Patrick Radden Keefe

London, going back centuries, had been a place where people with money from other shores would sometimes relocate.

In search of respectability, in search of bigger opportunities.

You obviously had people from the Commonwealth.

You had people from the colonies who would come to London to seek their fortune.

So there is a sort of tradition of people coming from foreign lands and relocating to London.

But I also think that part of this story, you have to kind of go back really to the mid-20th century when there were these two quite profound changes in London.

One is that...

Between roughly 1960 and 1980, all the docks in London closed.

And this city, which had been a shipping capital for centuries, a port city, suddenly ceased to be that.

And this whole industry that had kind of sustained, if you've been to London, really everything east of Tower Bridge, that all just went away practically overnight.

And at the same time, manufacturing jobs declined.

The factories shut down.

80% of jobs in manufacturing disappeared during that same 20-year or so period.

And so the city had been a city that built things, and it stopped being that.

And so when Margaret Thatcher comes in in the 80s, there's a little bit of a sense of, well, who are we going to be?

What's our role if we're not a factory town or a port city?

And the answer became London will be a financial capital between Europe and Asia.

It'll become a destination for money and for people who had it.

And there was a kind of active effort to, first of all, deregulate the banking industry and then attract these kinds of people.

Coincidentally, you then have the collapse of the Soviet Union.