Second season

THERE’S A SPOT OF MUD ON Sadiq Khan’s white shirt. The London mayor has arrived late after a tree-planting ceremony and he hasn’t had time to clean it, he apologizes, as he strides into a cavernous meeting room at city hall. It’s late June, but thick gray clouds hang low in the sky over Tower Bridge and the panoramic view of the city from the bulbous glass building’s balcony. “The running joke is that I like to sit out on a deck chair and enjoy the weather,” he says.

He doesn’t have much time for that. Khan won a second term as mayor in May, just as the city began reopening in earnest after almost five months of lockdown. Like the rest of the world’s large cities, London is reeling from the past 18 months, which have both exacted a heavier immediate toll on urban areas and thrown the chronic problems of big-city life into harsh relief.

With crowded housing and pockets of extreme deprivation alongside its more affluent neighborhoods, London has suffered the U.K.’s highest per capita death rate from COVID-19, with more than 15,000 lives lost. Black and Asian people, who make up at least 31.8% of Londoners, were up to four times as likely as white people to die from the virus nationwide. Those communities joined worldwide protests over racial injustice over the past year, forcing London to interrogate its policing policies as well as disparities in employment and housing. The number of Londoners in paid jobs fell by 5.5% from February to December 2020—by far the largest drop of any U.K. region, with low-income workers hit hardest. Meanwhile, wealthier residents have abandoned the city as remote