Cast iron is unforgivingly brittle; it doesn’t bend, it shatters. With the potential for catastrophic collapse into the Thames, the bridge was completely closed, halting both pedestrian and river traffic beneath.12

Did the review and precautionary measures save lives?

Consider Genoa’s Morandi Bridge, a 210-metre section collapsed in August 2018, killing 43 people. The operator had warned in 2011 that collapse within 10 years was possible, yet adequate action was never taken.

Compare too Dresden’s Carola Bridge, a 100-metre section collapsed in September 2024 just minutes after the last tram crossed. The cause was hidden stress corrosion cracking that had existed since construction in 1971.

What repair work has been completed to date?

In 2021, stabilisation work was undertaken and the bridge’s side walkways were made accessible to pedestrians and cyclists.13 Engineers innovatively filled the cast iron pedestals with fibre-reinforced concrete, installed steel support frames, replaced the Victorian bearings with modern rubber ones, and wrapped the chains in foil with air conditioning to keep them cool during heatwaves.

What can the stabilised bridge carry?

The local council initially claimed the stabilised restriction limited vehicles to 1 tonne (equivalent to a Fiat 500). After a third FOI request and internal review, the local council acknowledged the maximum allowable mass was 3 tonnes (a Volkswagen Transporter).14 The bridge cannot support regular buses (12-18 tonnes) or normal traffic, but could theoretically support one lightweight vehicle. The stabilisation has secured the structure, but not restored its function.

In April 2025, with stabilisation achieved, the main carriageway was reopened to cyclists and pedestrians, exactly six years after the initial closure, but remains closed to all vehicle traffic including buses and cars.

Why was the Victorian bridge built cheaper and faster?

The stabilisation works to date have cost £48m, five times more than the original construction costs for the entire bridge - why is that?

The explanation lies in a fundamental shift in cost structure.

• The 1887 bridge (£83,000, or £9.4m today) was dominated by material costs (perhaps 60%), with minimal professional fees and zero regulatory costs.15

• The 2019-25 stabilisation (£48m cost) inverts this cost structure: labour comprises perhaps 40%, professional fees have tripled to perhaps 18%, and regulatory compliance (a category that didn’t exist in Victorian times) consumes perhaps 12%.16

No itemised accounts exist for either project, but these estimates are based on comparative studies of similar projects (methodology in footnotes).

There has been a profound increase in the cost of British infrastructure. This cost inflation reflects genuine progress, but of a specific kind.

The Victorians built with brutal efficiency: workers died on their projects (accepted as the cost of doing business), heritage protection was non-existent, and accountability was staked on just one engineer’s reputation.

We have replaced this with a system that is better, but also exponentially more expensive: zero-tolerance safety protocols, Grade II listing requirements, extensive insurance and oversight structures. Regulatory compliance (a category that didn’t exist in 1887) now consumes perhaps 12% of the budget.

The Victorians deployed one engineer and one contractor. The modern stabilisation required six major organisations plus multiple specialist consultancies, quangos and charities. Each improvement is defensible on its own merits. Taken together, however, they create paralysis: costs multiply, timelines extend, and every stakeholder gains effective veto power.

These aren’t individual failures but rather a systemic accumulation of red tape that paralyses progress.

What is the proposed long-term solution?

The £250m restoration

The first challenging technical problem is solved: the bridge is now stabilised, albeit at significant expense.

But who will fund the complete restoration to return the bridge to its full operational capacity?

In April 2023, the local council submitted a business case to the DfT for full restoration.

That proposed solution is a double-decker system designed by Foster & Partners: vehicles on top, pedestrians in an enclosed tunnel underneath, walking through a dim passage while traffic roars above their heads.

The cost: £250m (and rising with inflation). The timeline: 10 years from approval, meaning 16+ years total since closure.

There is an irony. The entire justification for this solution is heritage preservation, yet this solution will encase the listed Victorian structure in a visual eyesore, forcing pedestrians into a claustrophobic tunnel, ruining the very heritage it claims to preserve.

Who will pay the bill?

Here’s where Britain’s infrastructure dysfunction becomes concrete.

Three players are each committed to funding one-third of any restoration:17

• London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham (LBHF): Local council and bridge owner. £80m total reserves.

• Transport for London (TfL): Transport authority strategically responsible for river crossings but financially crippled despite government bailouts post-Covid. Faces a backlog of 100+ critical infrastructure repairs, with Hammersmith Bridge far down the priority list.

• Department for Transport (DfT): National government department, normally provides 85% funding for strategic bridge repairs but has slashed commitment to just 33% for Hammersmith.

Since LBHF submitted their restoration plan in April 2023, the DfT has sat on this business case.

Why have they delayed? It is very likely that the £250m restoration will fail the Treasury’s value-for-money tests, but nobody is yet willing to admit that publicly.

The benefits are modest: reconnecting two wealthy areas across a short river crossing with multiple alternatives nearby. The costs are astronomical: £250m for bespoke heritage restoration, taking 10+ years, with each party exposed to inflation risk.

For context, TfL only spent £42m in 10 years between 2010-2021 for the maintenance of all Thames river crossings.

Some would call Hammersmith Bridge a state capacity failure. But let’s be precise about what has actually failed.

Not engineering ability: British engineers remain world-class, and the stabilisation work completed so far is evidence of that. Not resources: the proposed cost is a rounding error in national budget terms.

What has failed is our political capacity: the ability to make decisions, assign responsibility, and accept trade-offs.

We’ve created a planning system in which every actor can block and add cost but where none can decide, where doing nothing is the safest choice.

Are there any other proposed solutions?

In the vacuum left by years of inaction, a cottage industry of alternative proposals has emerged.

Baynes & Mitchell proposed a £110m interwoven structure. Sybarite’s inventive mirror-polished steel “ribbon” was dismissed as “another eccentric press stunt” by the council. Anthony Carlile Architects mocked up a temporary barge bridge. The Manser Practice held an internal competition yielding conceptual designs. The Richmond MP proposed licensed rickshaws.18 LBHF council have “not ruled out” funding restoration via a resident-exempt vehicle toll (though this appears unviable on basic calculations),19 whilst the DfT briefly considered permanent closure as a monument.

Even friends regularly offer enlightening new suggestions: inhabited bridges (funded through commercial and residential leases); a version of Wuppertal’s Schwebebahn (a public transport monorail operating since 1897); or London’s failed Garden Bridge.20

The problem is not ingenuity. It is a system that blocks any decision-making.

Hammersmith Bridge with Chinese characteristics?

Here is a more facetious proposal: award the contract to a Chinese state-owned operator.

Why China? Well, China’s bridge engineering operates at a scale that is difficult for those of us in a de-industrialised nation to comprehend.

At least 9 Chinese bridges have been built that would span the English Channel.21

For instance, the 55km 6-lane trans-oceanic Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge features 23km of elevated sections, a 6.7km immersed vehicle tunnel at 45 metres below sea level, and four artificial islands, completed in just 9 years of construction.22

The Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, completed in September 2025, is furnished with a “cafe in the clouds” and an artificial waterfall. It spans 2,890m at a height of 625m above the Beipan River and was built in less than 4 years for ~£220m (2.1 billion yuan), less than the proposed restoration of Hammersmith Bridge.23

In comparison t these mega-projects, Hammersmith Bridge seems rather modest.

But Britain is not China.

In terms of state capacity, China’s sustained construction programme generates continuous learning and accumulated expertise; Britain builds episodically and as much as half of its wage premium is due to costs rising without corresponding productivity gains.24

But in terms of values: we demand zero construction deaths, fair wages, and democratic accountability. China’s infrastructure achievements are staggering, but they’re inseparable from its authoritarian system: bridges built without parliamentary debate, villages demolished, environmental concerns overridden, labour protections minimal. The costs mask 8-15 worker deaths per project and £1-8 daily wages and lower build quality.25

Britain’s paralysis isn’t simply incompetence, it’s the cost of worker safety, political accountability and heritage protection.

The question is not “why can’t we build like China?” but “how do we deliver infrastructure within our political and value system?”

Should we simply demolish and rebuild the bridge?

£250m for a restoration is an extraordinary sum of money, so how about we just build a new bridge altogether?

At the January 2025 Taskforce meeting, the DfT proposed a demolition and rebuild. This proposal was rejected as legally impossible given the structure’s Grade II listing. But the heritage protection framework is policy, not immutable law. The Grade II listing was only awarded in 2008.

What would it cost simply to demolish Hammersmith Bridge and build a modern replacement?

The brief (assuming permission were granted) would be demolish the existing structure and build a functional and safe 210-metre Thames bridge crossing at Hammersmith, carrying two vehicle lanes plus pedestrians and cyclists.

Answer: £150-225m. A complete replacement would most likely be a beam bridge and require 4-6 years from project start to completion. Overall contingency 20%. The full methodology for my estimate can be found in the footnotes.26

There are two caveats to this estimate:

First, I’m not an engineer or architect. This estimate can in no way replace a detailed feasibility study, it is a back-of-the-envelope guess that offers a rough benchmark.

Second, this estimate underplays the vast range of uncertainty in UK infrastructure delivery. Although there is limited ambiguity in the engineering of the bridge itself, the current state of infrastructure construction in Britain means that the final price tag is highly uncertain.

Just compare other recent projects for Thames river crossings. The Rotherhithe Bridge saw costs triple from £100m to £463m before cancellation. The Lower Thames Crossing has spent over £300m on planning alone - more than Norway spent building the world’s longest road tunnel (the Laerdal Tunnel). The Thames Tideway Tunnel escalated from £1.7bn estimate in 2004 to £4.5bn by completion in 2025. The Silvertown Tunnel cost £2.2bn for a straightforward 1.4km crossing.27 Or consider High Speed 2 (HS2): £40.5bn spent to date (as of April 2025), having achieved very few of its stated aims. Final cost estimated at over £100bn in today’s money.28 That includes the £100m bat tunnel and the £100m HS2 bridge to nowhere.29

Even if the costs of a re-build were acceptable to the Treasury (they’re not) and the legal barriers were removed (they won’t be), demolition would destroy real value. £48m has already been spent stabilising the bridge and this is not simply sunk cost fallacy. The bridge now functions for cyclists, pedestrians, and motorised vehicles up to 3 tonnes, while retaining heritage significance no rebuild could match.

When projects routinely spend hundreds of millions just obtaining permission, throwing away a stabilised structure becomes hard to justify.

What is the de facto solution?

The bridge has been closed to motor traffic for six years. Primary school children in Barnes cannot remember when cars could cross. What began as an emergency closure has calcified into permanent car-free status through institutional paralysis.

The solution that is unfolding by default is to do nothing.

This has never been formally proposed, yet everyone’s inaction point towards it. Last month, bridge contractors filed a planning application requesting permission to transport Victorian ironwork to Brighton for long-term storage, indicating no prospect of restoration in the foreseeable future.30 After all, it could take years or decades before political change unblocks this system to even enable a rebuild, if ever.

To do nothing would imply that vehicle access does not matter. The bridge isn’t really closed - you can still walk or cycle across. And that’s better, isn’t it? We don’t want cars in cities anyway, right?31

No! A major London transport link has ceased to function, and there are currently no plans to address it. That should not be acceptable in a competently governed society.

We cannot accept this state of affairs.

But first, we must ask the right questions.

Part 2: Asking the Right Questions

When I began researching this piece, my intuition was straightforward: closing a major bridge carrying 25,000 daily vehicles should lead to more traffic on other nearby crossings and less economic activity on either side.

The evidence shows the exact opposite. Today there is less traffic and more economic activity.

How is that possible?

To answer that question, we must understand:

• What happened to the traffic?

• What are the social and economic impacts of the closure?

• Who has been genuinely disadvantaged?

What happened to the traffic?

When the bridge closed in 2019, 25,000 vehicles crossed it each day.

TfL predicted chaos: a July 2019 impact assessment showed 15,000 additional motorised vehicles per day on alternative crossings and estimated “social dis-benefits to exceed £50m per annum.” Local MPs still cite these figures.

But what does the data show six years on?

Today, there is less traffic and congestion on nearby Thames crossings than before the closure.

The data shows traffic has reduced in almost all the locations where increases were initially recorded. By 2024, overall motor traffic volumes across the affected region had fallen by around 10% more than in the rest of London (25% overall). Likewise, total traffic counts on neighbouring road bridges are lower than pre-closure (charts above).

Putney Bridge shows a different idiosyncratic effect. Traffic initially fell back after the closure in 2019, but delays began to increase in 2023. That sequence of events suggests that there are other variables unrelated to the closure that are impacting travel times.

Where did the traffic go?

Cycling data provides part of the answer. Richmond Council’s survey revealed that even a few months after closure, 44% of former drivers had already switched to walking or cycling.

Cycle counts across the area are also markedly increased. This is known in the literature as a “modal shift”. Richmond-upon-Thames now has one of the highest active travel mode shares in Britain.

So, of the original 25,000 daily trips, most shifted to cycling, walking and public transport, and some moved to other bridges.

But here’s the puzzle: TfL reports that 9,000 vehicles (36%) have simply vanished from the road network entirely - they are no longer visible on any crossing between central London and southwest London.

What happened to those 9,000 journeys that simply evaporated?

Was economic activity lost? Were human connections severed? Did relatives stop visiting grandparents? Did businesses stop making deliveries?

The answer may lie in a counterintuitive phenomenon known as Braess’ Paradox: adding capacity to a congested network can worsen performance, while removing it can improve things.32

When drivers make individually rational routing decisions, they reach an equilibrium where no single driver benefits from changing route, but this equilibrium is often inefficient for the system as a whole.

In Hammersmith’s case, the closure forced a new equilibrium. The 9,000 vanished vehicles weren’t displaced elsewhere, nor did they represent lost economic activity. They were replaced by alternatives that were more efficient in the new system.

The shopper who made three separate car trips weekly now combines errands or orders online from consolidated delivery services. The school run that meant queueing in traffic now happens on foot or by bike. The commuter who spent 20 minutes driving and searching for parking now cycles in 12 minutes.

After tube strikes, 5% of commuters permanently switch because disruption forces them to discover faster alternatives.

Hammersmith Bridge’s closure worked similarly: people tried new transport modes and often found they were better.33

What are the social and economic impacts of the closure?

When the bridge closed, TfL predicted economic contraction. The opposite occurred.

Mastercard data shows spending in Barnes increased by twice the London average.34 Spending increased +21% in Barnes (SW13) and +13% in Hammersmith (W6), compared to London’s +9% average. This held even when the bridge was closed to pedestrians and cyclists.

However, this aggregate spending increase does mask a more nuanced set of changes in local business composition. Data from the same Barnes Community Association survey in 2020 suggested that specialist retailers that previously relied on cross-river customers experienced revenue declines, whilst local businesses serving residential communities tended to adapt most successfully.35

As soon as 2020, the closure appears to have reshaped Barnes’ commercial character towards neighbourhood-focused businesses rather than destination retail, potentially strengthening its role as a local high street. Now, six years later, the local economy has entirely adapted to the new reality.

Reduced pollution likely increased dwell time and spending given that air quality improved at every monitoring station across the region, with nitrogen dioxide levels dropping significantly in Hammersmith, most of Barnes, and even Putney.

Emergency services have reported no impact on response times. The London Ambulance Service stated they have “never released any information about the closure impacting response times,” whilst London Fire Brigade data shows no increase in 999 response times in the Barnes peninsula.

West London’s economy hasn’t contracted; it has adapted. This isn’t suppression of activity; it’s optimisation. Economic vitality requires efficient connectivity, not maximum motorised vehicle throughput.

However, there are important confounding factors.

Since 2019, the entire urban transport landscape has transformed through three major forces largely independent of the bridge closure.

The pandemic (normalising remote work and collapsing commuter traffic), regulatory changes (Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, ULEZ expansion, 20mph zones), and new infrastructure (Elizabeth line, expanded cycling networks).

Disentangling the bridge closure’s impact from these confounding factors is nearly impossible, so it is not possible to attribute all these changes definitively to the bridge closure.

But one impact is clear: west London has adapted to reduced car dependency regardless of whether the bridge closure drove or merely coincided with these changes.

It is not necessarily the case that closing bridges improves transport; but it is undeniably true that people and places adapt when given alternatives.

Infrastructure shapes behaviour.

Who has been genuinely disadvantaged by the closure?

The closure has created genuine hardship for specific groups.

Elderly and disabled residents have been significantly disadvantaged, having lost direct bus routes across the river to Hammersmith with its step-free Tube access, retail outlets and major hospital.36 Low-income residents have been disproportionately affected. They’re less likely to own cars or bikes, cannot afford taxi detours, and have lost affordable public transport options. Parents with young children face new challenges. Cycling is not always an option, so any journey across the river has become significantly harder.

Specialised retailers have also lost business. Whilst generic local businesses saw spending increases, specialised retailers relying on customers from across London experienced revenue reductions. Similarly, tradespeople and businesses requiring vehicle access face longer detours. Plumbers, electricians, and builders transporting heavier tools lose time and income. Commercial motorised vehicles merit particular attention given ULEZ parallels, where delivery operators have raised concerns about regulatory burdens. However, unlike ULEZ, the bridge closure affects routing rather than compliance costs.

As a local resident who crosses the bridge every week, I see both sides of this argument:

For certain residents and businesses, the closure has created genuine hardship. Equally, however, the constant gridlock has vanished, the local economy has adapted, and cycling - previously a life-threatening exercise - is now pleasant and safe.

The harms are real, but they do not require a £250m car-restoration project. They require targeted public transport solutions.

What do locals state as their preferred solution?

Ask residents if they want the bridge reopened to all traffic and the answer is obvious: yes.

Maximum choice will always seem the most convenient option.

But that is the wrong question to be asking. As we have established, a full restoration would cost £250m, take years, and likely require a significant vehicle toll.

Given that reality, what’s the best option?

A 2023 poll tested this exact trade-off, and the response from residents was clear. If the alternative was a toll bridge, 50% of respondents would prefer a car-free bridge with cycling, walking and electric shuttles, with 36% in favour of tolling. Similar results were shown in a FareCity survey from 2019.

Given the actual constraints and costs, residents prefer targeted public transport solutions over expensive vehicular restoration.

Is the bridge legally required to reopen to cars?

Finally, we should address a claim that has shaped the entire debate.

Labour Council leader Stephen Cowan has repeatedly stated that the bridge is “legally required to reopen to cars,” indicating that the Secretary of State instructed him on the council’s “Highways obligations.” This assertion has anchored political negotiations around how to restore full vehicular capacity. Mayor Sadiq Khan has also expressed a desire to re-open the bridge to cars.

But in November 2022, the Department for Transport’s Freedom of Information response categorically contradicted this claim:

“The Department has not given any legal instructions to London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham regarding the management of the bridge – officials and Ministers have been clear that LBHF is the asset owner and decisions on maintenance and repair are for it to take.”

As the owner, there is no clear legal requirement for the Council to reopen the bridge to cars (as they have likely met their statutory obligations,37 although any formal highway downgrading would require Traffic Regulation Orders under established statutory procedures).38

This distinction is not semantic pedantry. If the obligation is political rather than statutory, then the solution space is fundamentally different. The council is not legally bound to pursue a £250m vehicular restoration. It could instead solve the actual mobility problem: providing public transport across the river for those who need it (which may itself be a statutory obligation).39

Yet this premise has locked the debate around restoring the existing structure to full vehicular capacity.

Part 3: Solving for the Future

So what might a solution look like?

In May 2023, a credible and equitable solution for Hammersmith Bridge was proposed, fully designed and costed.

It cost £10m (25x cheaper than the Foster & Partners solution), permitted cycling and walking, fulfilled public transport needs, and crucially abided by the stabilisation’s weight restrictions.

Ten-passenger autonomous electric pods, running every 2-3 minutes during peak times. Each pod weighs under 3 tonnes when fully loaded, comfortably within the bridge’s limits. The fleet would carry 235-282 passengers per hour. Full integration with Oyster cards and contactless payment. A protected two-way cycle lane alongside and pedestrian walkways. Restructured bus routes. The pods would operate in a single lane with passing points at either end.40

Total cost: £10m. Pod fleet (£3m), highways remodelling (£3.7m), public realm improvements (£0.5m), contingency (£2.8m). Timeline: 24-36 months from approval to operational.

The charity Possible spent 18 months developing this autonomous pod system for Hammersmith Bridge. The solution uses proven technology from New Zealand provider Ohmio. The pods are already used today in New Zealand and multiple international airports.

This solution addresses the genuine harms identified earlier. The autonomous pod system provides:

• Public transport for those without alternatives: elderly and disabled residents regain direct access to Hammersmith with step-free boarding, young families can cross safely, low-income residents get affordable Oyster-integrated transport.

• Reduced congestion for essential and commercial vehicle users: with 9,000 trips already evaporated and additional travellers using pods, tradespeople and businesses would experience a net benefit from reduced congestion on alternative crossings.

This is why the pod solution isn’t just cheaper than the £250m restoration - it’s better.

