It’s hard to capture the stinging experience felt by the people in charge of London at the fall in its international reputation. The viral meme of the British capitalas crime-ridden and hostile – not just to its own inhabitants but to visitors – proliferated in the years after the pandemic.
Credit where credit is due: the authorities set out to do something about it. Some of this is cosmetic, like the Mayor of London launching a task force to combat misinformation. But there is a lot that is real about the pushback to reclaim the city’s streets and, in doing so, to counter the avalanche of video telling a story of chaos.
Figures released last week explain why the authorities now believe the tide is turning. One blitz on crime has produced safer streets across Westminster, the borough that holds one of the world’s great concentrations of tourist attractions. Metropolitan Police statistics show neighbourhood offences there fell by more than a third over the past year – nearly 14,000 fewer crimes. Phone thefts have slumped on a similar scale across the city. A revamp of policing has left 13,000 fewer devices stolen over the past year.
The blowout in these figures in the first half of this decade should never have been tolerated. New leadership allowed the police to go back to the drawing board and bring urgency to the response. As a result, London’s authorities are not only cracking the sources of the crime wave but beginning to get on top of it at street level. To use the broken windows analogy of New York in the 1990s, when its crime wave was cracked by a fresh approach, it is attention to detail and sweating the small stuff that makes the difference.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has been a reforming figure, keeping a clear focus on how technology and new on-the-ground policing techniques can transform the safety of neighbourhoods. As he put it himself last week, the introduction of technologies unheard of just five years ago has made a difference.
“This reduction is a reflection of a wider policing approach and the dedication and hard work of local officers, working with specialist colleagues across the Met, using cutting-edge technology, to bring more criminals to justice,” he said.
At a more political level, London’s long-serving mayor, Sir Sadiq Khan, addressed the point that “lies have consequences” when he gave interviews about the new figures. The mayor says there was a 200 per cent increase in the volume of disinformation about the dangers of London over the past two years. Writing for a newspaper, he urged readers to share the good news of crime reductions.
“We saw the fewest murders of those aged under 25 this century, and the capital’s homicide rate has fallen to the lowest level in recorded history on a per capita basis,” he wrote. “It’s now lower than that in Berlin, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, Paris – and every US state.”
As a Muslim leader of one of the world’s major cities, Mr Khan is a weathering post in the hurricane of social media-driven information. Last week he spoke about how the city had suffered from the algorithm-driven nature of fears about safety in London. The anecdotes behind those fears may well be real. How often do people say they will not wear an expensive watch to a pavement cafe? The Met’s own videos of robbers on electric bikes mounting pavements to mug pedestrians are real too. Mobile phone thefts over the whole Met Police area have been the most visible viral crime, though they have gone down from 76,466 over the year to July 2025 to 53,483 for the year until June 2026
Mr Khan’s outrage is aimed at “the monetisation of the hate economy” that has cost London its reputation. He acknowledges that much of the manufactured outrage comes down to who he is.
“Yes I am Muslim of Pakistani heritage but don’t hold that against my great city,” he said.
What is also remarkable is the resilient appeal of London in the face of the problems it has suffered.
London is due to welcome more than five million extra visitors during this summer’s peak season, an unalloyed success by any global measure. The Abu Dhabi-owned property developer London Square conducted an international survey that showed 64 per cent of respondents in major global cities would like to live and work in London if they had the opportunity. Almost half said the city presented the best opportunities for skilled professionals.
The Aldar-owned firm’s report, What the World Thinks of London, found that confidence in the UK was being rebuilt on the basis of an improving image.
“Perceptions of London also appear to be strengthening, with 39 per cent stating their perception over the last five years had improved, compared with just 14 per cent who believe it has worsened over the last five years,” the report said.
The strength of positivity across the survey was remarkable. An antidote is emerging – in real life and, perhaps, online too – to the accusation that “London has fallen”.
