Casablanca is 102 minutes long. Citizen Kane runs for 119. This, the 150th and final episode of Skylines, the CityMetric podcast, is longer than either, at 124. You lucky, lucky people. I’ve loved doing this show over the last four and a bit years – it’s been a great opportunity to chat to interesting people about everything from transport and housing to smart cities and regional identities, with the odd argument about the tube or episode about ancient history thrown in for flavour. But for...

Partly because of the crisis, partly for reasons we’ll come to in a moment, our production schedule on Skylines has got a bit lax. So the first of this week’s interviews – with my pal Claire Cocks in Palermo, about what lockdown, Italian-flavour, looks like – is already a little out of date. Italy, unlike the UK, has begun lifting its lockdown.  But it’s still a fascinating insight into both what a stricter lockdown looks like, and also into how great Palermo would be if she were allowed to...

I’m still locked down, and so, I assume, are you, so this week’s show is a game of two-halves. In the present, I speak to my lockdown companion, my partner Agnes Frimston – who, as it happens, co-hosts the newly weekly Chatham House podcast Undercurrents – about how much fun she’s having being shut in a one-bedroom flat with me with no end in sight. We also talk about the various coping strategies the world at large is developing to help it get through lockdown; how public services are...

Apologies for the fact this week’s podcast is a little bit late. But in my defence, both time and the calendar have lost all meaning. Anyway. Something like a third of the world is currently in lockdown to deal with the coronavirus crisis, including Skylines’ little corner of it. So on the assumption that she didn’t have anywhere more fun to be right now, this seemed a good moment to invite my former co-host Stephanie Boland to Skype back into the podcast for the first time in about a year...

The mayoral walks mini-series began in an act of trolling. Rory Stewart launched his campaign to be mayor of London through the unusual strategy of walking all over London and tweeting about it; I have spent large chunks of my life walking all over London and tweeting about it; Twitter at large suggested we combine forces, and maybe turn it into a podcast.  And, once a couple of other candidates had helpfully put the pressure on by offering to go for a walk with me too, Stewart agreed. And...

In all the excitement over the London mayoral election, and Brexit, and coronavirus, and the end of civilisation as we know it, it might have escaped you that there are mayoral elections due in other English cities in early May. So, on this week’s podcast, we're looking at one of those.  The last time Skylines spoke to Jen Williams, politics and investigations editor of the Manchester Evening News, it was to talk about exactly what had gone wrong with the northern rail network. Since that's...

This week, it’s the second in our mayoral walks mini-series.  Sian Berry is the co-leader of the Green party, a member of the London Assembly, and is currently running as the party’s candidate to be mayor of the capital for the third time. A few weeks before Christmas, we spent a gloriously crisp winter afternoon together walking from Manor House station to Dalston together, a route chosen mostly because it took us along Green Lanes (geddit?).  Along the way we talked about, among other...

In just over three months, England goes to the polls, again, for local elections. This time round the big story, at least so far as we’re concerned, will be the mayoral elections in London, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and various other cities and city regions. To find out what to expect, I invited the New Statesman politics editor Stephen Bush back to Skylines to tell us what to look out for. At one point he genuinely argues that the exciting thing about these elections is that...

Rory Stewart likes to walk around London. So do I. And so, a few months ago, someone on Twitter gave me an idea for a fun wheeze: that we could walk together and turn it into a podcast. That walk will, hopefully, happen soon. But in the mean time I've been out and about with a number of the other candidates to be mayor of London. So this is the first of a mini-series. My companion on this walk, which took place last November, is the Liberal Democrat candidate Siobhan Benita. She took me to...

I’ve barely been in the office since we released the last Skylines, so this week it's a guest episode. Commonwealth Voices is another podcast series from our founding producer Roifield Brown, of Map Corner fame. Last year it produced a lovely episode on the air pollution crisis currently afflicting Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. Here's Roifield's blurb: What happens when air quality is so dangerous, it brings businesses, schools and other services to a close and hundreds of people to the...

I realised earlier that this is the fourth Skylines Christmas Special, which apart from being a marker of quite how long I've been doing this thing now, presumably explains why there are giant steampunk robots marching across Victorian London again.  Anyway. On this week's show, we're not going to talk about the election result – partly because I'm too depressed, partly because we've now got about four and a half years to think about that, but mostly because this episode was recorded 10...

Well, here we go again. We’re seven days out from polling day here in the UK, and I don’t know about you but I’m not feeling great about it. So as a form of therapy I dragged Patrick Maguire, who’s been travelling around the country as part of his role as the New Statesman’s politics correspondent, back to the podcast to offer some reassurance. He couldn’t offer any. Anyway - we did have a fascinating chat about regional differences in voting patterns; how parts of Wales and the North...