Why autonomous pods rather than conventional public transport? Standard buses weigh 12-18 tonnes, far exceeding the bridge’s 3-tonne limit. Trams require expensive track infrastructure and permanent structural modifications, the weight of which would be incompatible with heritage constraints.41 Autonomous pods solve this through lightweight design: each 10-passenger pod weighs under 3 tonnes fully loaded, with ten pods providing equivalent capacity whilst staying within structural limits. The system eliminates driver costs (60-70% of bus operating expenses) whilst enabling 2-3 minute headways impossible with human drivers, maximising throughput and cost-efficiency.

Would the pods risk obsolescence? After all, a restored bridge might serve for decades while autonomous technology is evolving rapidly. But in a rapidly changing transport landscape, the pods deliver adaptable infrastructure with manageable operating costs. Vehicles can be upgraded as technology improves at minimal cost and could be operated publicly like TfL services or through private concession with access leasing and passenger charges. In any case, the pods cost a fraction of the £250m restoration which would likely require perpetual subsidy for changing traffic patterns.

Barriers to implementation exist, but none are insurmountable. The Automated Vehicles Act 2024 already provides a legal framework, while Milton Keynes and Solihull already operate these exact Ohmio vehicles on public roads. The most likely bridge-specific challenges such as weight certification, vibration testing, structural approval are procedural requirements, not engineering barriers.

This proposal solves the actual mobility problems faced by local communities rather than restoring a traffic pattern that was already causing gridlock.

Here is the digital visualisation of the proposal (no sound):

What happened to this proposal?

The Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles offered £200,000 for feasibility studies. Possible assembled a consortium including Ohmio, City Science, and City Infinity. Richmond Council and TfL both agreed to support if Hammersmith & Fulham agreed.

Hammersmith & Fulham refused to engage. The deadline passed. The consortium disbanded.

Since then, Ohmio has begun trials in Solihull and Milton Keynes. Waymo and Wayve will trial autonomous taxi services in London in 2026.

The opportunity for the UK’s first autonomous public transport deployment was lost, but the solution remains viable.

Call to Action

What needs to happen now?

1. End the pretence. LBHF, TfL and DfT must publicly acknowledge what everyone privately knows: the restoration (£250m+) is unfunded and any replacement (£150m+) is equally unfundable.

2. Open a competitive tender. Tender for public transport solutions within the stabilised bridge’s 3-tonne weight limit. Offer clear requirements: passengers per hour, Oyster-integrated, delivery timeline.Let the market find the most cost-effective solution. Fast-track regulatory approval for the winning proposal. No multi-year planning inquiries for a bridge that’s already been closed for six years.

3. Create the destination, invest in the approaches. All three bodies also need to invest in regenerating areas at either end: the retail outlets, cycling infrastructure, public realm upgrades, drainage improvements (co-ordinate with the Hammersmith Flyover redevelopment if that proceed).

Recently, there have been some more positive signs. Various local politicians have begun to more clearly express support for prioritising a public transport solution over simply re-introducing cars. LBHF recently trialled yellow rental carts, demonstrating an appetite for testing new modes of transport.

Building the Future

The Possible proposal would have been the UK’s first autonomous vehicle deployment in real-world public transport.

Hammersmith Bridge offers the perfect testing ground: dedicated straight lanes, low speed, controlled environment. The Government has stated its ambition for technology leadership in autonomous vehicles.

That opportunity was lost when LBHF refused to engage, but the solution remains viable.

The bridge is stabilised. The community has adapted. The technology exists. What’s required is simply the political will to choose the future.

Hammersmith Bridge could become a place where Victorian ironwork frames cutting-edge technology. London’s greenest historic crossing could be the testing ground for Britain’s most advanced public transport solution.

Picture it at dusk: Victorian lampposts glowing, pods gliding silently past, cyclists heading home, the swans gliding along the Thames below. The bridge would no longer be a bottleneck that motorists endure, but a bridge people choose to cross.

Designed thoughtfully, Hammersmith Bridge’s public transport vehicles could become a timeless and recognisable feature of London’s urban landscape, alongside other distinctive British icons — red telephone boxes, double-decker buses, or black cabs.

That’s the future for Britain that we should be building - one that is even more beautiful than the past we’re failing to resurrect.

Hammersmith Bridge can be one of the greatest river crossings in the world.

Please do get in touch if you are in a position to help solve this challenge or have any feedback.

Let’s build the future.

Postscript: Fixing Britain

Will this solution help us solve the vast problem of Britain’s state crisis?

Of course not.42

But Hammersmith Bridge teaches a lesson.

Here, the intuitive question based on past assumptions was “how do we restore full vehicular capacity?” The real question we should have been asking ourselves is “how do we solve this mobility problem to ensure a better future?”

While we debate how to restore Victorian infrastructure for outdated traffic patterns, the actual future, autonomous and mass public transport, is materialising around us.

In that sense, Hammersmith Bridge serves as a warning.

If we can’t adapt our thinking here, what hope is there for the toughest problems that we face? For the infrastructure that Britain actually needs to build? For the critical state capacity that we most urgently need to develop?43

Hammersmith Bridge is the case study; now Britain must start asking the right questions.

Acknowledgements

This essay was possible because kind people cared enough to help.

Above all, I would like to thank Leo Murray, who led the charity Possible and wrote a definitive report on Hammersmith Bridge which informed so much of this information in this piece.

Tom Pike, Tim Lennon, and Charles Campion generously shared their expertise, data, and years of work on this problem. Their rigorous research and genuine commitment to solving the bridge’s crisis made this analysis possible.

The Looking for Growth team, Lawrence, Ludo, and Jack, provided invaluable support and encouragement throughout.

I am deeply grateful also to friends Quentin, Aeron, Paramvir, Bob and Jemima, who read early drafts and offered thoughtful feedback.

Finally, my most sincere apologies to every friend, family member, and innocent bystander who endured my monologues about Hammersmith Bridge these past months.

Disclaimer: All posts on this site reflect my personal views only and should not be construed as investment, financial, or professional advice. These views do not represent my employer or any affiliated organisation.

Bibliography

• Possible & Leo Murray (2024) Hammersmith Bridge Report

• Tim Lennon (2024) Hammersmith Bridge

• Barnes Community Association & Emma Robinson (2020) The Impact of the Closure

• LBHF Resources:

  • LBHF (2025) Hammersmith Bridge

  • LBHF (2024) Stabilisation Works

  • LBHF (2020) Hammersmith Bridge Timeline

• Local Groups:

  • Car-Free Hammersmith Bridge

  • Hammersmith Bridge SoS

Footnotes

1

Source: Bank of England Inflation Calculator. Taking the mid-date of the construction period and inflation adjusting to August 2025 values.

4

The Széchenyi Chain Bridge. Clark’s 1827 design was internationally significant. Hungarian Count István Széchenyi visited England in 1832 for bridge design ideas and so admired Hammersmith Bridge (and Clark’s similar design for Marlow Bridge) that he commissioned Clark to build a sister bridge in Hungary. That bridge, Budapest’s Széchenyi Chain Bridge (1849), is now Hungary’s national symbol and tourist destination. It was the first bridge linking Buda and Pest across the Danube. During construction, a broken link sent 400 tons of iron into the river, nearly killing Széchenyi watching from a boat. After German forces destroyed it in 1944, Hungary rebuilt it by 1949. Budapest’s bridge is also currently closed for major refurbishment with similar government cost disputes. Source: Institution of Civil Engineers

19

Back-of-the-envelope toll bridge calculation: LBHF estimates £7.5m annual finance costs for its £83m share (one-third of £250m total). If tolls cover all costs, that’s £22.5m yearly. Adding £1.3m maintenance and 15% collection costs requires £27m annually. Pre-closure, 18,000 private cars crossed daily. LBHF plans resident exemptions and expects lower usage. The M6 toll comparison is instructive: despite saving 40 minutes at £10.50 daily, only 15% of M6 traffic uses it. Applying this to Hammersmith Bridge yields just over £10m annually before resident exemptions, less than half the required amount.

Tolling would therefore require subsidy.“H&F has made it clear it can only fund its share of the capital costs and ongoing maintenance through a toll or road user charge. A toll or road user charge would ensure that those who benefit from directly using the bridge, i.e. motorists, pay for its repair and continued operation.” Source: LBHF. Compare also this survey from Richmond Council, Source: Hammersmith Bridge Survey

22

Chinese Bridges. At least 9 Chinese bridges exceed 32km in length, although it is worth noting that some traverse relatively shallow depths, less congested shipping routes, or carry trains rather than cars:

• Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge - 164.8km

• Tianjin Grand Bridge - 113.7km

• Cangde Grand Bridge - 105.81km

• Weinan Weihe Grand Bridge - 79.7km

• Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge - 55km

• Beijing Grand Bridge - 48.2km

• Jiaozhou Bay Bridge - 41.58km

• Hangzhou Bay Bridge - 36km

• Runyang Yangtze River Bridge - 35.6km

Additional visual aids. Left: Hangzhou Bay Bridge. Centre: Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. Right: HKZM Bridge Map.

40

Pod Lane Detail:

Please refer to the report from Possible, the charity that originally proposed the solution for further details.

It is worth noting further details from their recommendations:

• Two pods will be on charge and on reserve in case of faults so there are no interruptions in the service. They would be parked under the flyover in a lay-by ready to deploy if there’s issues with any of the others.

• A pod should depart from each terminus every two to three minutes during peak times. They cannot run more frequently than this because the bridge itself is the bottleneck - the weight limit means that only one shuttle will be able to cross at a time, at the fairly low speed of 9.63 miles per hour.

The summer of 1858 witnessed an unprecedented sewage crisis in London that became known infamously as the “Great Stink.”

Within the Houses of Parliament, the curtains and drapery were soaked in chloride of lime to create a barrier against the putrid odours emanating from the River Thames. According to a contemporary newspaper, The Examiner, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, entered one of the committee rooms only to depart shortly afterwards “with a mass of papers in one hand, and with his pocket handkerchief applied to his nose,” repelled by the stench.

What circumstances had transpired to transform the Thames into such a health hazard?

A short history of sewage in cities

Human waste management systems have varied dramatically across place and time, but effective sewage management has been the invisible enabler of urban development throughout history, creating the conditions for population density that would otherwise be impossible due to disease and contamination.

More complex sewage management systems have been developed at least since the 3rd millennium BC. At that time, the earliest civilisations in Ancient Mesopotamia and in the Indus Valley constructed sewage channels and brick-lined sewers at sites such as Uruk, Harappa, and Mohenjo-daro.

The pinnacle of ancient sewage engineering and sanitation is perhaps the Cloaca Maxima, Rome's monumental central sewer. Initiated in around 600BC, it has functioned continuously for over 2,500 years since, surviving even the end of the Roman Empire.

From there, sewage systems evolved variously as seen in medieval street gutters or Islamic ablution-related innovations, each different approach solving the fundamental challenge of removing contaminated waste from densely-populated human habitations.

A short history of sewage in London

In any city, sewage wastewater systems need to work in combination with a system for draining rainwater as well as a system for providing fresh water

In London, water was initially piped for fresh distribution, not sanitation. The Thames and other London streams were crucial for the supply of fresh drinking water, serving as the lifeblood of the growing metropolis.

During the Roman era, inhabitants laid clay pipes to carry the waters of the Walbrook to the public baths. In the 13th century, nobleman Gilbert de Sandford granted public access to Tyburn springs, piping water from there to the City of London via the Great Conduit, a channel made of clay, sandstone, lead and elm pipes.

In 1582, Peter Morice, a Dutchman, built pumps powered by waterwheels at London Bridge to draw drinking water into the City. By 1613, merchant Hugh Middleton had constructed the "New River," an artificial waterway that brought fresh water 42 miles from Hertfordshire springs. In 1723, the first company of several, the Chelsea Water Company, was established to draw “fresh” water from the Thames for drinking and household usage, which it continued to do without filtration until the mid-19th century.

In London, in terms of wastewater management, for most of its history, the city relied on natural underground streams for the drainage of storm and rain wastewater and relied on cesspools for the removal of sewage wastewater.

Cesspools were underground pits that collected and stored sewage from specific buildings. Cesspools were emptied by “night soil men” (also known as “gong farmers”) who sold the contents to farmers outside the city for fertiliser. This system remained the primary disposal method until the 19th century, when London’s rapid growth made it unworkable.

The city’s population doubled from 1 million to 2 million between 1801 and 1851, and from there nearly tripled to 5.6 million by 1891. London’s natural underground streams were gradually reconstituted over time as brick-covered sewers with some exceptions (such as Beverly Brook and the Wandle).

These street sewers, originally designed only for rainwater, underwent a further dramatic transformation as housing density increased.

Cesspools frequently overflowed and many homes begun to connect their wastewater to the street sewers. As early as 1660, Samuel Pepys recorded that: “[Upon] going down to my cellar… I put my feet into a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar.”

Indeed, after 1815, building regulations were formally modified to permit house drains to connect to public sewers. It was only in 1822, seven years after household waste was officially permitted to enter the Thames, that the London Bridge waterwheel water supply system, originally devised by Peter Morice, was discontinued.

The introduction of water closets (flush toilets, whose inventor, Thomas Crapper, provides an almost implausibly perfect example of nominative determinism) further exacerbated the situation by dramatically increasing household wastewater volume, creating serious public health risks. The last salmon to be caught be local fishermen from the river was in June 1833.1

As a result, the sewers, which emptied directly into the river, began to pollute the Thames and transform it from a relatively pristine river into an open sewer.

The Metropolitan Commission of Sewers (1849-1856)

The problem of sanitary reform, although well-established, had gone unsolved for many years.

The Bills of Sewers 1531, was the earliest major attempt to regulate London’s sewers in a systematic manner with eight local boards of commissioners. Later, in the wake of the Great Fire of London of 1666, the celebrated architect Sir Christopher Wren submitted a proposal for improved drainage, water supply, and sewerage to the Westminster Commission during the rebuilding of the City .

It was only the rapid growth of the metropolis in the 19th century and a landmark report published by Edwin Chadwick that brought sewage back as a critical topic of debate. Chadwick was a utilitarian social reformer and his report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population 1842 demonstrated the link between poverty and disease.

Subsequently, Parliament passed the Public Health Act 1848 consisting of historically significant reforms. It established a central Board of Health with unprecedented powers, enabled local authorities to levy taxes for sanitation improvements, and marked the beginning of governmental responsibility for public health infrastructure.

In 1848, catalysed by London’s second cholera epidemic, Parliament established the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers to address the mounting sanitation crisis.2

Though relatively short-lived and under-funded, the Commissions made several lasting contributions; namely:

• The first comprehensive survey of London’s sewer system.

• The requiring sewer connections for all new construction,

• An invitation for proposal to improve London’s sewage system, which returned 137 proposed plans, from which a final preferred plan was commissioned from Frank Forster for a main drainage system with intercepting sewers was selected in 1850.

By 1855, the Commission, already in its sixth iteration, finding itself hampered by internal disputes, a lack of funding ,and an inability to make compulsory land purchases, was dissolved by Parliament. Following the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak, which renewed the sense of urgency for sanitary reform, Parliament dissolved the Commission and replaced it with a new Metropolitan Board Works by the Metropolis Management Act 1855.

The Metropolitan Board of Works (1856-1889)

The Great Stink of 1858 marked a key turning point in London’s relationship with sewage. In June of that year, a heat-wave descended on the city, causing untreated wastewater to ferment in the city’s rudimentary drainage system.

On account of the Thames being a tidal river, an ever-increasing volume of human, animal, and industrial waste was borne repeatedly up and down the stream. As drought conditions lowered the Thames’ water levels, exposed raw sewage on the riverbanks released noxious gases that intensified the pre-existing stench.

The crisis generated widespread public outcry. The author Charles Dickens, writing to a friend in July 1858, noted that: “The Thames in London is most horrible... The offensive smells [are] of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature.”

The effects of the heat-wave penetrated even the highest echelons of society. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were forced to abandon a pleasure cruise on the river, while Parliament found itself unable to function and considered relocating from Westminster to Henley-upon-Thames.

The Times of London captured the scene in a front-page editorial:

“Parliament was all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench. The intense heat had driven our legislators from those portions of their buildings which overlook the river. A few members… ventured into the library, but they were instantaneously driven to retreat, each man with a handkerchief to his nose.

We are heartily glad of it.”

The severity of the unsanitary conditions of 1858 focussed legislative minds once more and, in July, Parliament passed a further Metropolis Management Amendment Act 1858 to extend the powers of the Board of Works.

The Amendment granted the Metropolitan Board of Works extraordinary new powers, including the authority to raise bonds to finance the massive infrastructure project and to compulsorily purchase land for construction.

Most crucially, the Act contained unambiguous language that left no room for further delays or half-measures:

“The Metropolitan Board shall cause to be commenced as soon as may be after the passing of the Act and to be carried on and completed with all convenient speed according to such plan as to them may seem proper the necessary Sewers and Works for the Improvement of the Main Drainage of the Metropolis, and for preventing as dar as may be practicable, the sewage of the Metropolis from passing into the River Thames within the Metropolis.”

Metropolis Management Amendment Act 1858

This legislative mandate effectively authorised the creation of what would become the most ambitious civil engineering project of the Victorian era.

Fortunately, the man who would transform this mandate into reality had already been appointed to the Board in 1856. That man was Joseph Bazalgette, the Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works.

Bibliography

Stephen Halliday (1997) Thesis: Sir Jospeh Bazalgette and the Main Drainage of London.

Stephen Halliday (2023). The Great Stink: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis.

Dr John Snow: Mapping cholera

In 1854, English physician Dr John Snow was living on Sackville Street in London’s Piccadilly and working at the nearby Charing Cross Hospital.

Snow was a pioneer in the development and safe administration of anaesthetics. His success was such that, a year earlier in 1853, he had been selected to administer chloroform to Queen Victoria during the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold.

But as the late summer’s haze settled over London, Snow was consumed by an altogether different challenge which would, ultimately, transform epidemiological history.

Between 31^st August and 1^st September 1854, in Soho, a nearby part of town, Snow records how:

The most terrible outbreak of cholera which ever occurred in this kingdom… took place within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street, there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days.

The mortality in this limited area probably equals any that was ever caused in this country, even by the plague.

Dr John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855)

Cholera is a severe bacterial infection that typically presents with sudden onset of diarrhoea and vomiting, leading to rapid dehydration that can be fatal within hours if left untreated.

At the time, the predominant belief in the medical community was that cholera was transmitted by “miasmatic particles” that circulated in the air. Snow, by contrast, suspected that cholera infection was communicated through water systems with poor sanitary conditions via a faecal-oral route. He theorised this on the basis that symptoms appeared first in the stomach and bowel rather than the respiratory system.

Snow sought to test his hypothesis in relation to the new outbreak by examining nearby water sources. Quickly, he identified a water street-pump at the intersection of Broad Street and Cambridge Street as the most likely source of the outbreak:

As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much frequented street-pump in Broad Street, near the end of Cambridge Street; but on examining the water, on the evening of the 3rd September, I found so little impurity in it of an organic nature, that I hesitated to come to a conclusion.

Dr John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855)

Although microscopic inspection did not yield further information, Snow was undeterred.

Changing tack, he paid a visit to the General Register Office to obtain a list of cholera deaths recorded that week in the Soho districts around Golden Square.

Snow identified the home addresses of 89 of the 616 fatal cases that he had tabulated. He then methodically interviewed relevant families and survivors to determine if the victims had consumed water from the pump. These interviews repeatedly confirmed that known victims of the outbreak had contracted cholera after drinking water from the pump, whether directly or through other means. Altogether, Snow documented that at least 69 of the fatalities had consumed water from the Broad Street pump.

Even apparent outliers, upon further investigation pointed back to the pump. For instance, there was a case of a 59-year-old woman who lived several miles away from the pump, in Hampstead. Upon interviewing her son, Snow discovered that the lady received a daily delivery of water from the Broad Street pump, as she preferred its taste. Snow wrote:

The water was taken on Thursday 31st August, and she drank of it in the evening, and also on Friday. She was seized with cholera on the evening of the latter day and died on Saturday.

Dr John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855)

Another case study that further strengthened Snow’s evidence was the discovery that workers at a nearby brewery, who drank beer instead of water, and residents of a workhouse, who drank from their own water supply, remained largely unaffected

After compiling his evidence, Snow became convinced that the Broad Street pump was the true source of the outbreak and presented his findings to the local authorities investigating the matter — the Board of Guardians. The Guardians, although incredulous, nonetheless agreed to remove the handle from the pump.

With a view to communicating his findings to a broader audience, Snow famously produced a cartographic illustration of the data that he gathered.

The decision to visualise the cases on a map to demonstrate the spatial distribution of cholera cases during that outbreak, with stacked black bars marking each death at the victim’s address, was a shrewd and novel communication strategy.

But despite this work, Snow’s theory faced broad rejection. The medical establishment remained sceptical, with The Lancet publishing editorials dismissing his conclusions. Similarly, the Medical Committee of the Board of Health, commissioned by the government to investigate the outbreak, rejected his theory outright.1 The Medical Committee’s President, Sir Benjamin Hall, stated that: “After careful inquiry we see no reason to adopt this belief.”

