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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

And yet if you walk in the centre in the evening, large areas are completely dead and empty.

Read books and magazines from the early 20th century and before and everyone from starving artists and authors up to nobility and royals lived there. Now it's all either offices or empty units.

There's no sense of resident life there now: people might "go out" to central London for a day or night out or they might work there, but they'll travel home for maybe an hour afterwards.

The Douglas Adams of this century certainly won't live in Islington: the house he once shared with two others is now worth something like £2 million (to say nothing of the 5-bed he moved to in the 80s).

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Really? That is very different from my experience.

If you're talking about the actual City of London then maybe, but most other places I have found quite lively and active in the evenings, especially around where I live.

the article says london, and they parent comment says "the centre".

The City of London (aka the financial district). I'm not sure if I'd consider that the "centre" of London or not. I guess it would depend on the context.

Take a random "residential" street from Google maps, Craven Street, near Charing Cross. Hardly a hive of human life: walk down there at night and I'd guess maybe 1 in 8 or 10 windows may have lights on. https://maps.app.goo.gl/bbT6JnPH8X2NN9ht9

And yet if you search for it on the Internet Archive, look how many different people used to live there, and they're just the ones that got their address written down durably: https://archive.org/search?query=craven+Street&sin=TXT&sort=... There are 22,000 results!¹

From a quick scan, we have architects, doctors, people dying aged 74, births, remarriage of a widow of a naval captain, soap-boiler, a tailor, a church donors, lords, ladies, "misses" and esquires.

The same applies to the city of Vienna proper compared to what it used to be a century ago. A lot more densely populated, a lot more life into it, nowadays, if you ignore the touristic downtown, the city might as well be a dormitory after 6 or 7 in the evening.

Isn't that an extreme case? A little over a century ago it was the capital ~50 million people in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a city population of 2,239,000 in 1916 (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna ).

The same chart has the population as 1,911,728 in 2020, about 10% smaller than a century ago. It's now the capital of a country with only about 9 million people.

You could make a similar case about London, too, it has lost a lot of its mojo compared to the 2000s. The Great Financial Crisis has put a knife through its financial heart, and Brexit certainly didn't help. This recent [1] Economist article about the LSE showcases some of that gloom.

[1] https://archive.is/hDZsB

London in special for different reasons, yes.

My main point though was that Vienna's population decreased greatly after its empire, and while increasing is still 10% smaller than a century ago.

London's population has different dynamics, and I can't pretend to have a good reason. I can observe that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London shows a clear decline correlating with its shift away from being an imperial power, from ~8 million in 1951 to ~6.6M 1981.

I usually stay about a block from there. It's not deserted at night but it's also not really a residential neighborhood and there is a lot more action as you walk up towards Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden, and all the West End theatres.

To another comment, I'd expect the City of London (i.e. the financial district) to be pretty deserted at night as very few people actually live there.

> also not really a residential neighborhood

The thing is, for hundreds of years, it was indeed residential. Those were houses, built to live in.

This matches my recent experiences in London.

Almost every major street in the center had office space available to rent and if you take a walk through some of the newer "residential" developments south of the river in Vauxhall and the Albert Embankment at the weekend the silence is eerie.

> The Douglas Adams of this century certainly won't live in Islington: the house he once shared with two others is now worth something like £2 million

Maybe that house is now being let by Islington estate agents Hotblack Desiato. That would be neat.

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