This podcast has been a bit parochial of late (read: London-bound) so this week we're going abroad.  Max Rashbrooke is a journalist, author and policy wonk based in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, with whom, a very long time ago, I used to work. We chat about the cities of his homeland, how one might travel between them, and how they came to have the sort of housing crisis that can almost make London look good. We also talk about New Zealand's politics and history more broadly - as...

Skylines is out and about again this week. Epping Forest is a 13 mile long strip of wooded land straddling the border between London and Essex. I often visited during my childhood, have walked bits of it since, but I've never done the whole thing. So last week, I did, with a man who's just written the book on the subject. Luke Turner, with whom I worked briefly a depressingly long time ago, is the co-founder of the culture website The Quietus. He's also the author of Out Of The Woods, which...

This week, I finally invited someone I should have asked years ago onto the podcast. Anoosh Chakelian is a long time colleague of mine at the New Statesman – she joined the staff literally two days before I did – whose work focuses largely on public services and the state of the public realm. She also earlier this year replaced Helen Lewis as co-host of the main NS podcast, on which she is doing an excellent job. Anoosh joins me to talk about a subject very dear to her heart: outdoor gyms,...

In roughly the same manner as the Greenland Ice Sheet, the London mayoral election is hotting up. Ex-Tory Rory Stewart has entered the race as an independent and is chatting about it to anyone who goes near him. Continuing Tory Assembly Member Shaun Bailey gave a speech to the party's conference, and is refusing to chat to pretty much anyone. (No change there: during the selection race last year, he was the only shortlisted candidate to refuse to talk to us, forcing us to replace him with...

One of the more exciting things to have happened in the already fairly exciting world of housing and planning policy in recent years is the rise of the YIMBY movement. Intended as a counterbalance to the "Not in my back yard" lot, YIMBYs aim to show politicians that there's support for policies that would get more housing built. They also, on occasion, write for CityMetric – so I invited two of them on to tell us about their work. John Myers is leader of the London Yimby group, while Sam...

The present is terrible and the future may be worse, so let's take refuge in the past. Monica L. Smith as an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, whose latest book is Cities: The First 6,000 Years. In it she investigates why cities first emerged, how they have evolved, and why people are drawn to them. She was kind enough to pop by New Statesman towers to give us a flavour, and tell me why cities first emerged, where you can find their ruins...

I’m on my summer holidays, so here’s a guest episode. Skylines’ founding producer Roifield Brown recently teamed up with Luton’s own Claire Astbury to launch a new podcast. Map Corner covers maps, cities, transport systems, and all the other things that Skylines listeners are into. They were kind enough to invite me on to talk about maps, Spain and Helsinki the other day, so this is that episode. It isn’t just me though - there’s also an extensive discussion of the British road number system,...

A few weeks ago, a man called Samir Jeraj got onto the Northern line of the London Underground at Bank station, promptly got his bag strap caught in the doors, and then spent the next 15 stops hoping in vain that the next would be the one where the doors in question would open again, freeing him again. He ended up at the end of the line in Edgware. This struck me as very funny, and since Samir is a housing campaigner and the author of The Rent Trap, I thought that a fun thing to do for the...

This week, it’s two interviews, unified by being at the intersection of politics and business, and also of my not really, if I’m absolutely honest with you, knowing what I’m talking about. First up, it’s Centre for Cities boss Andrew Carter, in our final “ask the expert” slot for the moment. This week, he’s telling me about Enterprise Zones, areas in which businesses are given special tax incentives to encourage them to invest. So, the question is – does this actually work, or just it just...

So does “cultured-led regeneration” actually work? Can a shiny new museum ever be enough to fix a struggling post-industrial city? Or a particularly big sports day? Carolina Saludes of the Young Fabians has been looking into these and other questions, and kindly agreed to come and answer them for us. We talk about Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture; her home city of Barcelona’s regeneration after the 1992 Olympics; plus, inevitably, Bilbao and its Guggenheim. And a good time was...

Finland, Finland, Finland, as Monty Python once sang: Finland has it all. Well, it has some things anyway, and more to the point its embassy in London was kind enough to invite me to visit, and to learn all about the country’s smart cities projects. And so I did. We visited Helsinki; Espoo, a rapidly growing city in the suburbs of the capital, which is something like a cross between Silicon Valley and Milton Keynes; and Tampere, effectively Finland’s second city, an industrial hub about 100...

This week's guest is John Boughton, teacher, historian and author of an excellent housing-flavoured blog, which last year appeared as a full-blown book. Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing is an incredibly readable look at the history, politics and architecture of public housing in Britain, from those first estates in the late 19th century to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017. It is genuinely one of the best books I have ever read on such a wonkish subject, and the paperback...