In producing his analysis, Snow had relied on statistics and data compiled by the General Register Office (GRO).2 Yet, key players at the GRO, such as the statistician William Farr, the Compiler of Abstracts, still adhered to the miasma theory. In his post, Farr delivered pioneering work in the field of vital statistics by systematically collecting and analysing mortality data and played a key role in compiling the data relating cholera outbreaks. During the 1848-49 epidemic, which killed over 53,000 people in England and Wales, Farr’s work was instrumental in mapping mortality patterns and he published a landmark report which provided the statistical evidence of cholera’s distribution across London and other regions. But, unlike Snow, Farr correlated cholera deaths with low elevation and proximity to the River Thames.

In his treatise, Snow also noted that some commentators had blamed the outbreak’s severity on recent sewer construction in the area, provoking a surge in the volume of miasmatic particles in circulation. The sewage project’s chief engineer, a certain “Mr Bazelgette” [sic.], was compelled to commission a report demonstrating that areas with repaired sewers had experienced notably lower mortality rates.

In the particular houses in this street where deaths have not taken place, it is satisfactory to be able to report that they are comparatively in an efficient state of drainage both into the new and old sewers, and without cesspools.

Edmund Cooper, Report to the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers on the house-drainage in St. James, Westminster during the recent cholera outbreak. 22 September 1854.

We shall return to Mr Bazalgette in a later instalment.

Reverend Henry Whitehead: Updating priors

How, then, did Snow’s theory come to be general consensus?

At the same time as the government-backed Medical Committee, the local Vestry of St James’ set up its own investigative committee.3

In Victorian London, the Vestry was a form of local government that played a significant role in administering parish affairs. The Vestry of St James, like other vestries in Victorian London, functioned as a form of local government that evolved from church administration to civic authority. Composed primarily of property-owning middle and upper-class residents, the St James Vestry oversaw a district of dramatic contrasts—from London's wealthiest streets to overcrowded tenements just a stone’s throw away.

In the case of this inquiry, the Vestry Committee comprised 16 members including Dr John Snow as well as a certain Reverend Henry Whitehead.

Reverend Henry Whitehead was a 29-year old clergyman serving his first curacy at the local church, St. Luke’s on Berwick Street. During the fiercest days of the 1854 cholera outbreak, the young curate worked incessantly to bring help and comfort to the afflicted and bereaved.

At the Vestry Committee, Snow and Whitehead met for the first time:

Snow had just completed his book On Cholera, which was published in January I855, and he presented a copy to Whitehead. But, having read it, the young curate remained unconvinced. He wrote to Snow setting out his reasons and stating that, in his opinion, an intensive inquiry would reveal the falsity of the argument attributing the spread of cholera to the Broad Street pump.

Sidney Chave (1958) Henry Whitehead and Cholera in Broad Street as well as Medical History 11(2), 92-109, 1958

Whitehead was also sceptical of Snow’s theory.

To his great credit, however, Whitehead did not dismiss the theory out of hand. Instead, Whitehead set about conducting his own inquiry with the aim either of confirming or refuting Snow’s hypothesis.

The ordinary course of my duties taking me almost daily into the street, I was under no necessity to be either hasty or intrusive, but asked my questions just when and where opportunity occurred, making a point of letting scarcely a day pass without acquiring some information and not caring how often I had to verify it in quarters where I could rely upon a willingness to converse upon the subject.

Reverend Henry Whitehead, Report on the Cholera Outbreak by the Cholera Inquiry Committee (1855)

In that way, Whitehead meticulously collected a set of “full statistical information [from] St Luke’s district.” In the course of his investigation, Whitehead personally contacted 497 of the 896 residents present during the outbreak. In summary, he found that:

• Of 56 resident fatalities, only 2 had not consumed the pump water.

• Of 28 non-resident fatalities, 24 worked in factories where the pump water was regularly used.

• Of 50 residents who contracted cholera but survived, 35 had consumed pump water after 30 August.

• Of unaffected residents, 279 had not drunk pump water between late August and early September, whilst 43 had.

From this data, Whitehead calculated that the mortality ratio for pump water drinkers was 80:57, compared to just 20:279 for non-drinkers.

In such a way, Whitehead prepared an analysis characterised by the rigorous objectivity of genuine scientific inquiry. What is more, in light of the statistical evidence, Whitehead began to conclude “slowly and, I may add, reluctantly… that the use of this water was connected with the commencement and continuance of the outburst”. Anecdotally, too, Whitehead’s investigation contributed examples:

From St. Luke's pulpit on September 8th, I congratulated the poor old women who formed a considerable proportion of the congregation upon their remarkable immunity from the pestilence.

The escape of these women, many of whom, living alone, had no-one to send to the well, was one of those “eccentricities” which found their best explanation in the pump theory.

Reverend Henry Whitehead, Report on the Cholera Outbreak by the Cholera Inquiry Committee (1855)

As a result, Whitehead determined to submit his findings in a report to the Vestry Committee.

Finally, Whitehead uncovered a pivotal piece of evidence:

One day last week, I happened to be studying the Registrar's Returns (of deaths) for a purpose unconnected with this matter, when my eye fell upon the following entry:

“At 40, Broad Street, 2nd September, a daughter, aged five months, exhaustion after an attack of Diarrhoea four days previous to death.”

Reverend Henry Whitehead, Report on the Cholera Outbreak by the Cholera Inquiry Committee (1855)

Why did this note capture Whitehead's attention?

It held dual significance: not only did the infant's case occur in the house nearest the Broad Street pump, but it also predated the major outbreak by roughly 48 hours.

About to submit his report to the Vestry Committee, Whitehead instead hurried to interview the deceased child’s mother. He found the bereaved woman living in a ground-floor back room at 40 Broad Street, having lost both her infant and her husband, a policeman, to cholera. To Whitehead’s questions, she provided a description of her actions during her child’s illness. She had soaked the soiled nappies in water buckets, then emptied this contaminated water into the cesspool at the front of the property.

Whitehead promptly obtained the Vestry Committee’s permission to examine the pump-well due to its alarming proximity to the cesspool. The subsequent inspection by surveyor Jehosephat York conclusively proved that faecal matter had leaked through the cesspool’s damaged brickwork into the well, just 3 feet away.4

In such a way, Snow and Whitehead each made thorough independent investigations of the outbreak. Whitehead’s work constituted a clear and independent confirmation of Snow’s hypothesis. As the Vestry Committee noted:

It was Dr. Snow who first endeavoured to trace out a relation [that] he supposed might exist between the use of this well-water and the cholera outbreak. The result of his laborious inquiry was in favour of that supposition.

Mr. Whitehead entertaining, at first, adverse views ended his special investigation of Broad Street by a remarkable confirmation of Dr. Snow's numerical results.

Report on the cholera outbreak in the Parish of St. James, Westminster, during the autumn of 1854. p.76 Source

As it happened, by the time that Snow has persuaded the Guardians to remove the pump handle, the cholera epidemic had already begun subsiding naturally. Fatal attacks had decreased from 142 on 1st September to just 14 by 8th September when the pump was closed

However, as Whitehead now observed, without the intervention of removing the handle, a second outbreak would almost certainly have occurred:

I must not omit to mention that if the removal of the pump-handle had nothing to do with checking the outbreak which had already run its course, it had probably everything to do with preventing a new outbreak, for the father of the infant, who slept in the same kitchen, was attacked with cholera on the very day (September 8th) on which the pump-handle was removed.

Whitehead concluded that:

There can be no doubt that [the husband’s] discharges found their way into the cesspool and thence to the well. But, thanks to Dr. Snow, the handle was then gone

Reverend Henry Whitehead, Remarks on the Cholera Outbreak in Broad Street, Golden Square, London, in 1854, Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London, pp. 99-105 (1867)

It is worth reflecting on Whitehead's intellectual journey.

Whitehead, entered into Snow’s scientific controversy almost by chance and had no reason to doubt the truth of the prevailing doctrine. Indeed, at the outset, Snow’s indictment of the Broad Street pump seemed unsatisfactory to him just as it did to the medical inspectors of the Board of Health.

But, when the opportunity presented itself, Whitehead did not rest with theoretical objections. Rather, he sought out empirical evidence and his meticulous research ultimately confirmed the very hypothesis he had expected to disprove. Despite his lack of formal medical training, Whitehead conducted an investigation that demonstrated the essential qualities of scientific inquiry—unbiased measurement, rigorous data collection, and the ability to evaluate evidence objectively.

Moreover, Whitehead’s discovery of the specific mechanism by which the well became contaminated provided the final evidence that substantiated Snow’s theory. Without Whitehead’s statistical documentation and evidence of contamination, Snow’s explanation of the Soho epidemic would have remained an unproven conjecture.

Despite initial scepticism rooted in prevailing miasma theory and his own religious framework, Whitehead allowed the empirical evidence to transform his understanding of the problem.

John Netten Radcliffe: The East London cholera (1866)

After John Snow passed away prematurely in 1858, his hypothesis that cholera was water-borne and transmitted by polluted water remained unconventional and broadly disregarded by the mainstream.

Whitehead, meanwhile, continued at St. Luke's for two years post-epidemic before serving in various London parishes. Beyond his clerical duties, he took practical interest in social issues, particularly juvenile delinquency.

Then, in 1865, cholera once again threatened London, with several small cases foreboding a greater outbreak. In July 1866, a full-blown cholera epidemic did indeed break out in the crowded slums of East London. The Bishop of London sought volunteers with cholera experience and Whitehead responded immediately.

In East London, as the crisis unfolded, Whitehead came into contact with a man called John Netten Radcliffe, an epidemiological expert who had been dispatched as a medical inspector by the Privy Council’s Medical Department.5

Netten Radcliffe began conducting meticulous fieldwork informed by Whitehead’s prior experience and working with Whitehead’s support, both figuratively and literally (Netten Radcliffe was limping while recovering from the effects of a rheumatic fever, so would take Whitehead’s arm as support during fieldwork). Through their work in the community, the pair traced the cholera cases to the East London Waterworks Company’s supply, identifying the Old Ford Reservoir as the point of contamination.

A further investigation revealed that the company had failed to properly filter water from the River Lea, which had been polluted with sewage following heavy rainfall and flooding. The contaminated water had then been supplied untreated by the East London Waterworks Company into thousands of homes in the localities around the docks.

Thus, Radcliffe’s report to the Privy Council, published in 1867 as part of the Report on the Cholera Outbreak in the East End of London, provided conclusive evidence linking the unfiltered water to the outbreak.

Radcliffe also acknowledged Snow and Whitehead’s roles in his reporting:

This doctrine now fully accepted in medicine, was originally advanced by the late Dr. Snow; but to Mr. Whitehead unquestionably belongs the honour of having first shown with anything approaching conclusiveness the high degree of probability attaching to it. Only now perhaps can the great public importance of the doctrine be clearly appreciated, and the value of Mr. Whitehead's inquiry properly estimated

Privy Council, Ninth Report of the Medical Officer, for 1866. Appendix No. 7. Report by Mr. J. Netten Radcliffe on Cholera in London and especially the Eastern Districts, 1867 p. 288

At the same time, William Farr at the GRO was once again working on the cholera outbreak, meticulously analysing mortality statistics and distribution patterns to deliver a comprehensive statistical report on the cholera epidemic.

As early as 1856, after reviewing the evidence, Farr had begun to doubt his miasmatic conjecture, as reflected in his writings, although he did not make public this intellectual shift. In 1868, however, when Farr published his statistical analysis, he reported that the outbreak did not appear to correlate with elevation, but rather with areas supplied by a particular water company; the East London Waterworks Company.

Finally, Snow’s theory was firmly validated with the further evidence of this second water-borne epidemic, both by Netten Radcliffe’s fieldwork and by Farr’s statistical approach, which explicitly linked the outbreak to contaminated water.

The Poetry and Prose of Public Health

The methodological contrast between William Farr’s statistical approach and Reverend Henry Whiteheads community-based investigation illuminates complementary approaches to public health which remain relevant today.

Farr, from his position at the General Register Office, pioneered epidemiological statistics, viewing populations increasingly as biological “human units” whose differences could be measured and quantified in aggregate—establishing the scientific “prose” of public health.

Whitehead, by contrast, approached the same crisis through immersion in community life, knowing his parishioners as individuals with stories rather than merely as statistical subjects. His thorough investigation coexisted with genuine pastoral care; he conducted meticulous research whilst maintaining the “poetry” of human connection.

Although Snow successfully conjectured the source of cholera, it ultimately required both Farr’s rigorous data and Whitehead’s human insight to prove definitively that Snow’s water-borne theory was correct.

This episode is perhaps instructive for us today, not least given the absence of such collaborative success in relation to identifying the source of the most notable recent pandemic.

Bibliography

Contemporary Victorian source material:

John Snow Archive

William Farr (1852), Report on the mortality of cholera in England, 1848-49. Source

John Snow (1855) On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, (2nd edition, London: John Churchill). Source

Reverend Henry Whitehead (1855), Report on the cholera outbreak in the Parish of St. James, Westminster, during the autumn of 1854 / presented to the vestry by the Cholera Inquiry Committee. Source

Reverend Henry Whitehead, 'Remarks on the Cholera Outbreak in Broad Street, Golden Square, London, in 1854', Trans. Epid. Soc. of London, m, 99-105 (1867)

John Netten Radcliffe (1877), On the Diffusion of Cholera in Europe during the ten years 1865–74. Source

Secondary academic analyses:

Chave, Sidney (1958) “Henry Whitehead and Cholera in Broad Street as well as Medical History.” 11(2), 92-109. Source

Hilts, Victor L. (1970) “William Farr (1807-1883) and the ‘Human Unit.’” Victorian Studies 14, no. 2: 143–50. Source

Eyler, J. M. (1973) “William Farr on the cholera: the sanitarian's disease theory and the statistician's method.” J Hist Med Allied Sci. 1973 Apr;28(2):79-100. Source

Halliday, S. (2001) “Death and miasma in Victorian London: an obstinate belief.” BMJ. Dec 22-29;323(7327):1469-71. Source

P. Bingham, N.Q. Verlander, M.J. Cheal (2004) “John Snow, William Farr and the 1849 outbreak of cholera that affected London: a reworking of the data highlights the importance of the water supply.”Public Health, Volume 118, Issue 6, 2004, Pages 387-394. Source

Koch, Tom & Denike, Kenneth. (2009). Crediting his critics' concerns: Remaking John Snow's map of Broad Street cholera, 1854. Social science & medicine (1982). 69. 1246-51. 10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.07.046.

Appendix: Vestry Report table of individuals killed in 1855 cholera outbreak by occupation and gender

5

The Privy Council is an ancient advisory body to the British sovereign that evolved from a powerful executive council into a largely ceremonial institution by the Victorian era, though it retained administrative functions particularly in emergency public health matters through Orders in Council.

The Medical Department of the Privy Council, established in 1858 under Sir John Simon, was an early centralised public health agency that investigated disease outbreaks, collected statistics, and produced influential reports on sanitation, playing a crucial role during the 1866 cholera epidemic through its field investigations and scientific recommendations. The Medical Department of the Privy Council no longer exists in its original form, as it was absorbed into the newly formed Local Government Board in 1871, marking an important transition in how public health was administered in Britain.

Doubtless readers of this Substack have not yet forgiven me for previously subjecting them to lengthy meditations on the cost of capital, the nature of money creation, the mechanics of quantitative easing and the UK public finances.

In the spirit of “a vigorous error vigorously pursued”, today, I will dare once again to return to the theme of debt capital markets.

Programming note: Pushing this out earlier than planned, ahead of the Spring Statement.

In this piece, I will examine whether there are any practical changes to the debt management strategy that the Bank of England and HM Treasury could implement via the Debt Management Office (DMO) to reduce government financing costs.

This subject is of particular relevance in the current environment because public debt interest servicing costs represent a significant and growing proportion of overall UK public expenditure (compare charts below).

Even marginal improvements in market efficiency could yield substantial fiscal benefits by further broadening the investor base and enhancing both primary and secondary gilt market functioning through strategic adjustments to issuance patterns and market structure.

Specifically, the debt management changes that I will consider are:

• Issuance strategy:

  • Maturity profile;

  • Currency diversification;

  • Range of instruments

    • Green gilts & greenium

    • Sustainability-linked gilts.

• Market architecture:

  • “Market maker of last resort” programme;

  • Strategic liquidity concentration.

In the course of this piece, I will also offer a commentary on particular characteristics of the gilt market and aspects of its historical development, including:

• UK gilt market primer:

  • Primary issuance;

  • Physical secondary market;

  • Sterling interest rate derivatives;

  • Market participants and regulatory influences.

• Yield curve dynamics:

  • Interest rate and inflation expectations;

  • Liquidity premium;

  • Term premium;

  • Credit default risk premium.

• Gilt market structure primer:

  • Market structure (1688-1986);

  • Current market structure.

UK gilt market primer

Primary issuance

UK government bonds, known as gilt-edged securities, or gilts, are issued by the UK Debt Management Office (DMO) through a structured framework (auctions at predetermined times). HM Treasury establishes the annual financing remit alongside the Budget, determining gilt issuance volume and composition based on government borrowing requirements and debt management objectives.

Physical secondary market

The UK benefits from a deep and liquid physical sterling gilt market. That means that bond yields, while anchored by Bank of England policy rates, are continuously established by secondary market participants.

The markets for these gilts span the entire yield curve, from very short maturities (Treasury bills and short-dated conventional gilts) to ultra-long maturities (exceeding 50 years). This comprehensive coverage ensures efficient price discovery, reliable government funding access, and serves as a critical benchmark for sterling-denominated assets across the financial system. GEMMs maintain continuous two-way markets, though liquidity typically concentrates in benchmark issues at key tenors (2, 5, 10, 30, and 50 years), with off-the-run gilts sometimes trading less efficiently.

Sterling interest rate derivatives

Gilt derivatives are also highly liquid and complement the physical gilt market by offering superior capital efficiency, straightforward short positioning mechanisms, and precise risk management tools through a variety of instruments.1

These derivative instruments standardise interest rate exposure across the yield curve, reducing fragmentation while offering lower transaction costs and minimal price impact even for substantial positions. This efficiency attracts a broader set of market participants, including those unable to hold physical gilts due to regulatory constraints. This serves to enhance the overall functioning of the market to the extent that, during periods of stress, derivatives often become the primary venue for price discovery, providing debt managers and central bankers with essential signals about market expectations.

Market participants and regulatory influences:

The gilt market features a range of participants with distinct motivations.

• Pension funds and insurance companies typically seek longer-dated gilts to match long-term liabilities, often operating within regulatory frameworks like Solvency II that encourage or mandate such matching. For example, a defined benefit pension fund might purchase 30-year gilts to align with future pension payments.

• Asset managers approach the market tactically, adjusting duration and curve positioning to generate alpha. Hedge funds are similar and may also engage in relative value strategies like gilt-swap spreads or cross-market basis trades.

• Overseas investors, notably, foreign central banks, hold gilts as reserve assets, typically in shorter maturities.

• UK banks use gilts to maintain liquidity buffers to satisfy regulatory requirements like the Liquidity Coverage Ratio, using gilts as high-quality collateral for repo transactions, and supporting customer trading activity.t.

• UK individuals access UK public debt through NS&I products and the DMO's with a focus on income generation from shorter-term issues.

• The Bank of England itself holds a substantial gilt portfolio acquired through quantitative easing operations, peaking at £895 billion in 2021, which significantly influences market dynamics through both its accumulation and subsequent reduction phases.

Maturity profile

First, let’s consider the question:

Could the DMO reduce financing costs by changing the term structure (or the weighted average maturity) of the national debt?

To answer this satisfactorily, it is worth first considering the nature of the prevailing yield curve dynamics in the UK sovereign market.

Yield curve dynamics

In a purely theoretical world where government bond yields perfectly and exclusively describe the anticipated course of future central bank interest rate policy, a government’s funding strategy should be indifferent to where it issues across the yield curve.

In reality, however, bond yields are abstract and complex composite measures that incorporate not only investor expectations for future central bank interest rate actions, but also various other expectations such as inflation expectations. In the case of inflation expectations, the premium, known as the “break-even rate”, can be observed by comparing the nominal bond yield with the equivalent inflation-linked bond yield (the “real” yield).

Beyond rates and inflation, however, other components of yield typically remain impervious to direct observation. For instance:

• Liquidity premium. Compensation for the difficulty or cost of quickly buying or selling a specific bond in the market. Relatedly, the supply and demand dynamics, how the volume of bond issuance and investor participation affect market pricing. Similarly, central bank intervention may also play a role, such as quantitative easing, quantitative tightening and other monetary policies interventions that distort bond yields.

• Term premium. Compensation for duration risk, as in, the additional yield required for holding longer-maturity bonds, reflecting increased interest rate risk and uncertainty. Whereas interest rates and inflation can be observed after the fact, those other residual components of yields, such as term premium, remain unobservable even after the event and cannot be measured reliably, either independently or as a residual.

• The credit default risk premium (the compensation demanded by investors for the risk that the issuer might not fully repay its debts) is another important component of yields. However, in the case of a sovereign issuer with monetary policy independence, such as the United Kingdom, are not typically material. Indeed, this premium, also termed the “credit spread”, is typically determined by comparing the yield of the issuer to the supposedly “risk-free” reference currency sovereign yield.

• Compare, also, the hypothesised Moron Risk Premium.

Besides these, yields may be composed of a multiplicity of other factors that shape investor expectations.2

Why does the UK have a long-dated debt profile?

