Diary — Field Notes on London

The building is floodlit like a stage set with no play. Meanwhile, the theatres nearby are cutting matinees to survive, and the pubs are being sold off to developers. We treat our best assets like they're too precious to use. Other cities open their museums on Friday nights and turn them into salons, gigs, late-night reading rooms. London locks the doors at 5:30. Somewhere in that gap between what we own and what we do with it is the whole argument for a Minister for London's Reawakening.

I keep coming back to parking because it's the smallest test of whether the state treats you like a citizen or a cashpoint. The rules aren't hard. Publish them clearly. Enforce them fairly. Refund honest mistakes. Instead we've built an appeals industry, and every Londoner has a story about a sign they couldn't read in the dark. Fix this and you rebuild a little bit of trust. Refuse to, and you tell people the system is against them — which is exactly what they already suspect.

The building doesn't change. The medicine doesn't change. What changes is the choreography — the receptionist knows your name, the coffee is warm, the appointment starts on time. None of this is expensive. It's design. If we stripped out the mystique and asked what actually costs money versus what costs attention, we'd find most of the 'luxury' in luxury healthcare is just respect delivered on schedule. That's the whole NHS Privé argument in one waiting room.

I want to know who lobbied for this ban. Not in a conspiratorial way — in a follow-the-money way. When a policy hurts consumers, small importers, and delivery workers all at once, and helps only the incumbent transport operators and insurance underwriters, someone somewhere wrote a memo. The Boris paradox — the cycling PM who criminalised private e-scooters — is the kind of contradiction that only makes sense if you assume a lobbyist got there first.

I'm a doctor. I'm not a politician and I don't want to be. But I live here, I work here, and I'm watching a great city drift because nobody in charge seems to be asking the right questions. This diary is where I write down the questions before I forget them. Some will be wrong. Some will be embarrassing in a year. The point isn't to be right — it's to think out loud in public so sharper people than me can push back, correct, extend. That's what a civic lab is.