Skylines, the CityMetric podcast

Partly because of the crisis, partly for reasons we’ll come to in a moment, our production schedule on Skylines has got a bit lax. So the first of this week’s interviews – with my pal Claire Cocks in Palermo, about what lockdown, Italian-flavour, looks like – is already a little out of date. Italy, unlike the UK, has begun lifting its lockdown. 

But it’s still a fascinating insight into both what a stricter lockdown looks l...

I’m still locked down, and so, I assume, are you, so this week’s show is a game of two-halves.

In the present, I speak to my lockdown companion, my partner Agnes Frimston – who, as it happens, co-hosts the newly weekly Chatham House podcast Undercurrents – about how much fun she’s having being shut in a one-bedroom flat with me with no end in sight. We also talk about the various coping strategies the world at large is developin...

Apologies for the fact this week’s podcast is a little bit late. But in my defence, both time and the calendar have lost all meaning.

Anyway. Something like a third of the world is currently in lockdown to deal with the coronavirus crisis, including Skylines’ little corner of it. So on the assumption that she didn’t have anywhere more fun to be right now, this seemed a good moment to invite my former co-host Stephanie Boland to ...

The mayoral walks mini-series began in an act of trolling. Rory Stewart launched his campaign to be mayor of London through the unusual strategy of walking all over London and tweeting about it; I have spent large chunks of my life walking all over London and tweeting about it; Twitter at large suggested we combine forces, and maybe turn it into a podcast. 

And, once a couple of other candidates had helpfully put the pressu...

In all the excitement over the London mayoral election, and Brexit, and coronavirus, and the end of civilisation as we know it, it might have escaped you that there are mayoral elections due in other English cities in early May. So, on this week’s podcast, we're looking at one of those. 

The last time Skylines spoke to Jen Williams, politics and investigations editor of the Manchester Evening News, it was to talk about...

This week, it’s the second in our mayoral walks mini-series. 

Sian Berry is the co-leader of the Green party, a member of the London Assembly, and is currently running as the party’s candidate to be mayor of the capital for the third time. A few weeks before Christmas, we spent a gloriously crisp winter afternoon together walking from Manor House station to Dalston together, a route chosen mostly because it took us along Green ...

In just over three months, England goes to the polls, again, for local elections. This time round the big story, at least so far as we’re concerned, will be the mayoral elections in London, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and various other cities and city regions.

To find out what to expect, I invited the New Statesman politics editor Stephen Bush back to Skylines to tell us what to look out for. At one point he genuinely ...

Rory Stewart likes to walk around London. So do I. And so, a few months ago, someone on Twitter gave me an idea for a fun wheeze: that we could walk together and turn it into a podcast.

That walk will, hopefully, happen soon. But in the mean time I've been out and about with a number of the other candidates to be mayor of London.

So this is the first of a mini-series. My companion on this walk, which took place last November, is the ...

I’ve barely been in the office since we released the last Skylines, so this week it's a guest episode.

Commonwealth Voices is another podcast series from our founding producer Roifield Brown, of Map Corner fame. Last year it produced a lovely episode on the air pollution crisis currently afflicting Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. Here's Roifield's blurb:

What happens when air quality is so dangerous, it brings businesses, schools ...

I realised earlier that this is the fourth Skylines Christmas Special, which apart from being a marker of quite how long I've been doing this thing now, presumably explains why there are giant steampunk robots marching across Victorian London again. 

Anyway. On this week's show, we're not going to talk about the election result – partly because I'm too depressed, partly because we've now got about four and a half years to t...

Well, here we go again. We’re seven days out from polling day here in the UK, and I don’t know about you but I’m not feeling great about it.

So as a form of therapy I dragged Patrick Maguire, who’s been travelling around the country as part of his role as the New Statesman’s politics correspondent, back to the podcast to offer some reassurance. He couldn’t offer any.

Anyway - we did have a fascinating chat about regional diff...

This podcast has been a bit parochial of late (read: London-bound) so this week we're going abroad. 

Max Rashbrooke is a journalist, author and policy wonk based in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, with whom, a very long time ago, I used to work. We chat about the cities of his homeland, how one might travel between them, and how they came to have the sort of housing crisis that can almost make London look good. We also ...

Skylines is out and about again this week.

Epping Forest is a 13 mile long strip of wooded land straddling the border between London and Essex. I often visited during my childhood, have walked bits of it since, but I've never done the whole thing.

So last week, I did, with a man who's just written the book on the subject. Luke Turner, with whom I worked briefly a depressingly long time ago, is the co-founder of the culture website T...

This week, I finally invited someone I should have asked years ago onto the podcast. Anoosh Chakelian is a long time colleague of mine at the New Statesman – she joined the staff literally two days before I did – whose work focuses largely on public services and the state of the public realm. She also earlier this year replaced Helen Lewis as co-host of the main NS podcast, on which she is doing an excellent job.

Anoosh joins me to ...

In roughly the same manner as the Greenland Ice Sheet, the London mayoral election is hotting up. Ex-Tory Rory Stewart has entered the race as an independent and is chatting about it to anyone who goes near him. Continuing Tory Assembly Member Shaun Bailey gave a speech to the party's conference, and is refusing to chat to pretty much anyone. (No change there: during the selection race last year, he was the only shortlisted candida...

One of the more exciting things to have happened in the already fairly exciting world of housing and planning policy in recent years is the rise of the YIMBY movement. Intended as a counterbalance to the "Not in my back yard" lot, YIMBYs aim to show politicians that there's support for policies that would get more housing built.

They also, on occasion, write for CityMetric – so I invited two of them on to tell us about their work. J...

The present is terrible and the future may be worse, so let's take refuge in the past. Monica L. Smith as an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, whose latest book is Cities: The First 6,000 Years.

In it she investigates why cities first emerged, how they have evolved, and why people are drawn to them. She was kind enough to pop by New Statesman towers to give us a flavour, and tel...

I’m on my summer holidays, so here’s a guest episode.

Skylines’ founding producer Roifield Brown recently teamed up with Luton’s own Claire Astbury to launch a new podcast. Map Corner covers maps, cities, transport systems, and all the other things that Skylines listeners are into.

They were kind enough to invite me on to talk about maps, Spain and Helsinki the other day, so this is that episode. It isn’t just me though - there’s als...

A few weeks ago, a man called Samir Jeraj got onto the Northern line of the London Underground at Bank station, promptly got his bag strap caught in the doors, and then spent the next 15 stops hoping in vain that the next would be the one where the doors in question would open again, freeing him again. He ended up at the end of the line in Edgware.

This struck me as very funny, and since Samir is a housing campaigner and the author ...