As a result of prevailing yield curve dynamics, sovereign issuers develop idiosyncratic maturity issuance profiles over time.

The UK, for instance, has maintained a pronounced long-dated bias in its debt maturity profile for several decades, influenced by various factors, including:

• Pension demand: Prior to the global financial crisis, the UK yield curve exhibited an unusual inversion where 10-year gilts often yielded more than 30-year gilts—contradicting the conventional relationship between duration and yield. This anomaly reflected persistent structural demand from UK life insurers and pension funds implementing Liability-Driven Investment (LDI) strategies. HM Treasury rationally responded by shifting issuance towards longer maturities to meet this demand and capture favourable pricing for pensions seeking assets that match the duration of their liabilities.

• “Refinancing risk”: The strategy of issuing long-dated debt is also motivated by a desire to avoid the uncertainty of refinancing short-term liabilities at potentially higher future rates, termed “refinancing” risk (see, for instance, DMO 2023/24 Review, Sections 2.18 & 2.19). By “locking in” known long-term borrowing costs, the Treasury seeks greater stability and predictability in debt servicing expenses.

This approach has resulted in the UK maintaining the highest average maturity government bond market globally.

The costs of limiting refinancing risk

But refinancing risk is not one-sided.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now determine that the UK’s long-dated issuance strategy has proved substantially more expensive than short-dated issuance would have been during the decades-long global bull market in bonds as well as in the current environment where the yield curve is steep.

In an era of declining yields, frequent refinancing could have enabled the Treasury to reduce its borrowing costs incrementally, as opposed to being committed to higher long-term rates.3

Arguably, the most neutral approach to mitigating refinancing risk would be to use exclusively short-term liabilities which, over the course of an economic cycle, would function as natural “fiscal stabilisers,” becoming more costly during economic expansions (when tax revenues are robust) and less costly during downturns (when fiscal support is most needed). This counter-cyclical effect mirrors the rationale often cited for issuing inflation-linked bonds.

In reality, market refinancing dynamics and the unknowable nature of the future makes the exclusive issuance of short-term liabilities likely to be an imprudent debt management policy.

In an ideal world, the government would have issued as much long-term debt at the lowest possible rates. A glance at the below chart indicates that, in a broad sense, this is not dissimilar to what the DMO actually did (although, this was not necessarily by design, but rather driven by urgent pandemic-related current spending which coincided with historically low rates).

The diminishing pension bid for long-dated assets

Today, it is also worth noting that there is reduced demand for long-dated gilts from pensions due to a confluence of factors.

Firstly, a substantial portion of pension funds have already transitioned their holdings from equities to bonds, leading to a plateau in fresh demand. Likewise, many defined benefit schemes are no longer open to new members and are experiencing a gradual decline in their membership as beneficiaries pass away.

There has also been a notable reduction in the present value of pension fund liabilities, largely due to a general uplift in yields across the market, which has resulted in improved funding positions for these pensions and lower investment requirement.

How QE distorts the national debt’s maturity profile

We have established that the UK still has the highest national debt WAM globally and that the favourable dynamics that drove that maturity profile are no longer as relevant.

Therefore, in response to those changes, is the DMO now reducing the WAM of the UK’s debt maturity profile?

A cursory inspection of the DMO’s Annual review for 2023/24 would suggest that the UK’s weighted average maturity (WAM) is indeed falling. Specifically, the report suggests that the average maturity (market value-weighted) of the DMO debt portfolio has fallen from 13.72 years to 12.89 years.

However, the debt portfolio illustrated in the DMO Review does not reflect the total UK national debt.

In actuality, the UK national debt comprises both the DMO debt portfolio (gilts and Treasury bills) and the reserves that were issued by the Bank of England to (private) banks as part of quantitative easing operations (in return for gilts and Treasury bills, now held on the APF’s balance sheet).

Although the shorter issuance tilt from the DMO is bringing about a gradual shortening of the WAM of the officially outstanding government securities (excluding APF), the WAM of the national debt (including APF) is increasing through quantitative tightening by the BoE. This is because central bank reserves (which have a WAM of 0 yrs) are being replaced by gilts or bills (with WAM >0 yrs).

Wisdom after the event is unhelpful (everyone has perfect hindsight), but we can now see that the the period of quantitative easing created a significant refinancing liability, not clearly acknowledged at time, nor in keeping with the UK Government, BoE and DMO’s broader debt management strategy. But this phenomenon was recognised by officials from the outset. See, for example, this OBR report from 2021.

In essence, substantial portions of the UK state's long-term obligations, specifically in the form of gilts, were effectively transformed into short-term liabilities, akin to overnight borrowings (reserves).

These short-term liabilities currently incur higher costs compared to the long-dated gilts that were retired. For them now to be replaced by new primary issuance of long-dated gilts would result in an even more punitive cost of borrowing.

How could the DMO reduce the WAM of the UK national debt portfolio?

In light of the ongoing central bank programme of quantitative tightening and current market conditions, there is a case for the DMO reconsidering its approach to debt maturity structure.

To me, there seems to be one clear strategic adjustment that the DMO could implement as of today to reduce the weighted average maturity and lower UK borrowing costs; namely:

Increase short-dated Treasury bills primary issuance.

• The DMO should increase the volume of issuance of short-dated UK Treasury bills and lower the proportion of long-dated bonds issued.

• The UK Treasury bill market remains small by international standards. As quantitative tightening continues, reducing the quantity of Bank of England reserves, this will create natural demand for substitute assets that behave in the same manner.

• This is timely as the current steep yield curve makes short-term issuance financially attractive. These instruments would also function counter-cyclically, reducing costs precisely when fiscal support is most needed.

Besides this proposal, if the DMO’s goal was purely to lower the WAM of the UK national debt, there are other strategic options available. For instance, the DMO could strategically tender specific long-dated issues. This would mean:

• Targeted buy-backs of long-dated gilts trading at deep discounts would effectively capture “profits” on previously low-coupon issuance.

• While governments traditionally view liabilities at book value (indifferent to mark-to-market changes) and prioritise servicing cost stability, the potential to reduce debt-to-GDP by up to 16% (according to BofA analysts) certainly merits consideration.

• For example, UKT 4 10/22/63 and UKT 1 ⅛ 10/22/2073 are amongst the cheapest long-dated bonds.

Given, however, that current refinancing costs are higher than some of those historic coupons (0.5% on the 2061s!), it would not be in the interest of the UK to buy back those issues, although it would result in a reduction of the WAM, as it would raise the cost of borrowing (by rolling historic low coupons into much higher current coupons).

For historical precedents for this approach to shortening maturity profiles, see Appendix 1 “Are there historical precedents for shortening maturity profiles?”

Why might the DMO maintain the current approach to WAM?

There are also reasonable explanations for why the DMO might decide to maintain the current debt management strategy. Amongst these, the most compelling are perhaps:

• Consistency with policy framework. The DMO's mandate emphasises long-term fiscal sustainability over short-term cost optimisation—a principle that has fostered market stability and investor confidence. Tactical reactions to current yield conditions could undermine this established approach, with historical evidence suggesting limited lasting benefits from financial engineering in sovereign debt management.

• Preserving market liquidity. Altering the existing issuance pattern risks fragmenting established benchmark liquidity—a valuable feature developed over decades. The efficiency of the UK's gilt market depends on concentration at key points rather than dispersion across multiple tenors, with fragmentation potentially increasing the liquidity premium across the curve.

• Impacts on the repo market. The gilt repo market serves as essential financial plumbing that enables price discovery, supports market-making, and facilitates collateral flows throughout the system. Changes to the UK's maturity profile would inevitably alter collateral availability across different tenors, potentially creating repo market dislocations that could offset intended financing benefits.

Currency diversification

The DMO issues almost exclusively sterling-denominated debt. So, here is a second question:

Could the DMO improve financing costs by issuing bonds and notes denominated in currencies other than sterling (USD/EUR)?

Arguments in favour of issuing non-sterling gilts would be based on the premise that you could lower the cost of capital by expanding the UK's investor base.

By appealing to international investors who prefer holding debt in their native currencies, under certain market conditions, the DMO might secure more favourable borrowing rates in foreign currencies, which could be swapped back to sterling through derivatives markets. Also, there is a case that establishing liquid benchmarks in major foreign currencies would create useful reference points that could benefit UK corporations that issue debt in foreign markets.

As it happens, there are already certain limited instances in which the UK issues short-term debt denominated in foreign currencies (specifically, US dollars and euros).4

But there are also compelling reasons why the UK government issues gilts almost exclusively in sterling. In summary, there are:

• Exchange rate risk and monetary sovereignty. These are fundamentally intertwined concerns that militate against issuing foreign currency denominated debt. When issuing debt in foreign currencies, the government not only becomes vulnerable to currency fluctuations but also relinquishes a crucial aspect of its economic independence. If the UK were to issue USD-denominated gilts and the dollar strengthened, the cost of servicing this debt would increase substantially while simultaneously reducing the government's ability to influence these obligations through domestic monetary policy tools. Unlike foreign currency debt, sterling obligations remain under the influence of the UK’s monetary authority. In extreme circumstances, the Bank of England possesses the currency issuance power to meet these obligations – a fundamental safety net unavailable for foreign currency debts. This creates an important distinction between liquidity risk and solvency risk. With sterling debt, the UK faces only potential inflation consequences rather than technical default, preserving its policy autonomy and fiscal flexibility.

• Negative financial spirals. Globally, many sovereign issuers do rely on foreign-denominated debt, and their vulnerability to foreign currency obligations can trigger dangerous negative financial spirals during times of economic stress. When investors doubt a nation’s ability to service foreign currency debt, they may sell both the debt and the domestic currency, further increasing debt service costs and worsening the initial problem – a pattern that has repeatedly caused crises in emerging economies reliant on external currency financing, where currency mismatches led to balance sheet crises.

• Operational complexity. While currency swaps can mitigate risks, they introduce new complexities and counterparty exposures. The operational infrastructure required to manage a multi-currency debt portfolio is significantly more sophisticated and costly. Given the UK's strong position and robust demand for sterling gilts, the marginal benefits may be limited. Markets might interpret foreign currency borrowing as indicating weakness in domestic funding conditions. Historical episodes of UK foreign currency borrowing, particularly during economic difficulties in the 1970s, have created an association between non-sterling issuance and periods of financial vulnerability.

Moreover, historical episodes of UK foreign currency borrowing have often been associated with economic difficulties, such as in the 1970s. This has left a lasting association between non-sterling issuance and periods of financial vulnerability.5

There are strategies that might mitigate the most problematic exchange rate risks, such as issuing some form of cross-currency swap-linked gilts (instruments with embedded currency hedges to appeal to international investors currently avoiding sterling exposure but which retains UK obligations in sterling). Again, however, these instruments would introduce additional issuer costs through structuring complexity as well as fragmenting the market, potentially reducing liquidity.

Currency diversification benefits do not outweigh the downsides

Given the UK's already strong position in global markets and robust demand for sterling gilts from both domestic and international investors, the marginal benefits of foreign currency issuance are clearly limited.

Likewise, foreign currency debt removes an important policy lever during crises, as it cannot be influenced by domestic monetary policy or affected by inflation in the same way as sterling debt. There's also the perception risk—markets might interpret foreign currency borrowing as indicating weakness in domestic funding conditions.

Range of instruments

Next, lets’s consider the question:

Could the DMO improve financing costs by introducing novel gilt instruments?

The UK gilt market currently consists of:

• Conventional gilts (fixed interest)

• Index-linked gilts, “linkers” (interest linked to inflation, introduced in 1981)

• “Green” gilts (funds committed to “green” projects, introduced in 2021)

The recent introduction of “green” gilts raises the interesting prospect that the DMO could introduce additional novel instruments into its issuance pattern.

It is worth noting how green gilts work. Importantly, green gilts do not work through the hypothecation of the money into certain investments, but rather through commitment structures. The UK government legally pledges to direct gilt proceeds exclusively to environmental projects, publishes detailed allocation reports, and submits to independent verification. This creates accountability and transparency, allowing investors to trace impact without requiring the actual funds raised to be physically segregated or ring-fenced.

One of the incentives for introducing these green gilts was likely the existence of a so-called “greenium.” Greenium is a portmanteau of “green” and “premium” in reference to the differentiated risk premium that investors are willing to pay for bonds whose funded are committed to green projects compared to equivalent conventional assets.

In theory, the greenium benefits issuers by potentially lowering their borrowing costs due to increased investor demand for sustainable assets, while simultaneously reflecting the price premium those investors are willing to pay for green bonds. However, as with other risk premia discussed above, observing the size of the greenium present in the market is not a simple exercise. A perfect comparison requires there to be two “twin” bonds, one green and one conventional, where the green bond is identical in terms of cash flows and other characteristics to the conventional bond such that there are no pricing distortions caused by differences in capital rank, currency, coupon type, and duration, or the amount outstanding.

Typically, finding matching bond pairs however is not easy, as issuers do not usually issue “twin” bonds. The German Finance agency, however, is an exception and has issued several “twin” pairs of green/conventional bonds (maturing in 2025, 2030, 2031 and 2050). Comparing the yield of these green bonds to the conventional twin therefore enables the greenium to be directly observed. The UK, more typically, does not issue twin bonds. Therefore, the best comparator available to assess the UK sovereign greenium is the UKT 4.5 09/07/2034. Admittedly, this is a bond with slightly lower duration (given the higher coupon structure) and larger amount outstanding, but all things considered it remains a decent proxy.

In reality, like term premium, greenium does not always benefit the issuer. Indeed, at times over the last few years, greenium turned negative. Does this mean that the green-earmarked financing structure in fact increased the cost of borrowing for the UK? Not necessarily. This was more likely the result of a liquidity premium or other technical factors.6

Given the relative success of green gilts, the DMO could consider introducing additional such instruments aimed at broadening the investor base and attracting “ESG”-motivated investors at potentially lower yields.

Consider, for instance, sustainability-linked gilts. SLBs are already commonplace within corporate debt markets and several EM sovereigns have also issued such instruments (Chile and Uruguay). An SLB ties the interest rate of the instrument to a given sustainability target which can ratchet up or down based on meeting specific targets at certain observation dates.

The case against such issuance, besides any reservations around the merits and demerits of such sustainability targets, primarily concern the complexity challenges involved in the operational implementation of such instruments. Significant changes to issuance patterns introduce operational complexities and transition costs that could disrupt market functioning, particularly during periods of stress when predictability in government debt issuance becomes especially valuable.7

Market architecture

Finally, let’s consider a further question:

Could the DMO lower borrowing costs by altering the structure of the gilt market?

Any architectural changes would require gradual implementation to minimise market disruption, leveraging the DMO's established strength in market consultation and transparent communication.

But first, perhaps some historical context is warranted.

Gilt market structure primer

Market structure (1688-1986)

UK government securities have been traded on the London Stock Exchange since the establishment of Britain's permanent national debt following the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

While initially managed as a matter of administrative convenience, government debt management underwent a profound transformation during the 20th century. The extraordinary expansion of the United Kingdom's national debt during the World Wars elevated debt management from a routine Treasury function to an issue of critical macroeconomic significance, fundamentally reshaping both fiscal policy considerations and financial market development.

For primary issuance, from 1909 until Big Bang in 1986, the Bank of England dealt nearly exclusively on the London Stock Exchange, and, not being a member, was obliged to deal through a broker. Its broker, the Government Broker, was the senior partner of Mullens and Co, a stockbroking firm.

During Big Bang, in April 1986, Mullens & Co. was bought out by SG Warburg and ceased to operate. As a result, the brokerage of government securities was broadened, allowing banks and securities houses to register with the Bank of England as brokers, now renamed as gilt-edged market makers (GEMMs).

Current market structure

The architecture of the gilt market has evolved substantially since the Glorious Revolution (and even since Big Bang), adapting to changing market conditions and technological innovations. These transformations have enhanced liquidity, broadened participation, and reduced government financing costs.

Today, in the gilt market, for primary issuance there are three issuance methods that are typically used:

• Auctions represent the most common issuance method, following a multiple-price format where successful Gilt-Edged Market Makers (GEMMs) pay their bid price. The DMO maintains transparency by pre-announcing an auction calendar on a quarterly basis, allowing market participants to plan accordingly.

• Syndications are used for large, often long-dated or index-linked issues. The DMO appoints a group of GEMMs to form a syndicate that markets the gilt to investors, building an order book. This method allows for larger issuance volumes and targets specific investor bases.

• Taps are smaller offerings of existing bonds addressing specific market demand or liquidity concerns, enabling the DMO to respond flexibly to market conditions.

Here are two additional areas where further architectural changes might yield benefits.

“Market maker of last resort” programme

In his canonical text on financial markets and central banking, Walter Bagehot outlined the following principles for crisis management:

In time of panic [the central bank] must advance freely and vigorously to the public out of the reserve… for this purpose there are two rules:

First. That these loans should only be made at a very high rate of interest. This will operate as a heavy fine on unreasonable timidity, and will prevent the greatest number of applications by persons who do not require it.

Secondly. That at this rate these advances should be made on all good banking securities, and as largely as the public ask for them. The reason is plain. The object is to stay alarm, and nothing therefore should be done to cause alarm. But the way to cause alarm is to refuse some one who has good security to offer.

Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, Chapter VII.II (1873)

Throughout its history (even prior to the publication of Bagehot’s text), the Bank of England acted as a lender of last resort role at times of financial market crisis. This happened on several occasions across the 19th and 20th centuries, as it has again in the 21st century, most recently during the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2022 LDI crisis.

Today, one of the most significant architectural innovations that the Bank could implement would be to establish a formal “Market Maker of Last Resort” (MMLR) framework to preserve financial stability during periods of severe market dislocation.

This could take the form of a formal commitment to intervene in gilt markets during periods of exceptional stress, not as an emergency measure but as a structured market function with predefined activation thresholds, operational protocols, and exit strategies.

This could be achieved by means of a two-way stabilisation mechanism, as outlined in a recent Bank of England bulletin. The central bank would establish bid-ask prices outside competitive market rates during normal conditions, discouraging usage of its facilities. When markets become severely dysfunctional, these unchanged central bank prices would automatically become attractive, activating the Market Maker of Last Resort function precisely when needed.

This mechanism honours Bagehot’s principle of lending at penalty rates whilst providing essential liquidity during crises—all through a transparent framework that minimises moral hazard and preserves financial stability.

Crucially, the MMLR function would differ from quantitative easing in both scope and intention—focusing specifically on preserving market functioning rather than pursuing broader monetary policy objectives. Unlike traditional asset purchase programmes, an effective MMLR would operate symmetrically, both buying and selling gilts as needed to maintain orderly markets. This two-way mechanism would distinguish it from quantitative easing programmes and position it more clearly as a market functioning tool rather than a monetary policy instrument.

Strategic liquidity concentration

A final change that the DMO could implement would be a deliberate strategy to concentrate liquidity in fewer, larger benchmark issues.

If applied, such a benchmark concentration strategy would focus on creating standardised “super-benchmark” issuances at key tenors rather than maintaining a diverse range of gilt issues across the yield curve. This approach, already employed successfully by the US Treasury and Germany's Deutsche Finanzagentur, enables more efficient price discovery and potentially narrower bid-ask spreads.

However, this strategy also presents potential drawbacks that may outweigh its benefits. Concentrating issuance would reduce the precision with which liability-driven investors can match their duration needs, potentially decreasing overall demand from the UK's pension-heavy investor base. Larger benchmark issues would also create more pronounced refinancing “cliffs,” increasing cash flow volatility for the government.

Given that the UK gilt market already functions well in normal liquidity conditions, the marginal benefits of further concentration are unlikely to justify the associated risks and market disruption. By contrast, the MMLR function formalises a role that is already crucial during periods of price dislocation.

Concluding thoughts

On setting out to write this piece, my intuition was that institutional conservatism has likely prevented the deployment of novel strategies in debt management.

On reflection, this concern seems largely unfounded. The existing framework, particularly regarding currency denomination and instrument selection, represents a rational response to the UK’s specific market dynamics.

There are, however, two areas for which there is compelling evidence for adjustment.

First, the public debt maturity profile. The historical long-dated bias, once aligned with structural pension demand, now appears increasingly misaligned with current market dynamics. This is compounded by the fact that quantitative tightening is reducing the quantity of central bank reserves increasing demand amongst banks for substitute assets, such as short-dated gilts.

In short, a modest shift towards increased Treasury bill issuance could potentially reduce borrowing costs whilst maintaining the existing strengths of the UK’s debt management approach.

This is by no means a novel proposal. The papers by Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Barclays that I have referenced each touch on the possibility of such developments in the UK’s debt maturity profile. Officials at the helm of other major central banks are also reflecting on similar challenges.8

Secondly, a further structural change that the Bank might also wish to consider is the establishment of a formal “Market Maker of Last Resort” (MMLR) framework to preserve financial stability during periods of severe market dislocation. This proposal is grounded in the sound principles set out by Bagehot in the 19th century and a viable mechanism has already been outlined by Bank of England officials themselves.

Finally, it is worth stating that any such adjustments should be implemented gradually and transparently, ensuring that reduced borrowing costs are not offset by market disruption or increased risk premia.

Bibliography

Bank of England:

• The yield curve impact of government debt issuance surprises and the implications for QT. November 2024

• Financial stability buy/sell tools: a gilt market case study. November 2023

• The Bank of England as lender of last resort: new historical evidence from daily transactional data. November 2017

Debt Management Office:

• Annual Reviews

• GEMM Guidebook, October 2024

• Information Memorandum Issue, Stripping and Reconstitution of British Government Stock, March 2024

• Official Operations in the Gilt Market, March 2024

Office for Budget Responsibility:

• Debt interest (central government, net of APF). February 2025

• Debt maturity, quantitative easing and interest rate sensitivity. March 2021

Financial Times:

• Bessent’s debt dilemma. Robert Armstrong, March 2025

• Yields up, (long-dated) borrowing down? Toby Nangle, March 2025

• Lessons from the gilts crisis. John Plender, December 2022

• ‘Who is going to buy?’ UK set to unleash historic debt deluge. Tommy Stubbington, December 2022

• UK’s debt management chief gets set for fresh borrowing binge. Tommy Stubbington, January 2020

Investment Industry Research:

• Bank of America. Choices under pressure. An ambitious UK Treasury has options to tame Gilts. Mark Capleton et al, 19 March 2025

• Bank of America. Who pays wins. How UK DMO can still deliver duration with short-dated issuance. Market Capleton et al, 23 February 2023

• Goldman Sachs. Shorter WAM Optimal for Gilts. George Cole et al, February 2024

• Barclays. Why the long face? Moyeen Islam et al, 12 Februrary 2025

• Hudson Bay Capital. ATI: Activist Treasury Issuance and the Tug-of-War Over Monetary Policy, July 2024

• M&G Bond Vigilantes: There’s no free lunch in green bonds… or is there? October 2022

William Allen:

The following two texts are valuable contributions to the historical study of UK debt management.

Mr Allen worked for the Bank of England from 1972 to 2004 in a wide range of functions, including monetary policy formulation and financial market operations. From 1978 to 1980 he was seconded to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, and from 1994 to 1998 he was a member of the European Union Monetary Committee.

• Government debt management and monetary policy in Britain since 1919, Bank for International Settlements Papers. 2012

  • Paper comparing four episodes in the management of the UK national debt since 1919.

• The Bank of England and the Government Debt: Operations in the Gilt-Edged Market, 1928–1972 (Studies in Macroeconomic History). 2019

  • Book narrating official interventions by the British monetary authorities in the secondary market for gilts from 1928 to 1972.

  • Considers how the market for gilts developed in the middle of the 20th century, of how the monetary authorities tried to compensate for its deficiencies, and of how they overcame the unintended consequences of their actions.

Appendix 1: Historical precedents for shortening maturity profiles

US Treasury's 2001 decision

The US Treasury successfully employed buyback operations to improve market liquidity and manage its maturity profile. During 2000-2002, for instance, the Treasury used budget surpluses to repurchase less liquid off-the-run bonds, enhancing overall market functioning and reducing the government's borrowing costs by an estimated 1-2 basis points—significant savings when applied to a multi-trillion-dollar debt stock.

When the US Treasury announced the suspension of 30-year bond issuance on 31 October 2001, the market reaction was immediate and dramatic. The 10-year yield fell 18 basis points (from 4.41% to 4.23%) while the 30-year yield dropped 34 basis points (from 5.21% to 4.87%) in a single trading day. This sharp bull-flattening of the curve demonstrated how central banks can significantly influence both yield levels and curve shape through strategic issuance decisions. The US was operating with budget surpluses at the time, making the comparison imperfect but instructive.

UK debt management in the early 1980s

During the early Thatcher years, the UK Treasury deliberately shortened its issuance profile, refusing to pay what it considered excessive term premiums for longer-dated debt. This strategy coincided with a period of significant yield curve adjustment and contributed to reshaping market expectations about future government funding patterns. Though implemented under different economic conditions—with inflation much higher than today—this episode highlighted how determined policy shifts in maturity structure can influence market pricing.

Additional international examples

Several other countries including Canada (2017), Germany (2008) and Australia (2011) have at various times adjusted their maturity profiles in response to changing market conditions, generally achieving measurable impacts on their respective yield curves. These interventions typically produced the most significant effects when they represented clear departures from established issuance patterns rather than incremental adjustments.

These events happened in different fiscal circumstances, but they demonstrate that debt management offices can have a material effect on the level and shape of the yield curve by changing the distribution of debt issuance.

8

In a widely circulated paper, the incoming chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers has argued that issuing more short-term Treasuries artificially lowers longer-term yields (“Activist Treasury Issuance”, or ATI), allowing the government to run up bigger deficits and stimulate the economy without spooking bondholders. Hudson Bay Capital. ATI: Activist Treasury Issuance and the Tug-of-War Over Monetary Policy, July 2024

Charity Sweet Jars

Late on a Friday afternoon at work, two colleagues appeared at my desk brandishing charity donation boxes and a jar brimming with sweets. A game was afoot! Specifically, “guess the number of sweets in a jar”, in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.

Delighted, I examined the jar. But as I formulated my guess, it struck me that my colleagues had inadvertently presented the makings of a crude experiment. I was one of the final desk stops on their fundraising crusade, so they had already collected several dozen independent guesses. This reminded me of the "wisdom of crowds" effect. This effect describes how collective estimates often converge remarkably close to the true value, despite significant individual variations, and can solve problems better than most individuals within the group, including experts.

My request to base a guess on the mean of previous responses was (quite reasonably) declined, but my curiosity was piqued and the colleagues agreed to share a complete dataset once the competition results were announced.

Using this data, I investigated the following hypothesis: "A measure of central tendency derived from participants' guesses will be closer to the true number of sweets in the jar (in terms of absolute error) than the majority of individual guesses."

Materials & Methods

Two jars were circulated in different sections of an open-plan office environment during normal working hours (14:00-16:30 GMT). Participants made individual guesses in isolation. The fundraisers collected 23 guesses for Jar A and 44 guesses for Jar B. Jar A contained 110 items and Jar B contained 120 items.

Given that this test is rudimentary in nature, being the result of happenstance rather than a carefully designed scientific experiment, it is worth highlighting several conditions that are likely to have enhanced or limited the reliability of any findings.

For instance, the following conditions may have improved the generalisability and reduced the error involved in this analysis:

1. Incentive structure: There was a meaningful financial barrier (£5 minimum entry fee) and a dual-reward mechanism (winning the sweet jar and having a charitable impact). This likely promoted authentic participant engagement as the entry requirement screened out casual participants and the two-part reward system balanced self-interest with prosocial motivation, though this may have attracted participants with particular psychological profiles rather than a representative sample.

2. Information independence: Participants submitted their estimates in isolation from one another, which prevented direct information cascades and minimised the risk of conformity bias influencing individual judgements. However, it is possible that information leaked within the office environment through pre-existing communication channels, potentially compromising the true independence of estimates.

3. Diversity (heterogenous mental models): The office workers who participated in the estimation task brought diverse estimation approaches shaped by their distinct organisational roles, enriching the data through multiple problem-solving perspectives. However, the sample's limitation to white-collar corporate professionals excluded potentially valuable viewpoints from other occupational and socioeconomic groups.

In terms of the experiment’s limitations, several factors likely constrained the generalisability of any findings:

1. Sample size: Most notably, the small sample size of participants (n=67) reduced the study's statistical power and increased the margin of error. With only 67 participants, the findings are unlikely to represent a broader population, making it difficult to detect subtle effects or draw robust conclusions that could be confidently applied to larger groups.

2. Selection effects: The study population was inherently skewed by the self-selection of participants who actively chose to donate to charity, potentially introducing systematic bias. These individuals may possess distinct psychological, socioeconomic, or demographic characteristics that differentiate them from the general population, such as higher levels of empathy, greater financial security, or stronger prosocial tendencies.

3. Number preference bias: In cultures using base-10 counting systems, people tend to round to numbers ending in 0 or 5, an effect also known as "terminal digit preference." The organisers' choice of 110 and 120 as correct answers may have played into this bias. As multiples of 10, those answers were more likely to be guessed than numbers like 113 or 118.

4. Temporal effects: The data was collected over a short time period and participants might have been experiencing workday-related cognitive load effects (such as a postprandial decrease in cognitive performance, also known as a '“post-lunch dip”).

5. Environmental and settlement effects: While all estimates were made under consistent lighting conditions, the jar's circulation likely caused compaction through movement, potentially affecting volume assessments over time.

Hypothesis Testing

In terms of the results, here is a table showing the guesses for each jar from largest to smallest, and their distance from the true value:

And here are those same results plotted on a bar chart where 0 = the true value, and the x-axis is the distance from the true value:

For Jar A, guesses ranged from 200 (90 sweets too high) to 69 (41 sweets too low). For Jar B, guesses ranged from 204 (84 sweets too high) to 65 (55 sweets too low). The spread of guesses was slightly larger for Jar B, likely reflecting the larger sample size, (range of 139 sweets) compared to Jar A (range of 131 sweets).

Despite the broad spread of guesses, in the case of each jar, several participants guessed quite close to the true value and one participant guessed the exact correct number.

Turning then to the collective measures. A very quick analysis immediately demonstrates that a measure of average of all the prior guesses was a very good estimate of the true value. For Jar A, where the true value was 110:

• Arithmetic mean of 113 overestimated by ~3 sweets or 2.39% error.

• Median of 105 underestimated by ~6 sweets or 5.00% error.

• Trimmed mean (x̄10%) of 111 marginally overestimated by just ~1 sweet or 0.58% error and was closest to true value. (A “trimmed” mean is where the tails of a distribution of estimates are trimmed and then the arithmetic mean is calculated from the truncated distribution)

For Jar B, where the true value was 120:

• Arithmetic mean of 124 overestimated by ~4 sweets or 3.33% error.

• Trimmed mean (x̄10%) of 122 overestimated by ~2 sweets or 1.78% error.

• Median was almost spot on 120 sweets or 0.42% error.

By contrast, on average, any individual guess was significantly further away from the true value.

This can be demonstrated using two statistical measures. Firstly, the mean absolute error (MAE), stated in the same units as the original data (number of sweets), calculates the number of sweets that individual guesses missed the true value by on average. For Jar A, MAE was 23.3. This means that, on average, guesses were off by ~23 sweets. For Jar B, MAE was 30.2, meaning on average, guesses were off by about ~30 sweets. Second, the root mean square error (RMSE), similar to the MAE but which penalises large errors more heavily due to squaring.

To compare the two measures MAE asks: "how far off were people usually?" and RMSE asks: "how far off were people, especially counting those who were really far off?" For Jar A, RMSE was ~32 sweets. For Jar B, RMSE was ~37 sweets. When RMSE is notably larger than MAE (as it is here), it indicates there are some large outliers.

There we have it. We have illustrated that the results strongly support the wisdom of crowds hypothesis. All collective measures (mean, median, trimmed mean) significantly outperformed average individual estimates for both our samples.

1. Collective measures showed remarkably low error rates (0.42%-5.00%)

2. Individual guesses demonstrated high variability (MAE: 23-30 sweets)

3. Higher RMSE values indicate presence of significant outliers and the trimmed mean performed particularly well, suggesting value in outlier removal.

Correcting Systemic Biases

Inevitably, the question remained: how can I leverage these findings to win the next office sweet jar contest? Would using a measure of central tendency be sufficient to guarantee an ultimate statistical victory?

For my two jars, the trimmed mean performed well, but it is not clear how well this performance generalises to other contexts and whether it represents an optimal aggregation strategy. Although these measures of central tendency empirically demonstrate accuracy in the case of our jars, they do not to address directly the biases that are likely to be the root cause of the margin of error.

For instance, in real-world contexts, it is more common for individuals to share information with, and influence, one another. Indeed, as observed above, it is quite possible that there was some information leakage in our rudimentary test. In such cases, it is likely that the individual estimates used to calculate a collective estimate will be correlated to some degree. Social influence cannot only shrink the distribution of estimates but may also systematically shift the distribution, depending on the rules that individuals follow when updating their personal estimate in response to available social information.

For example, if individuals with extreme opinions are more resistant to social influence, then the distribution of estimates will tend to shift towards these opinions, leading to changes in the collective estimate as individuals share information with each other. In short, social influence may induce estimation bias, even if individuals in isolation are unbiased.

My next avenue of exploration was to understand the distribution of the guesses better. So I plotted histograms:

A quick visual assessment confirms that this histogram is not normally distributed. Indeed, even in the summary statistical data, it is clear that there is a hierarchical relationship between the mean, trimmed mean, and median (mean > trimmed mean > median).

This hierarchical relationship indicates that distribution of guesses for both jars exhibits a positive skewness (longer right-hand side tails), suggesting a consistent tendency toward overestimation. I explored these relationships in an earlier piece that can be read here:

Jar A’s distribution is highly positively skewed, with a skewness of 1.33, while Jar B’s distribution is more moderately positively skewed, with a skewness of 0.42. Jar B’s lower skewness is likely explained by the relatively larger size of the sample of guesses. With larger samples, distributions tend to become more symmetric (closer to a normal distribution) as extreme outliers have less impact on the overall shape and the larger sample better represents the true underlying distribution.

The presence of such systematic overestimation bias suggests that simple arithmetic averaging may not be optimal for crowd estimation. In fact, this distribution is indicative of a type of non-normal distribution known as a lognormal distribution where log-transformed data should be more normally distributed.

To confirm the lognormal nature of the guesses, I prepared Q-Q plots to compare the original observed data and log-transformed data against theoretical normal distributions:

The points show some deviation from the reference lines, particularly at the tails, but generally follow a pattern consistent with a lognormal distribution. There's some curvature in the middle section, suggesting that while the data might be approximately lognormal, there might be some departures from this distribution.

A quick search of the web brought up a study that studies this systematic bias pattern, Kao et al. (2018) paper titled, "Counteracting estimation bias and social influence to improve the wisdom of crowds."1

This research paper investigates how individual biases and social influences affect collective estimates in numerosity estimation tasks and uses a sweet jar as its example too. The authors argue that while aggregating non-expert opinions can enhance accuracy, biases can lead to systematic errors in collective estimates. The key biases of concern to the researchers were:

• Estimation biases: Kao et al. identify that individual estimates tend to be biased, often leading to overestimation by the arithmetic mean and underestimation by the median. They highlight that these biases can be quantified and mapped to collective biases.2

• Social influence biases: The paper also explores how social information sharing impacts individual estimates. They conducted experiments to quantify the rules of social influence, revealing that individuals are more likely to adjust their estimates when social information is higher than their own. Experiment details provided in footnote.3

The authors propose three new aggregation methods that should effectively counteract estimation biases and social influences. These include a corrected mean, a corrected median, and a maximum-likelihood estimate method, all designed to improve collective accuracy.

Let’s consider their proposed maximum likelihood aggregation measure. For this, the Kao et al. model assumes that for a true jar count J:

• The log of estimates follows a normal distribution

• The mean (μ) of this distribution = 0.87 * ln(J) + 0.68

• The standard deviation (σ) = 0.16 * ln(J) - 0.30

Applying this to the data for Jar B data, I did the following:

• Calculated the expected μ and σ using above formulas and, given the similarity of the tasks (sweet jars vs. jellybean jars). Assumed the same parameters, namely:

  • m_μ = 0.87 # slope for mu

  • b_μ = 0.68 # intercept for mu

  • m_σ = 0.16 # slope for sigma

  • b_σ = -0.30 # intercept for sigma

• Computed how likely each observed estimate would be under this distribution (the log likelihood).

• Summed the log likelihoods to get total likelihood for the Jar.

This analysis returned a total log likelihood of -16.43, which implied a maximum likelihood ~119.5 versus a true value of 120.

In summary, our rudimentary sweet jar experiment provides a real-world demonstration of both crowd wisdom and its inherent biases, while showing how statistical methods can improve crowd estimation accuracy.

The fact that both the mean and median worked well as estimators without correcting for bias is a remarkable testament to the wisdom of crowds effect. It suggests that even with systematic bias present, the aggregate wisdom still manages to cut through to something akin to the truth.

Galton & the Ox

Having satisfied my initial curiosity, it then occurred to me that this hypothesis must have undergone extensive testing in more rigorous, scientific contexts prior to my foray above especially given that the “the wisdom of crowds” effect seemed to be well established. Indeed, we have already explored Kao et. al’s intervention.

So, turning briefly to academic literature on crowd estimation behaviour, I identified these studies as being noteworthy:

• On collective intelligence: An influential work is Surowiecki's (2004) "The Wisdom of Crowds", subtitled “Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations.” This book provides a theoretical foundation for the study of the collective intelligence that emerges when diverse, independent judgements are aggregated. It examines three types of problems (cognition, coordination, and cooperation) through theoretical frameworks and case studies while demonstrating the broad impact of crowd wisdom on daily life and future possibilities.4

• On non-human animals & swarm intelligence: Building on this, Krause et al. (2010) documented how swarm intelligence manifests in both human and animal groups, offering insights into collective estimation behaviour. Swarm intelligence is the phenomenon where collectives can solve complex problems beyond individual capabilities. Animals, birds and insects, offer a multitude of examples of complex adaptive systems at work and demonstrate how collectives can function effectively without leaders. Influential papers on this theme explore fish shoals, flocks of birds, bee hives, and ant colonies.5 It also transpires that Kao runs a lab at the University of Massachusetts Biology Department that studies collective decision-making in animal groups. The About Us page for The Kao Lab observes that: “Collective decision-making abounds everywhere in nature and includes dynamics within a cell, the output of a brain, consensus among birds in a flock, and democratic governments.”

• On biases relevant to sweet jar estimation: See studies examining the cognitive aspects of quantity estimation. Kaufman et al.'s (1949) classic work on visual number discrimination revealed systematic patterns in how people process numerical estimates, including the tendency to favour certain numbers. Raghubir and Krishna (1999) specifically investigated container-based estimation, demonstrating how factors like transparency and shape significantly influence quantity perception.6

Besides these eminent studies, I was particularly impressed by an early example of a wisdom of crowds experiment published by Francis Galton (1907).

This is Francis’ second appearance on the blog, the first can be found here:

As regular readers will recall, Francis Galton was a Victorian-era polymath (and half-cousin of Charles Darwin). Galton’s legacy is controversial due to his role in pioneering statistical methods while simultaneously advocating for theories of eugenics.

While attending the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in Plymouth in 1906, Galton came across a competition where locals competed to guess the weight of an ox. As a statistician interested in human measurement and variation, Galton thought he had identified an opportunity to test a hypothesis about the intellectual capacity of people of lower social status.

In a piece titled ‘Vox Populi’ published in Nature, the scientific journal, Galton described his methodology:

A weight-judging competition was carried on at the annual show of the ‘West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition’ recently held at Plymouth.

A fat ox having been selected, competitors bought stamped and numbered cards, for 6d. each, on which to inscribe their respective names, addresses, and estimates of what the ox would weigh after it had been slaughtered and dressed. Those who guessed most successfully received prizes.

About 800 tickets were issued, which were kindly lent me for examination after they had fulfilled their immediate purpose. These afforded excellent material.

The judgments were unbiased by passion and uninfluenced by oratory and the like. The sixpenny fee deterred practical joking, and the hope of a prize and the joy of competition prompted each competitor to do his best. The competitors included butchers and farmers, some of whom were highly expert in judging the weight of cattle; others were probably guided by such information as they might pick up, and by their own fancies.

After weeding thirteen cards out of the collection, as defective or illegible, there remained 787 for discussion. I arrayed them in order of the magnitudes of the estimates. Table of data (see footnote).7

Francis Galton, Vox Populi, Nature 75, 450–451 (1907)

After the competition, Galton acquired all the tickets. Galton had hypothesised that the crowd, mostly comprising ordinary citizens with no expertise in livestock, would be far off in their guesses. This hypothesis would likely have been based on his pre-existing belief in the genetic superiority of elite classes.

Instead, to his great surprise, Galton discovered that the median guess was remarkably accurate. Despite his enduring belief in hereditary intelligence and class hierarchy, his experiment had inadvertently identified the wisdom of crowds through pure scientific curiosity.

It appears then, in this particular instance, that the vox populi is correct to within 1 per cent of the real value, and that the individual estimates are abnormally distributed in such a way that it is an equal chance whether one of them, selected at random, falls within or without the limits of -3.7 per cent and +2.4 per cent of their middlemost value.

Galton (1907)

It is worth noting that Galton did not attempt to doctor the experiment, data, or results to match his own beliefs. Rather, he presented the data as it appeared. Moreover, he seems to have updated his priors in light of the new evidence, concluding as follows:

This result is, I think, more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected

The average competitor was probably as well fitted for making a just estimate of the dressed weight of the ox, as an average voter is of judging the merits of most political issues on which he votes, and the variety among the voters to judge justly was probably much the same in either case.

Galton (1907)

In a follow-up paper, Galton advocates for the median rather than the mean average as the preferred measure of central tendency. Galton thought that this measure better mitigated the influence of "'cranks in proportion to their crankiness”.8

Closing Remarks: Sweet Jars & Financial Markets

At this point, I realise that what began as a tongue-in-cheek analysis has ballooned into something altogether larger. It has, quite frankly, all got rather out of hand and we are now very deep in the rabbit hole.

It occurs to me that this line of inquiry could be developed further with reference to a broad variety of concepts. Above all, this analysis is relevant to several concepts that are now well-established in finance, and particularly behavioural finance.

Investing, after all, is all about estimating value based on imperfect information, while markets are prediction and betting aggregators. Valuing a financial asset is, in some sense, just like guessing the number of sweets in the jar. Therefore, as an investor, it is worth knowing as much as we can about how to be good at making predictions and the limits of individual and collective human forecasting ability.

Next time, I intend to explore some of the applications of the wisdom of crowds beyond the bounds of sweet jars.

Thank you for reading. As always, feel free to reply if you have comments, questions or suggestions.

Reader Follow-ups

One reader pointed out that the wisdom of crowds hypothesis has been proven many times via the ‘ask the audience’ segment of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire?’ A quick search online suggests that, after 15 years of the show, the 'ask the audience' success rate is between 91% and 92%, compared to a 66% success rate for the 'phone a friend.'

What was the gender breakdown of participants? Across the two jars, 49% of guesses were submitted by participants who identified as female (33 of 67 total guesses).

What was your guess? I participated in Jar B, my guess was 118 a versus true value of 120… (!)

7

Galton’s table:

This bookshelf collects blogs, podcasts and books that I think are worth your time. Please share what you enjoy and do send over your own recommendations.

Blogs

Full list included further below. If you’re short on time, try these first:

• Andrew Bennett on Sovereign Albion.

• Ben Southwood, Sam Bowman & Samuel Hughes on fixing the foundations.

• Byrne Hobart on LLMs & Darwinian evolution.

• Cultural Tutor on beauty.

• Matt Clifford’s speech on making Britain rich again.

• Matt Levine at Money Stuff.

• Scott Alexander’s parable The Prophet And Caesar’s Wife.

• Sam Kriss on folk tradition and Silicon Valley (his own suggestions here).

• For other collections of recommended reads try: Lindy Library, The Electric Typewriter, and Read Something Wonderful.

Podcasts

Full list further below. Top three recommendations:

Anglofuturism: Tom Ough & Calum Drysdale, produced by Aeron Laffere. Who now has anything to say about the de-industrialisation of this country? More serious than it sounds. Great episodes include Alex Fitzgerald on British Manufacturing, Philip Cunliffe on The End of Globalisation, Tom & Calum on The British Antarctic Territory. I wrote for them about English History, here.

Manifold: Steve Hsu works at the forefront of genetics, physics, and software engineering. His willingness to examine controversial topics cost him academic posts during the early 2020s. Standout episodes include Dan Collins on US-China manufacturing, Greg Clark on Genetics and Social mobility, Dominic Cummings on Vote Leave.

The Stubborn Light of Things: Melissa Harrison takes listeners on audio walks through the Suffolk countryside around her cottage, following the seasons from spring through summer into autumn. Each episode captures birdsong, running streams, and the sounds of the landscape, interwoven with extracts from an 18th-century clergyman’s diary. For the immersive seasonal experience, listen weekly starting in early March.

Books

Classical Texts

• The New Testament (novum testamentum): Nestle-Aland Greek-Latin parallel edition.

• Histories (Ἱστορίαι): Strassler’s Landmark Edition.

• Iliad & Odyssey (Ἰλιάς & Ὀδύσσεια): Samuel Butler for a readable prose version.

• On the Shortness of Life (de brevitate vitae) see more in this post, also note 2nd Choral Ode of Thyestes.

• Aeneid (Aeneis): Dryden’s heroic couplets are unbeaten. In prose, Robert Fagles is compelling.

• The Periplus of Hanno (Άννωνος Περίπλους): Explored at length in this post.

Fiction

• The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot.

• Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann.

• The Earthsea Quartet, Ursula Le Guin.

• Les Aventures de Tintin, Hergé.

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle.

• Il Nome della Rosa, Umberto Eco.

Non-Fiction

• The English & their History, Robert Tombs. My review post here.

• Should He Have Spoken? Roger Scruton (here).

• First World War diaries: Pairing Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), Ernst Junger, with Memoirs of an Infantry Officer Siegfried Sassoon. In film, pairing 1917 (Sam Mendes), with All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues, Edward Berger).

• The Silk Roads: A New History of the World , Peter Frankopan (interviewed by me here).

• Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, John Julius Norwich (see also the Christmas Crackers).

Recent Reading

2026

• Bismarck: A Life, Jonathan Steinberg

• State of Emergency: 1970-1974, Dominic Sandbrook

• The Clash of Economic Ideas, Lawrence White

• How Westminster Works & Why It Doesn’t, Ian Dunt

• A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson

• Castlereagh, John Bew

• Emma, Jane Austen

• From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, Lee Kuan Yew

• The Great Game, Peter Hopkirk

• The Rage of Party, George Owers

• Failed State, Sam Freedman

• Bleak House, Charles Dickens

2025

• Between the Waves, Tom McTague

• Breakneck, Dan Wang

• Folk Song in England, Steve Roud

• George Eliot & Money, Dermot Coleman

• The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot

• Middlemarch, George Eliot

• A Hero of Our Time, Mikhail Lermontov

• Against the Tide, Roger Scruton

• How to be a Conservative, Roger Scruton

• The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch

• Il Gattopardo, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

2024

• A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford

• A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Eric Newby

• For the Record, David Cameron

• Outlive, Peter Attia

• Material World, Ed Conway

• The Time of the Gypsies, Michael Stewart

• The Price of Time, Edward Chancellor

• Trillions, Robin Wigglesworth

• Between the Woods & the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor

All Blog Recommendations

• Benedict Evans on artificial intelligence.

• Benedict Springbett on coming to the nuisance.

• Ben Yeoh on unconferences.

• Brian Potter on construction physics.

• Byrne Hobart on technological innovation.

• Dan Neidle on tax policy (interviewed here).

• Danny Kruger on the Christian state.

• Dominic Cummings on regime change.

• Drupka Kunley on the Yookay.

• Duncan McClements on Dogger Bank.

• Ed Hezlet on the UK energy system.

• Ed Pinnegar on wine and Alderney.

• Ed West on British constitutional change.

• Emma Garland on desire.

• Ethan Mollick on generative education.

• Felix Stocker variously curious.

• Fernando Boretti on managing ADHD.

• FT’s Alphaville.

• Gwern on everything.

• Hannah Ritchie on sustainability data.

• Henrik Karlsson on writing without purpose.

• Howard Marks’ memos.

• Jack Wiseman on inference.

• James W Phillips on UK COVID response and inquiry,

• Jay Foreman on maps and London infrastructure.

• Jim Waterson at London Centric.

• Joachim Klement on enclothed cognition.

• Joe Hill on Greater London.

• John Myers on the housing theory of everything.

• Josey PArker on Isotta Nogarola.

• Khe Hy on generative productivity.

• Lindy Man on winter light.

• Louise Perry on feminism.

• Matt Clifford’s thoughts in between. Reading lists (2010s, 2020s) were the inspiration for this post. Interview with Patrick O’Shaughnessy.

• Matt Levine, the classicist-turned-lawyer-turned-investment banker-turned-Bloomberg columnist. Writes a stunning ~700k words per year at Money Stuff, The Crypto Story, the Money Stuff Podcast, as well as this interview.

• Matti Thal on English soup, Hampstead Heath, and Cambridge churches.

• Michael Mauboussin at Consilient Observer on foundational financial markets questions. See also his reflections on 30 years.

• Monty Evans on sports betting arbitrage.

• Neel Nanda on mechanistic interpretability.

• Neil O’Brien on UK migration.

• Nemets on anthropology.

• Noah Smith for economics.

• Paramvir Singh Khera’s poetry.

• Paul Norris for idiosyncratic sensitivity (formerly here).

• Peter Leonard for Central Asian politics.

• Phoebe Arslanagic-Little on artificial wombs.

• Polemic Paine on bypassing the state.

• Razib Khan on human genetics.

• Rian Chad Whitton on British industry.

• Sam Bowman on consumer surplus.

• Sam Currie on economic statecraft.

• Sam Dumitriu on British planning reform.

• Sam Enright’s roundups of links.

• Samuel Hughes on vernacular architecture.

• Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten on philosophy and culture Beware Isolated Demands for Rigour and Fake Tradition Is Traditional and on scientific themes How Are The Gay Younger Brothers Doing?, Welcome Polygenically Screened Babies, Missing Heritability, Prison & Crime.

• Trenton Bricken on optimal bet sizing.

• Tom Jones on human quantitative easing.

• Visakan Veerasamy on LLM epistemology.

• William Buckner on traditions of conflict.

• Zvi Mowschowitz on artificial intelligence.

All Podcast Recommendations

More recondite recommendations:

Tides of History: Patrick Wyman brings academic depth to overlooked periods of human prehistory. Especially good on ancient migration patterns for which an entry-point is his exploration of the Yamnaya Culture.

The Abundance Agenda: James O’Malley & Martin Robbins explain their radicalisation towards the abundance movement using case studies from local councils across Britain. Highlights include Build a Tunnel to the Isle of Wight, HS2’s Bridge to Nowhere, Natural England’s War on Sussex.

Folk on Foot: Former BBC broadcaster Matthew Bannister tours the British Isles interviewing traditional folk musicians in their home landscapes including Kris Drever on Orkney, Sam Lee in Sussex, Seth Lakeman on Dartmoor, Johnny Flynn on the Hackney Marshes, and Goblin Band in the City of London.

Works in Progress: The WIP Editors discuss underrated ideas with guests. Standout episodes include Anton Howes on Henry VIII & the Industrial Revolution, Nicholas Boys-Smith on Traffic Modernism, The Editors on Ugly Buildings.

Darknet Diaries: Jack Rhysider accessible exploration of hacking, information security, and cyber-warfare. The 2019 analysis of NotPetya attack by the Russian state on Ukraine proved remarkably prescient.

Looking for Growth: James Newport & Becca Wray from the LFG team explore how to set the UK back on a course of growth. Try interview with Phoebe Arslanagic-Little of Boom.

More conventional recommendations:

The Rest is History: Dominic Sandbrook & Tom Holland are now household names, but for good reason. The historical theme means that almost all episodes are evergreen. All-time highlights for me include episodes on Rudolf Vrba & Alfréd Wetzler, The Rise of the Nazis, Outbreak of the First World War, and The Rise of Putin. For extended treatment of their specialist topics, try Dominic Sandbrook on Britain in 1974 (see also this These Times interview), or Tom Holland on Baghdad (see also this Conversation with Tyler interview and Leading interview.

Invest Like the Best: Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s podcast is an exeptional repository of financial markets expertise. Try: Christian Rudder on dating app data, Scott Goodwin on credit markets, Boyd Varty on the South African Bush, and every episode with Michael Mauboussin, Cliff Asness, or Rory Sutherland. Full access to a transcript library is available on the website.

Secrets of Statecraft: Andrew Roberts interviews political and military public figures exploring how the study of history has influenced them. Memorable episodes: Mike Gallagher on China, David Cameron on Vernon Bogdanor, Michael Gove, Richard Dearlove on MI6, Tom Gross on Israel.

Moral Maze: Michael Buerk chairs BBC Radio 4’s long-running ethical debate programme. Four panelists interrogate witnesses on contemporary moral dilemmas. Often heated, occasionally illuminating. Start with whichever moral question most piques your interest.

In Our Time: After decades of impressive work, Melvyn Bragg retired recently from interviewing academics on important themes. The archive is consistent in quality. Greatest moment ever for me was Melyvn Bragg’s defence of the autochthony of the British Industrial Revolution.

Leading: Rory Stewart (see Rian’s essay Rob Rory) & Alastair Campbell, two centrists who rarely disagree but often misjudge tone. Listen despite them, not for them, given the truly impressive guests they are able to draw in for long-form interviews. See, their heated exchanges with indefatigable David Baddiel and Michael Gove, for espionage try A Tale of Two Spies and Sir Alex Younger.

Odd Lots: Each week, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway interview “the perfect guest” on an esoteric feature of financial markets. Evergreen episodes include What a Bakery Can Tell Us About the Economy, the Trucking Bloodbath, and 5,000 Years of Interest Rates (I discuss Richard Sylla’s book here).

Modern Wisdom: Chris Williamson’s unlikely path from nightclub promoter to interviewer produces surprisingly strong conversations. Try Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data), Louise Perry (Mother, Maiden, Matriarch), Scott Galloway (Prof G), Peter Attia (Outlive), Morgan Housel (Psychology of Money).

Other notable long-form interviewers include Sean Carrolls’ Mindscape, Dwarkesh Patel, Collison Borther’s Cheeky Pint, and Conversations with Tyler all with freely-accessible transcript libraries on their websites.

Standalone series:

The Coming Storm: Gabriel Gatehouse‘s seven-episode series journeys deep into the depths of QAnon, politics, and conspiracy theory. First aired in 2022, the series left me somewhat metaphysically adrift.

The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping: Sue-Lin Wong‘s series is exemplary journalism. Despite commanding the largest nation in the world, Xi Jinping’s surprisingly obscure personal history across eight episodes.

Duck: Rabbit: Advertising executive Rory Sutherland and behavioural scientist Paul Dolan take on contentious moral questions. The episode on living longer or better is a highlight (I previously wrote on the subject of Living Well, here).

Discontinued podcasts:

These Times: UnHerd political editor Tom McTague and Cambridge professor Helen Thompson explored the historical context of current affairs. Evergreen pieces include Europe’s Reckoning with Ukraine, The Israel-Hamas War, and the special reports for the 2024 UK General Election including Reform in Clacton, the Labour Left in Chingford, and the SNP in the Outer Hebridies.

The Secret History of the Future: The Economist’s Tom Standage and Seth Stevenson of Slate Technology, identified historical examples of technological innovation and compared them with current technological innovations. Evergreen episodes include food, to transportation, to artificial intelligence, this series is impressively expansive. So far, the analysis has withstood the test of time.

On the occasion of my grandmother’s 98th birthday, I have decided to re-share the piece here.

To have been able to converse at length with a long-lived grandparent at an adult age has been a unique privilege, all the more so given that my Oma is such a loving and kind woman who has played an important role in shaping my own life.

Please enjoy the following account of a series of portraiture sessions and our conversations in the garden:

London, United Kingdom, 2020

Oma leans forward, her hands clasped over the head of the walking-stick. The hornbeams cast a shade from above, a warm green light. She rests, breathing deeply in the still air.

From the undergrowth, a medley of trills erupt.

The melody culminates in a sharp chirp and the identity of the singer is confirmed by a rapid flash of crimson and yellow as a delicate songbird skips out from beneath the bushes. It flits from hedgerow to hedgerow and rustles through the sun-drenched leaves.

Oma’s expression is unchanged and her body perfectly still, but her eyes dart eagerly as they pursue the activities of the garden’s visitor. At last, the goldfinch lands on a branch above her head, coming to a rest.

There is silence again and a gentle breeze brushes past. Then, another surge of activity. Three more songbirds, companions of the first, flit through the foliage; a charm of goldfinches.

Ornithological collective nouns are often redundant: the solitary owl is rarely seen in a pair, let alone in a parliament. Goldfinches, however, do roam collectively and ‘charm’ is fittingly descriptive of their enchanting and colourful appearance.

Oma’s slight movements have reconfigured the way in which the light falls on her face.

The sockets of her eyes, previously shaded, are now lit up. Conversely, new shadows are cast around her jaw where the mandible looms over the neck. What had been mid-tones across the upper planes of her face have been replaced by a brightness which extends from the arches of her cheekbones and along the bridge of her nose.

Extending my arm with a paintbrush held upright, I seize this opportunity to make new observations and take measurements. These gentle head movements have revealed valuable new insights into her facial structure.

I squint and measure by gliding my thumb along the veneered handle of the paint-brush. First, the relationship between the nose and the eyes, then the horizontal distance between the cheeks relative to the vertical length of the head. I transfer my observations onto the board in faint brushstrokes, finally locating where the eyes will sit on the canvas.

It seems to me that the panoramic view of a sitter that is available when painting from life offers an artist an unique set of visual information. Photography, by contrast, presents only specific perspectives on a sitter. A photograph can, for instance, capture an image at a far more granular resolution than any human eye. Likewise, editing software can enable us to adjust the spectral and tonal ranges of an image. Yet, photography still lacks some of the visual information needed to inform a painted portrait. The camera lens flattens its subject and the very precision of the photographic image misleadingly suggests that there is a singular, definitive version of reality. On the other hand, a subject observed in the flesh possesses an ever-shifting dimensionality.

In my view, in-person observation remains the most coherent and complete way to understand how a sitter inhabits space and time, although it can be further enhanced by the aid of photography.

Memories of Italy

The German word, Oma, meaning grandmother, is the affectionate name that our family has always used to address my hyper-alert and inquisitive sitter.

At 94 years old, Oma’s mental and physical agility is still awe-inspiring. Highly active, she owned a speedboat until just over a decade ago, relinquishing it reluctantly, and, until this year, she swam every morning.

More recently, as Oma’s pace of life has slowed, she has begun to use a walking stick. Once a skilled mountain-climber, today climbing stairs requires great exertion. Yet Oma’s mind remains a hive of activity; she occupies her spare time with endless crosswords and, a polyglot, she still uses three or four of her languages each week.

The present portrait sitting is taking place in our family home in a leafy suburb of south-west London, encircled by the meandering Thames. Our patch of garden is modest, but its varied flora attracts a constant flow of wildlife that entertains Oma as we bask in the warm sunlight.

On this occasion, besides the goldfinch display, garden guests comprise a robin, whose whistle begins with piercing clarity before dwindling into silvery twitter, a haggard fox, who brushes gingerly through the vegetation, and the wood-pigeons, whose unrelenting cooing verges on monotony.

Wood-pigeons are a more handsome member of the dove and pigeon family than their urban counterparts, the descendants of rock doves, variously known as ‘feral pigeons’ or ‘city doves’, depending on the disposition one has towards their presence. But wood-pigeons are far less elegant (and far more corpulent) than their other cousins, the turtledoves. Oma takes no strong view on their appearance, but is perplexed by the unresolved structure of their call:

‘They always stop halfway through the song!’

I nod in agreement. Whilst the whistle of the blackbird is euphonious and varied, the wood-pigeon’s murmur is repetitive, bordering on intrusive.

In the background, the two family cats slink into and out of the house. Often they lounge on the shed roof, occasionally they leap over the fence to explore neighbouring plots, but they never seem to their attention towards the pigeons.

‘What did Anna have to say earlier, Oma?’

Each Sunday, at 11:00am, Oma rings her oldest friend, Anna Cappuccino. Anna is a lady of the exact same age as Oma, almost to the day. They have known each other since 1933 when they met in Bologna aged 7. Almost a century later, they still exchange weekly updates in bubbling, excitable Italian.

Anna, now deprived of her eyesight, has moved to near Lake Cuomo where she lives with her daughter’s family and is frequently visited by an extensive progeny. The Cappuccinos seem almost absurdly stereotypical in being such a large and ebullient Italian family.

In the last few months, however, the continuous stream of visitors to Anna in Lake Como have come to a halt. At the outbreak of the pandemic, Italy was first European nation to experience a deadly wave of coronavirus. As the healthcare system in the northern regions was overwhelmed by surging numbers of cases, the country went into a strict lockdown. Now Anna keeps in touch with her family over the phone.

The customary pattern of life has changed for Oma too. Ordinarily, Oma lives by the Thames, near Tower Bridge in Bermondsey. But while the disruption from the pandemic is ongoing, Oma has re-located to live with us to weather out the storm. That means that I am fortunate enough to enjoy a silver lining despite the ongoing crisis. For, at a time when I should have been cramming for university finals amidst the dusty shelves of a Cambridge college library, I have instead been able to spend an unprecedented length of time with my grandmother, as our family has been brought closer together at home.

‘Anna is well! She spoke with your sister too.’

As Oma recounts that day’s exchange with Anna, the direction of our conversation rambles seamlessly from the present into the past. The warmth of Italian custom that Oma enjoys each week when exchanging updates with Anna reminds her of the kindness she experienced as a child living in Bologna.

An assortment of memories of everyday life resurface as Oma paints a picture of Bologna in the early twentieth century. The vignettes are framed by perpetual sunshine, incomparable cuisine, and evenings spent on rooftops. Character sketches of neighbouring children, parochial artisans, and local eccentrics further enhance the emerging tapestry of life. One particularly vivid memory concerns the brief acquisition of a puppy from a nearby farmyard, whose subsequent loss is still a point of anguish for Oma.

These varied recollections are cherished fondly. From time to time, however, they touch on a less rose-tinted reality:

‘Yes, I remember that particular family very clearly. They were lovely people and the parents were wonderful. The father, especially, was an entertaining and kind man. And, of course, when they banned Italians from talking to Jews, he did not comply. He still came over to greet us and would throw me in the air!’

Oma’s family life in Bologna was not the result of voluntary emigration, but a necessary flight from the seething currents of the twentieth century’s turmoil.

Munich, Weimar Republic, 1926

Born in 1926 to an affluent family and raised in a suburb of Munich, fair-haired and bright-eyed, Oma was by all appearances a typical Bavarian girl and she did not stick out as ‘a Jew’. This is not particularly surprising given that Oma’s maternal ancestors had lived in the German-speaking territories and principalities for centuries, long before the confederation and unification of Germany was ever achieved.

Similarly, Oma’s paternal Jewish forebears arrived in the central European states some centuries before the Austro-Hungarian Empire was formed and outlived its demise. The Furstenheims, the Uiberhals, the Cohns, and the Worms were all families with culturally Jewish roots, but they were also deeply assimilated into their local culture, flourishing within their respective communities.

This assimilation is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the fact that, when, at the outbreak of war in 1914, their states called upon them, Oma’s male relatives re-joined their former military regiments and marched off to far-flung battlefields.

Six uncles were awarded Iron Crosses for services on the Western or Eastern Fronts: some fought in Flanders and bore witness to the carnage of Verdun; one flew aeroplanes for the nascent air-force; others froze in the snow-cloaked wastes of Galicia and the Carpathians; one, operating undercover in the Arabian Peninsula, disappeared in mysterious circumstances, purportedly murdered by desert tribesmen; and another, a tall, handsome officer, was killed by a sniper upon returning to his hometown following the collapse of Austro-Hungary, a week after armistice had been declared and war had supposedly ended.

By the 1920s, Oma’s family had begun to disengage with Jewish cultural traditions. Most had become more or less atheistic, while some had even embraced Catholic or Protestant Christian practices.

Oma’s parents, in particular, were thoroughly assimilated. Her father, Ludwig, was educated at the foremost German university, Heidelberg, and later acquired a post-doctorate degree in Vienna. Subsequently, he achieved notability as a scholar of Goethe. In his spare time, he wrote satirical pieces for local newspapers that found humour in the foibles of everyday Bavarian life. Her mother, Hertha, was a well-educated lady who spent some years working in Berlin before meeting Ludwig. An early adopter of skiing, she loved to take the family up into the Bavarian mountains for holidays.

But what follows is, of course, an all-too familiar story. In the wake of the First World War, extreme political doctrines ran riot as communism and fascism swept through populations ripe for radicalisation. In Germany, the ascendant ‘Nazi’ regime unleashed an expansionist programme of racial ideology. Ultimately, their populist policies, demands for Lebensraum, and eugenicist agenda precipitated warfare on a global scale as well as a genocide of an almost unprecedented magnitude.

In the 1930s, Oma recalls how her school class was summoned to join a political rally in her hometown of Munich, also the birthplace of National Socialism. Oma herself presented as such a typical ‘German’ child that her anti-fascist teacher was able to place her at the front of the parade, right beneath of the eyes of an unsuspecting the Nazi high command.

Witnessing Nazism at its very source in Munich, it soon became evident to Oma’s parents that their family life in Munich was no longer tenable. In 1933, the situation became such that Oma’s family decided to leave Germany altogether and relocate to Italy. They arrived in Bologna via Florence, two university cities where her father had friends and academic connections.

Despite the move, Oma kept in touch with her activist teacher in Munich, Fraulein Köberle, who in turn forwarded letters from her classmates to Bologna. Oma’s replies, supplemented with parcels of Italian culinary delights, were distributed among the class.

Aged just 7 and largely unaware of the seriousness of the developing political situation, Oma’s memories of Munich, like those of Bologna, are almost uniformly fond: games in the local park between the apartment blocks; young boys with slingshots; skiing during the school holidays. She firmly reminds me:

‘Not all Germans were Nazis, not all Italians were fascists.’

But, of course, enough were.

Notes on Florentine Ateliers

The sitting, which had begun in silence, gradually blossoms into conversation.

For me, the aim of painting a portrait is not simply to produce an accurate visual representation, a likeness, of your subject, but also to build a more complete picture of the psychology of your sitter. Often the flow of the conversation corresponds to the flow of the paint on the palette.

For this portrait, I elected to work in oil paint on medium density fibre-board (MDF) that I had primed with a layer of white gesso. Unlike canvas, whose springy cotton undulations can inhibit brushwork, the less textured surface of MDF picks up paint in a more uniform manner.

I find that the immaculate whiteness of a blank canvas can distort the eye’s ability to perceive colour, so I begin my process by neutralising the colour-blinding effects of the board’s white surface with a layer of neutral, ochre-coloured ground.

Typically, as I sketch out the initial measurements of a picture, I first decide on the portrait’s framing, then the composition of the figure as well as the manner of lighting. After that, I can gradually begin to build up the architecture of the face.

At its most strict, my palette only holds five colours: lead white, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, ivory black, and ultramarine blue. This restricted palette is a consequence of a summer spent in Florence studying the methodologies and materials of traditional Florentine ateliers.

These art studios trace their genealogy back through art history to the workshops of Titian, Van Dyck and Velasquez, and pride themselves on preserving for posterity the portraiture techniques that originated in the Italian and Dutch Renaissances. These methods were later enhanced by the society artists of eighteenth century Britain like Gainsborough, Romney, Raeburn, and achieved an unrivalled zenith in the hands of Victorian master-draughtsmen such as John Singer Sargent and Phillip de László in the twilight of the nineteenth century.

Amongst the Florentine ateliers, the ability to produce oil paints, varnishes, and thinners that resemble those used by their revered forebears is a prized craft. In pursuit of that aim, each atelier has developed their own quasi-necromantic practices and arcane recipes (often based more on trial-and-error than on textual sources). Even where original ingredients can be ascertained through textual interrogation, the methods of grinding and mixing are often disputed.

The ingredients themselves can also be difficult to acquire. Burnt sienna, for instance, comes from natural earth pigments from the Siena region in Italy, while ultramarine blue is produced using lapis lazuli from mines in Afghanistan.

Substances used as dilutants for oil paints are similarly esoteric. Typically, the mixer is either: spirit of turpentine (the distillation of resin harvested from pine trees); white spirit (also known as mineral turpentine, the synthetic equivalent of natural turps); or linseed oil (a viscous liquid, pressed from the dried, ripened seeds of flax plants).

These dilutants are invariably pungent, often nauseatingly so, creating the distinctive musk that clings to the rafters of Florentine art studios.

More remarkable still is the fact that these substances are toxic in nature. Long-term exposure to them has proved debilitating or even lethal to many an acolyte of portraiture. Extensive exposure to cadmium may result in a phenomenon referred to as the ‘cadmium blues’, with flu-like symptoms including chills, fever, and muscle ache. Meanwhile, the milder side effects of lead poisoning include vomiting to which I can personally attest following a bungled attempt at grinding the pigment into powder at a studio in the Piazzale Donatello.

Why would any artist bother with such toxic substances? I suppose, in the case of lead white, the paint’s heavy body, when mixed in a certain manner, creates skin tones than are unsurpassed by any other material. Cadmium red, another studio favourite, produces a hue of red whose vibrancy is unrivalled. But mostly, the persistence of these materials derives from a hankering for tradition and lost artistic knowledge on the part of some practitioners, to which I only subscribe in a half-hearted sort of way.

Mercifully, the modern era has heralded the arrival of non-lethal (and more environmentally friendly) substitutes for these essential art supplies that, in my view, are largely successful in imitating the traditional materials.

The Art of People-Watching

As our conversation courses onwards, Oma and I are unexpectedly interrupted by a scratching sound emanating from the foliage that cloaks the fence.

Turning, we see a child’s head peering cautiously out over the wooden lattice of the garden-fence, promptly followed by a second. Delighted, the children stare out in fascination at Oma. She, equally intrigued, peers back, before breaking into a smile and waving hello. This provokes a burst of excited giggling from the children who scramble back into the cover of the neighbouring garden’s bushes.

A self-confessed people watcher, Oma is fascinated by gaze and is indiscriminate in her practice of the art of observation.

In the context of our portrait sitting, as the painter, I am supposedly the observer, while Oma, the sitter, is the observed. Over the course of the sitting, however, I often sense that the roles are reversed.

Oma squints at me unremittingly, frequently tilting her head to get a better view. Posture and enunciation are the foremost targets of her critique as Oma intently observes my demeanour, offering an occasional commentary on the quality of my posture and the clarity of my diction.

Likewise, whenever I have recourse to use ‘technology’ (her censorious label for phones, laptops, and other hardware), Oma demands a full explanation of each machine’s inner-workings. Invariably, her lines of questioning rapidly breach the limits of any technical expertise that I might pretend to have.

As our conversation progresses, she shares some advice that perhaps hint at the deeper-seated origins of her observational habit:

‘My father told me: “Always take an interest in and revere those who you come into contact with, regardless of their background.”’

Eventually, Oma’s family situation in Mussolini’s Italy became as untenable as it had been in Hitler’s Germany. Her father’s closest academic colleague, Professor Bianchi, was co-opted into the Italian Fascist regime in his capacity at the University of Bologna. Oma recalls seeing Bianchi, sat sullenly in a black uniform at the local stadium in Bologna during a political rally. As in Munich, her school class had been compelled to attend the rally and she was taken along with them.

When new laws were passed prohibiting social interactions with Jews, a few neighbours began to shun the family. This appalled Anna Cappuccino, who took her brothers to reprimand a neighbour who refused to acknowledge or even look at Oma’s family in the street. The final straw was the passing of laws banning all foreign Jews from residence in Italy.

Thereafter, it would be illegal for them to remain.

Vienna, Austria, 1908

From the conservatory indoors, the light tones of my sister’s voice glide through the air.

She is sat at the piano, singing warm up scales before tuning her harp. The sound of the notes transport Oma back through time to the sitting room of an apartment in Vienna where her aunt, Henryka, taught piano lessons.

If you ever visit Vienna’s Leopold Museum and enter at the main entrance, near where Mariahilferstrasse meets the Ringstrasse at the Museumplatz, one of the first large portraits that will come into sight is of this same aunt; Henryka Cohn. The portrait, a centrepiece of an art movement which rejected the style of the Viennese Secession, was produced by the erstwhile painter, Richard Gerstl.

Gerstl was the archetype of the tormented artist with an ego to match.

While studying at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, he is reported to have shouted at Christian Griepenkerl, a widely respected professor, the following taunt:

So wie Sie malen, kann ich in den Schnee brunzen!

I can piss in the snow better than you can paint!

Gerstl quickly gained a reputation for being psychologically unstable, impulsive, and radical. When his affair with the wife of a friend fell apart, Gerstl entered a characteristic frenzy.

On a cold November night in 1908, distraught and isolated, Gerstl retired to his studio and gathered together all the artworks, letters and personal papers on which he could lay his hands. Then, setting the bonfire alight, he hung himself from the rafters in front of the studio mirror. The autopsy sardonically notes that he also managed to stab himself.

That is how, along with almost the entirety of his artistic oeuvre, Gerstl passed into oblivion, aged just 25. Henryka’s portrait, meanwhile, by virtue of the fact that it was hung in the family apartment, evaded Gerstl’s ruinous fate.

Yet, despite surviving Gerstl’s death, the painting did not remain safely in the apartment for long.

When I mention Gerstl to Oma, she reminds me of a similarly tragic event. Henryka’s sister, Hansi, had died suddenly of an infection, causing a young Austrian officer who had been infatuated with her to commit suicide in despair. A photograph of Hansi still hangs in the frame above Oma’s bed.

My father leans over at this point to expand on the details of Henryka’s life. He relates that she was a vibrant character, a proto-vegan and yoga enthusiast, who advocated for women’s rights and female education. My other sister, who has been reading a book nearby and who is a long-time practitioner of vegan-ism, is particularly delighted by these details.

Vienna, Austria, 1938

In February 1938, before leaving Bologna for the final time, Oma’s family paid one last visit to her father’s relatives in Vienna.

Oma relates to me details of the train journey from Italy to Austria, reminiscing about particular stop-offs, hotels and meals. But other, less convivial memories also return:

For the first time on that journey I felt very frightened.

Fahrkarten! the guards would shout as they came by in their uniforms to stamp the tickets.

I shall not forget that feeling of being afraid - afraid that at any moment they might seize our luggage, or us.

The Vienna visit was meant to be brief, but when Oma’s father contracted pneumonia, the family had to delay their return, awaiting his recovery.

Oma recalls spending pleasant afternoons skating on the local ice-rink during that period. But it was a close call. Just weeks after their departure, Anschluss was declared as the Third Reich annexed Austria on 12 March 1938.

Then, the ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish property began; namely, the systematic expropriation and murder of the Austrian Jews. Adolf Eichmann was dispatched by the Nazi Party to oversee the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung in Wien (The Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna). Henryka, like all of Oma’s family and millions of other European Jews, had her entire estate expropriated, all her property and assets, everything from apartments to businesses, paintings, furniture, manuscripts, and musical instruments. Indeed, the wealth extracted during this period was so enormous that it formed the financial bedrock for the Nazis war effort.

In May 1939, Henryka, sensing the gravity of the situation, weighed up her options. Evidently, she determined that personal safety was more valuable than material possessions. Having made friends during travels in Great Britain during the 1920s, she was incredibly fortunate that two of those families, the Abbotts and the Gardiners, were willing to serve as her sponsors. As soon as she could, Henryka fled Austria and arrived in London with almost no personal possessions save for the clothes on her back. That is how she escaped the Holocaust.

The rest of the family was less fortunate. Henryka’s brother Richard and his wife Ilse, for instance, with whom Oma’s family had stayed while in Vienna, sought the right to emigrate to Australia but were refused at the embassy. They perished a few months later in disease-ridden concentration camps.

Another member of the family was Ernst Flatow (one of the aforementioned Iron Cross holders, who had been recognised for acts at Verdun). Having converted to Christianity, Ernst became a celebrated priest in his local community. Despite being presented with the opportunity to leave Germany, Flatow chose to remain with his church and congregation. Subsequently, Church authorities, in collaboration with the Nazi regime, identified him as a Jew and deported him to the Warsaw Ghetto, where he died as a forced labourer.

That is how so many of the family were murdered, once their possessions had been expropriated, they were forced out of their communities into ghettos and then camps.

As for The Portrait of Henryka Cohn, Oma recalls seeing it on the occasions when the family visited Vienna. Indeed, if you inspect the reverse of the canvas, as one scholar notes, you will find Henryka’s handwriting, recording her name and address. The Museum, however, claims that, “the picture was never owned by the Cohn family and was found as part of the artist’s estate.” To date, no sources have been produced to validate these claims.

Today, Henryka’s portrait still hangs in Vienna, the city of its birth. There it can be appreciated by all. Appreciated by all that is, if all are willing to pay the Leopold Museum’s €20 entrance fee…

Windhoek, German South-West Africa, 1939

Following their narrow escape from Vienna, Oma’s parents resolved to leave Europe altogether.

Initial enquiries were sent by her father to friends in the United States. There was a relative who had recently moved to an emerging Jewish state in the Middle East, but fresh legislation had restricted Jewish migration to this area of Palestine. The sheer flood of those fleeing violent persecution across Eurasia, from Russia to France, had become unmanageable.

Their deliverance came instead in the form of her mother’s uncle, Erich, who had emigrated many years earlier from Berlin to a colonial outpost in German south-west Africa, modern-day Namibia.

Erich had emigrated to the German colony to establish a diamond mine where he planned make his fortune, which he duly did. As Oma notes, however, Erich’s enterprise may have been prompted less by his thirst for adventure and more by his expensive vices. She grins as she recalls the man:

‘A drinker and a gambler!’

In January 1939, the family left Italy for Namibia. Having experienced social alienation and the hostility of neighbours in Munich, Bologna, and Vienna, Oma’s family was shocked to observe the way in which black Africans were treated by settlers in Windhoek. Oma recalls gloomily:

‘My mother and father interacted with the people who did serving jobs differently to the way in which my friends parents treated them. They treated them with respect and took an interest in their lives.’

Cape Town, British South Africa, 1940

We pause while Oma takes her afternoon tea.

Gazing into the distance, my eye is caught by a sculpture in the undergrowth and I am reminded that Oma too has played the role of the artist.

For some years, Oma was an amateur sculptor. Her sculptures and pottery line the walls of her apartment as well as the homes of many family and friends. The object that has jolted my memory is one of these sculptures, titled, Siren, it is an arresting, turquoise-green figure that now sits in the undergrowth of our garden. Oma’s sculptures are often sprawling figures, whose limbs and clothes are an abstract mass of drapes and folds that turn heavy inert material into intelligible forms nestled within swirls and spirals.

For Oma, it seems to me that the steady intensity of her gaze is equalising. Persistent observation facilitates understanding and tolerance, while refusal to engage has damaging consequences.

Many hours spent haunting life drawing sessions have taught me the same lesson. Regardless of how you may have felt about the model’s body when it was first unveiled in all its naked glory, by the time you depart two hours later, they will have become intriguing and beautiful. Whether obese, emaciated, scarred, or wrinkled, after sustained scrutiny every body becomes uniquely attractive and fascinating.

I noticed this phenomenon in its most extreme form whilst studying the disfigured faces of early facial reconstructive surgery patients, the victims of the First World War’s industrialised warfare. At first, these men’s visceral facial wounds were difficult to look at. And yet, after spending many hours observing, drawing and painting them, they became not just ordinary, but even fascinating and beautiful.

Following a their stop-off with Erich in Namibia where many German settlers still had strong affiliations with the Nazi party, the family decided to move once more, this time to British South Africa.

In Cape Town, Oma once again had to adapt quickly to her altered circumstances. At school, she learnt two more languages, English and Afrikaans, in addition to the German and Italian she already knew.

‘When you're a child, you learn fast because you want to fit in – you pick up the mannerisms and the accent.

After just a month I recited Wordsworth’s daffodils poem in front of the entire school.’

The reference to Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is a jarring reminder of the life that the pandemic has disrupted. Wordsworth was an undergraduate at St John’s in Cambridge, the place that I should be studying at this moment in time.

At this time of year, I think to myself, the daffodils would be in full bloom in the wildflower meadows on the banks of the River Cam.

Eyes & Wrinkles

Oma’s face is beginning to emerge from the board’s surface.

I work from the darks to the lights, adding in half-tones as I progress. After the main forms are blocked in, I start work on the detail. When a steadier hand is required, I rest my brush on a mahl-stick. When broader, more dynamic brushstrokes are in order, I alternate between standing up, sitting down, striding towards the easel, then backing away again. These movements help me as I attempt to gauge the accuracy of the portrait’s likeness, revealing the proportional discrepancies between life and art.

Protracted periods spent staring at the painting close up can cause a sort of blindness, an inability to see the wood from the trees and the overall likeness can be lost as you are drawn too far into specific details.

There is an anecdote preserved by a contemporary biographer of Gainsborough who records that the artist’s most cherished paintbrush had a six-foot handle. Other techniques seek the same end. You may sometimes see artists with their backs to their subject, holding a mirror. It sounds counterintuitive, but the method is sound – an inverted reflection often highlights proportional inaccuracies in a portrait.

‘I am going to need you to look over here for a moment and sit rather still for a few minutes, Oma.’

I prepare to tackle the part of the portrait which is perhaps the most important of all - the eyes.

Intuitively, when inspecting a portrait, the viewer’s eyes are drawn to the eyes of the painting. This may be because eyes form an important part of recognition and emotional communication in social interactions. For this reason, a pair of eyes can make or break a portrait.

Personally, I find each element of the eye deeply satisfying to paint: the swimming, cloudy colours of the iris; the milky whites of the eyes; the glistening rims of the eyelids and the fold of skin in the corner (apparently known as the ‘lacrimal caruncle’); the shadow cast by the eyelashes; and, most importantly of all, the gleam of light in the pupil.

In Oma’s case, the precise colour of her eyes is a point of contention. My sister reckons them to be blue, but my father argues for a sort of green hue, while I maintain that they are more of a blue-grey colour. Oma, for her part, reckons that their colour may even have changed somewhat over the years.

Skin, on the other hand, which covers most of the face, does not stand out in quite the same way and is frequently the most frustrating part of a portrait, depending on whether the face is young or elderly. The smooth, tautness of young skin is completely different to the myriad of crisscrossing wrinkles on older weathered skin.

Catching a glimpse of the portrait, Oma exclaims:

‘Just wrinkles! My goodness, I look in the mirror and that’s all I see – a little old lady staring back.’

London, United Kingdom, 1946

Since it is seventy-fifth anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, my mother has furnished the house with a bunting of Union Jack flags.

I ask Oma whether she remembers where she was on 8 May 1945. Her memory of that day, as of much of the Second World War, is indistinct.

Living in Cape Town, so far from the main theatres of conflict, one of her strongest memories of 1939-45 is of knitting socks for the troops. But her recollections of the post-war period are illuminating.

In 1946, soon after the war and aged 20, Oma emigrated from South Africa to Britain. At the University of Cape Town, she and several friends had been appalled by apartheid South Africa. A few of them had decided that they no longer wished to remain there.

Oddly enough, when Oma first arrived in London, her first residence was just two roads over from where are currently sat.

Oma recalls the particular phenomena that marked out that era: smog, so thick that in the daytime you could not see the street in front of you and being guided by the dim glimmer of lamp-posts; cycling on clear days down Whitehall through streets devoid of cars; and rationing with the accompanying strictures of a rationed diet.

Unlike Cape Town, London had been severely affected by the war. The docklands had been razed to the ground, while ancient monuments and archives had been destroyed in fires. For decades afterwards, the rows of suburban terraced houses were punctuated by bomb-sites.

As Oma talks, her voice is slowly drowned out by the roar of an aeroplane engine overhead. Our garden is directly under the Heathrow flight-path and when a plane passes over, its sound deafens any conversation and obliterates the birdsong. During the current pandemic, however, the continuous flow of planes has ceased, and this sort of interruption is a much rarer occurrence.

When the roar subsides, Oma recalls how, in the 1940s, local residents, deeply affected by their experience of the air-raids and the Blitz, would still flinch when they heard the drone of a plane’s engine.

Dreams & Brushstrokes

Throughout the afternoon we have taken regular breaks and we pause for another now. During the pause, Oma casts her eye over an essay I have just completed which discusses the significance of dreams in the Aeneid. Oma approves of it but notes, solemnly:

‘You dream less as you get older. Nights are disrupted and you experience a different sort of sleep – less vivid.’

During this final break, I doodle a face on my palette in wide translucent brushstrokes. A rugged old chap stares back at me from the wooden plate. As we commence the final sitting, I again need the palette space and the face, however splendid, cannot stay.

Wiping the transient figure away with a cloth, I am reminded of a moment from school days. While I was grappling with an almost complete painting but struggling to finish, my art teacher had loomed over my shoulder.

‘May I suggest something?’ said Mr Flint, to which I willingly replied, ‘Why of course, Sir!’

Without further ado, he whipped out a cloth and wiped almost the entire image off the board in one clean stroke. Stunned, it took me a moment to appreciate the point, but his reasoning was sound, and the advice often re-echoes in my head:

‘Don’t get allow yourself to wallow in the details of the piece. Keep it fresh, and if you find you are getting stuck, wipe it away and start again.’

Memory & Remembering

‘What was it we had last night? I wrote it somewhere… Ah here it is!

Blackberry crumble.’

Oma now writes much more to help her remember. Just yesterday, she had described to me how her mother had passed away aged just 50 with advanced Alzheimer’s, barely able to remember her husband.

Oma has so far successfully retained her faculties for nine decades, but just as much as in the twentieth century, forgetfulness and dementia are still hallmarks of old age.

‘It’s strange, if I do not talk about you playing ‘saxophone’ often enough that word goes! A word like that – just gone! It seems to return eventually though.’

But perhaps one day it will not return.

As the daylight begins to fade and the shadows on Oma’s face start to lengthen, I sense that it is almost time for this sitting to draw to a close. A portrait painted in natural daylight cannot be continued under artificial lightning. The effect of the light change on the face is too extreme to sustain continuity. This portrait is complete.

Almost immediately, I form a vision of a further, final portrait of Oma to add to the small collection I have now accumulated.

For all my pontificating on the virtues of painting from life, the final portrait that I produce will have to be from photographs. This is in part due to the fact that I want to change tack and produce a more photo-realistic portrait. The more urgent reason, though, is the fact that Oma will soon be returning home.

When she arrived at ours in early April, she had been very ill, and it was unclear what degree of restriction the government would impose. Now, she has recovered and, as the timeline of the lockdown becomes clearer and restrictions are gradually lifted, the time for her to resume her former mode of life has come.

Etymologically, the word ‘portrait’ comes via French portraire from Latin protrahere – ‘to drag out’. This seems quite fitting.

To produce a portrait is to draw out a likeness by literally dragging materials into a form which communicates the subject. In the case of oil painting, this dragging constitutes rearranging of the grains of pigment and oily fluid in a search for the right combination of hues. In the case of clay sculpting, it is a literal dragging of the earthy material into a recognisable form.

Another semantic shade of protrahere is ‘to bring light to’ or ‘to expose’. This too resonates well with an artistic rendering: the artist applies their individual hand and eye to a subject, bringing to light their particular representation of the subject.

A portrait offers the viewer a record of the artists’ interaction with and experience of the subject. Often portraits unintentionally highlight and bring to light features of a subject, inducing in the viewer new ways of seeing the subject.

I look down at the portrait that I have produced. Then, I look back up at Oma.

Saddened, I feel that I have not captured a sense of her being and have not done justice to my sitter. This is troubles me because I realise that my inadequacies as a draughtsman will be read literally as the honest way in which I perceive Oma.

Hopefully, I shall have more success next time.

The Final Sitting

Over the course of our sittings, the conversation has spanned almost a century of life.

Musing to myself as I pack away the paints and clean the brushes, I wonder to what extent Oma’s experience of the instability and disruption caused by the Second World War shaped her perspective on life. Then I wonder whether our perspective on life will be moulded by the experience of the coronavirus pandemic.

Oma’s comments have infused vivid energy into the carefully researched family history that I have been taught by my father. His is a fountain of genealogical knowledge and he is always at hand to fill the gaps in my understanding of the historical facts. But Oma’s insights into the daily realities of life in the past bestow upon those facts a new three-dimensionality.

My father, retiring from the study, joins us in the garden to read The Spectator nearby and ruminates out loud on some gloomy facet of the pandemic.

Turning to me, Oma very seriously stresses the point:

‘I don’t care two hoots if I get this virus or not! You see, I have reached a stage of life where my perspective is now different. Other people will be anxious, but I am not. I’m prepared.’

As I support Oma up from her chair, our attention is caught one final time by a birdsong.

Gazing upwards, we see a solitary shape climbing into the clear expanse of blue sky above us. It is a skylark, soaring effortlessly into the heavens. As it soars, there is no break in its song, rather a perpetual melody, streaming into the heavens.

Appendix: Further Reading

In 2023, several years after writing this piece, I found myself in Paris, at the apartment of a close friend. There, late on evening, he pulled out several of his favourite graphic novels from the bookshelves. He commended to me one book in particular, ‘Maus’ by Art Spiegelman. Knowing his recommendations to be solid, I took the book to bed with me. Some hours later, I finally put it down again having finished reading it that very same night.

Like many texts that relate accounts of the Holocaust, the book is as horrifying as it is all-consuming. What I found particularly spell-binding about Maus, however, was the narrative style. The novel’s narrative takes the form of the author conversing with his father. Over the course of several conversations, Spiegelman learns about his parent’s lives before, during, and after the Second World War. The conversations narrate the past but the narrative flow is frequently interrupted by life in the author’s present day. In reading Spiegelman, I was struck that I had unwittingly chosen a comparable narrative style with which to write this piece.

Maus is a gripping and worthwhile read. Given that this piece touches on the Holocaust, for anyone who wishes to better comprehend the magnitude of that crime against humanity, I would like to take this moment to recommend that book, as well as the following three sources:

• BBC Archive, Richard Dimbleby’s Report on Belsen-Bergen Concentration Camp, April 1945 (audio)

• The Rest is History, The Man Who Escaped Auschwitz, January 2023 (audio)

• The World at War, Genocide, Episode 20, March 1974 (video documentary)

Many of the book’s messages resonated with me, so I will now subject you to my thoughts and reflections on the text. In particular, I will reflect on Attia’s approach with reference to Seneca’s ‘On the Shortness of Life’. In comparing Seneca’s philosophical outlook on longevity with Attia’s approach, I will ask: what does it mean to outlive?

On Longevity

Dr Peter Attia is a longevity guru and talking head. As a public persona, Attia makes appearances on a broad sweep of self-improvement podcasts and shows. Indeed, as much as it pains me to admit it, I first came across Peter Attia on Steven Bartlett’s podcast.1

As Attia himself often likes to remind an audience, he is a former surgical oncologist and later trained as a financial risk manager, so his credentials are relatively robust. These days, as far as I can discern, Attia operates a medical practice for an ultra-wealthy elite. These individuals reportedly part with hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to retain him as their personal physician and medical adviser.

In summary, this book ‘Outlive’ is a sort of manifesto that outlines Attia’s principles for maximising longevity. The book itself is not particularly well edited and is riddled with clichés, but the ideas that Attia amalgamates in this book, while simple, are powerful when considered in combination.

Attia refers to his approach as ‘Medicine 3.0’ (exempli gratia of aforementioned cliché). In his words:

The aim is to outlive… not to achieve a faster marathon time or bragging rights at the gym, but to live a longer and better life, and most importantly, a life in which you can continue enjoying physical activity well into your later years.

In short, Attia wants not only to increase longevity, but also the quality of life. In doing so, he differentiates between lifespan and what he terms ‘healthspan’. Attia again:

The goal is not to increase lifespan (how long we live), but to increase healthspan (how long we can live healthy enough to do the things we enjoy).

We want to spend as little time as possible in a state of decreased mental, physical, or emotional capacity. Ideally, we would all enjoy long, healthy, fruitful lives and then have a quick descent to the end of our lives, without years of decreased capacity and disease.

He illustrates this difference with the following visual prompt:2

And to further reinforce the concept of healthspan, Attia asks the reader to perform the following thought experiment:

Devise a list of 10-20 things you would like to be able to do in your final decade of life.

To get the ball rolling, Attia offers the following illustrative examples:

1. Hike through a forest for 30 minutes.

2. Stand up from the floor using your own power (only one arm for support).

3. Pick up a young child from the floor.

4. Carry two bags of shopping from the local shop to home.

5. Lift a small suitcase into an overhead compartment

6. Balance on one leg for thirty seconds, eyes open

7. Sleep for 6 hours each night consecutively.

8. Have a 1-hour conversation on a specialist subject.

9. Have sex with a partner.

10. Climb 4 flights of stairs in 3 minutes.

11. Open a jar.

12. Do 30 consecutive skipping-rope jumps.

This thought exercise very much gripped my attention. For context, I am extremely fortunate to have several very long-lived grandparents, currently enjoying their ninth decade of life. Seeing up close the trajectories of their respective healthspans has given me cause to reflect in recent years. Observing the longevity of their mental and physical health, and the pathways into decline that they are experiencing, I increasingly wonder how I might maximise the chance of enjoying good health for as long as them.

In the opening section of his book, Attia first and foremost acknowledges that genetics play a significant role in determining an individual's lifespan, discussing factors involved in the genetic lottery that is healthspan.

Attia tells several amusing anecdotes about eccentric centenarians such as the world’s longest-lived person ever verified, the French woman Jeanne Calment, a supercentenarian who lived until 122 (from 1875 until 1997). She supposedly once joked, “I’ve only ever had one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it” and kept smoking until the age of 117. There are plenty of other remarkable stories besides. For instance, Polish-born Yisrael Kristal suffered as a forced labourer at Auschwitz, thereby surviving the Holocaust, and yet still lived to age 113 and is amongst the top ten longest lived men ever recorded.

Contrastingly, Attia also shares several tragic anecdotes about his own family members who died prematurely as a result of genetic predispositions to cardiovascular conditions.

He writes:

If you do happen to have centenarians in your family tree, let me offer my congratulations. Such genes are, after all, a form of inherited luck. 

And asks:

Can we, through our behaviours, somehow reap the same benefits that centenarians get for ‘free’ via their genes? Can we mimic the centenarians’ phenotype, the physical traits that enable them to resist disease and survive for so long, even if we lack their genotype? Is it possible to outlive our own life expectancy if we are smart and strategic and deliberate about it?

Then, Attia moves into the heart of the book, turning our attention away from the inevitability of genetic factors towards the tactical domains that any one of us can address in order to alter our own healthspan. Attia is clear that, while genetics provide a baseline for longevity potential, lifestyle choices significantly influence how those genetic predispositions manifest themselves.

Attia is particularly interested in the ways in which these lifestyle choices influence our risk of dying from some of the most common chronic diseases: cancer; heart disease; type 2 diabetes; and dementia.3

In short, the key features of Attia’s approach are:

1. Exercise.

2. Nutrition.

3. Sleep.

4. Emotional Health.

5. Pharmacology.

Hang on…

Isn’t it obvious, blindingly obvious even, that those would be the key features of longevity?

Well, it is obvious. But that is precisely the point. None of the insights offered in Attia’s book are in any way ground-breaking. The beauty of his message is that the levers for improving longevity are profoundly simple (except for those which are genetically determined). To outlive, you do not have to absorb hours of content from influencers, buy their latest products, or follow their fad diets, though you may find yourself reading Attia’s book…

It is the very simplicity of Attia’s approach that makes it a rather difficult programme to follow. There is no hack, there is no elixir. There is no pill that we can take to extend life.

1. Exercise.

Attia considers exercise to be by far the most potent domain for any given individual to take change the course of their own lifespan and healthspan. In short:

• Exercise as much as possible.

• Any exercise above zero is better than doing nothing.

• Do a wide variety of exercise.

Specifically, Attia favours cross-training and generalisation in exercise. He measures success in terms of three main components:

• Aerobic measures. Aerobic efficiency and maximum aerobic output (VO2 max, which is the maximum (max) rate (V) of oxygen (O₂) your body is able to use during exercise).

• Strength. For fast-twitch ‘type 2’ muscle fibres and bone mineral density.

• Stability. To avoid injury through flexibility, form, and cross-training.

Attia lays out study after study to establish a causal link between exercise and health, demonstrating that regular exercisers live longer than their more sedentary counterparts (typically, as much as a decade longer).

Each study that he references is selected for being of the highest available quality. Yet, he is very open about the limitations of this approach. He writes:

Living systems are messy, and confounding, and complex. Our understanding of even fairly simple things is constantly evolving.

The best we can hope for is reducing our uncertainty. A good experiment in biology only increases or decreases our confidence in the probability that our hypothesis is true or false. 

In the absence of multiple, repeated, decades-long, cross-species, randomised clinical trials that might answer our questions with certainty, we are forced to think in terms of probabilities and risks.

In his view, peak cardiorespiratory fitness (as measured by VO2 max) is the most effective and accessible predictor of longevity that we have at present.

Being below average in your age category in terms of VO2 max leads to a 2-4x greater increased risk in all-cause mortality (death from any cause) compared to the group with the highest fitness level (Kokkinos et al 2022).

Muscle strength (not size) is another metric that Attia identifies in the clinical literature as a strong predictor of health and lifespan. For instance, he references a study showing that muscle lean mass is a strong predictor of all-cause mortality (specifically, the appendicular lean mass index which measures the muscle mass of their extremities, arms and legs, normalised to height).

Attia writes:

Seniors with the least muscle mass (also known as lean mass) are at the greatest risk of dying from all causes.

One Chilean study looked at about 1,000 men and 400 women, with an average age of 74 at enrolment. The researchers divided the subjects into quartiles, based on their appendicular lean mass index, and followed them over time.

After 12 years, approximately 50% of those in the lowest quartile were dead, compared to only 20% of those in the highest quartile for lean mass.

Whilst this study alone cannot establish definitive causality int his case, the strength and reproducibility of these findings suggest that this is more than simple correlation. Given that ‘falls’ are by far the leading cause of accidental death amongst the oldest cohort of the US population, it is not difficult to infer why there may be a causal relationship between strength and all-cause mortality.

Most remarkable of all, for me at least, is a study referenced by Attia that suggests that another proxy measure of strength, greater handgrip strength, is directly correlated with having a lower risk of developing dementia (Esteban-Cornejo et al 2022).

Elsewhere, Attia highlights that habitual exercisers do not only tend to live longer, but they also stay in better health, with less morbidity from causes related to metabolic dysfunction (citing Booth & Zwetsloot 2010).

Interestingly, these studies indicate that the benefits of exercise begin with any amount of activity north of zero. In other words, even a brisk walk represents a vast improvement over remaining sedentary for your health (Citing Lee & Buchner 2008).

2. Nutrition.

Attia’s approach to diet, nutrition, and nutritional biochemistry is also disarmingly simple. In brief:

• Eat food.

• Do not eat too much food.

• Eat mostly plants.

The key questions Attia poses when considering any given individual are:

• Are they over nourished or undernourished?

• Are they under muscled or adequately muscled?

• Are they metabolically healthy or not?

Attia favours achieving an optimal caloric intake without cutting out specific food groups to maintain healthy weight and metabolism. But he does advise the following specific measures:

• Eliminate fructose-sweetened drinks.4

• Avoid alcohol. Learn how your body responds to foodstuffs via continuous glucose monitoring.

• Consume sufficient protein, but over the course of the day rather than in a single sitting.

• Favour monosaturated and polyunsaturaed fatty acids, minimise saturated fats.

And other practical advice that I found enjoyable included:

• Buy fresh produce and take the time to prepare it yourself.

• Become a chef for yourself and for your friends.

• Use the best oils you can get. Undercook whenever possible and eat raw vegetables. Use good salt. Use great spices.

• Add food containing fibres like beans and lentils.

• Don't buy ultra-processed food. Avoid processed meat.

• Limit ordering prepared food. Don't eat out in places that might use ultra-processed ingredients or low quality meat and vegetables.

• When drinking, buy the most expensive red wine and champagne you can afford. It has a different quality and will prevent you from drinking too much.

3. Sleep.

Next, Attia prioritises sleep. His advice, in order of priority, can be summarised as follows:

• Maintain the consistency of wake time (even on weekends).

• Improve quality of sleep by adjusting temperature and light, minimising anxiety-inducing activities at bedtime, reducing alcohol intake, and limiting food consumption after dark.

• Increase sleep duration (less than 7 hours per night is typically associated with worsened health outcomes).

4. Emotional Health.

Attia also identifies emotional health as a component of overall well-being and longevity. In particular, he outlines the connection between emotional and physical health, recognising that emotional stress and psychological factors can have profound effects on the body's physiology and contribute to the development of chronic diseases.

Attia advocates for strategies to manage emotional health and to develop resilience in the face of life's challenges. For instance, he suggests:

• Mindfulness practices.

• Meditation.

• Exposure to daylight.

• Time in nature.

• Spending time with family, friends.

• Cultivating supportive relationships.

• Dialectical behaviour therapy.

Overall, the key message from Attia is the fundamental importance of addressing emotional stressors as part of a comprehensive approach to health optimisation.

5. Pharmacology.

Finally, Attia surveys pharmacological interventions. He makes clear that, in his view, although relevant for particular conditions, pharmacology is the least important domain.

By pharmacology, he means any exogenous molecules: drugs, supplements, and hormones. Chief amongst these molecules for him are statins and other cholesterol and lipid-lowering drugs, although he emphasises that additional testing is necessary for any given individual to find out which medications in which combination are most appropriate. It should be taken as read that I am medically illiterate, so my ability to evaluate this part of the book is impaired by my status as a lay-person. To this end, however, Attia offers a mercifully simplified primer on several disciplines within medicine, with particular focus on cardiology and oncology.

Finally, Attia enumerates an eye-watering range of screens and scans that he advises his ultra-wealthy patients to undertake. Above all, he is an advocate for early detection of underlying problems. As a result, Attia has patients undergo testing earlier and more frequently than most other healthcare professionals would advise. If of interest, I list the tests that are mentioned in the book in the Appendix, all of which, Attia informs us, can be conducted without a medical referral… for a price!

Seeing the Wood for the Trees

By and large, I was strongly convinced of Attia’s framework for improving longevity and even the minutiae of his approach. This is perhaps because his proposed approach aligns with my intuitive vision of a healthy lifestyle.

What’s more, under the gimmicky exterior, Attia is surprisingly measured and empirical. He refuses to engage in binary absolutes. When asked by a friend, “should I do more cardio or more weights?” Attia’s response is to reject the binary premise of the question. Instead, he proposes that it is possible to have your cardio and lift it…

This balanced, pragmatic approach extends also to questions around nutrition, exercise and sleep. On several key topics of debate, Attia also demonstrates his ability to adapt to new information that challenges his beliefs. When presented with evidence that contradicts his understanding, he update his priors accordingly. In my view, Attia’s epistemic humility, by which I mean his ability to recognise the incomplete-ness of his own knowledge, helps distance his doctrine from the sort of bio-hacking, death-cheating bro-science that often mires discourses around longevity.

That said, I am still unsettled somewhat by Attia’s pursuit of longevity.

Attia is uncompromising, verging on fanatical and he himself is the ultimate test subject for his all-consuming health regime. As much as I agree with the contents of his book, the obsession with maximising healthspan seems somehow deficient, leaving little room for anything else. Admittedly, the closing chapters of the book expand on the significance of emotional health in achieving a longevity but still I found myself wondering: does Attia occasionally loses the wood for the trees?

What of the soul?

And to that end, let’s now turn briefly to Seneca.

On the Shortness of Life

de brevitate vitae (‘On the Shortness of Life’) is a text presented in the style of a letter from the author, Seneca the Younger, to a friend called Paulinus.

In the letter, Seneca ruminates on the nature of human life and, in doing so, considers longevity.

The main thrust of Seneca’s argument is as follows: people often lament the brevity of life when, in reality, they waste vast swathes of their life on trivial matters. Seneca reflects on what it means to use time wisely and how to live more meaningfully rather than merely existing for a long time. In particular, Seneca takes great pleasure in disparaging anyone who pursues longevity for its own sake.

For Seneca, it is not the length of the life that we live that matters, but how we use the time at our disposal. In his view, it is better to live fully and virtuously for a short time than to live for many years without purpose or fulfilment.

I very much agree with Seneca on all these points. It is only where he draws his conclusion that he begins to lose me somewhat. For Seneca, the ultimate way to live virtuously is to study philosophy (see XIV below). Readers will no doubt determine for themselves whether they find this to be a convincing conclusion to draw.