In the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire broke out in a west London tower block; 72 people died in the resulting conflagration, many of them, tragically, because they had followed the official safety instructions to remain in their homes. At the time the Grenfell fire felt like a turning point in Britain’s attitude to social housing. Two years on, though, precious little seems to have changed. Stuart Hodkinson, an associate professor at the University of Leeds, has spent a decade talking to...

This week, two disparate segments linked by the idea of trading with the world. Well, vaguely. It’s there, but you have to squint. First up: I make my regular visit to the Centre for Cities office for the Ask the Experts slot with head of policy Paul Swinney. This week, he teaches me why cities need businesses that export internationally to truly thrive. After that, we’re off to Liverpool, with New Statesman politics correspondent Patrick Maguire. He tells me why the local Labour party tried...

This week it's one of those two-for-the-price-of-one episodes where I'm not even going to pretend the conversations are connected. They are, however, both interesting, so here's more about them: In the first half, I talk to Skylines regular Paul Swinney, head of policy at the Centre for Cities, about what should really have been one of the big UK urbanism stories of the moment. Last week, the North of Tyne region – what would once have been called Newcastle and Northumberland, but not,...

This week it’s another live episode, of sorts. In early April I was lucky enough to chair an event at the Cambridge Literary Festival with the journalist and novelist John Lanchester. John was mostly there to promote his latest novel, The Wall, a “cli-fi” book about a Britain trundling on after catastrophic climate change has wiped out much of the planet. In the past he’s also written about other vaguely CityMetric-y topics like the housing crisis and the tube - so he’s a guest I’ve been...

Last year, Burhan Wazir wrote a lovely piece for the New Statesman under the headline, “The changing shape of Britain’s mosques”. In it he talked about how the country’s Islamic community had initially co-opted sitting rooms and former pubs for its places of worship, but had gradually, over the decades, begun to build bigger, more communal mosques on the scale of churches or even cathedrals. All this sounded like it might make an interesting podcast, so I asked if Burhan fancied a chat. He...

The last few of these things have been quite serious, so let's mix it up a bit with some spurious nonsense. And what better way to do that than to invite Sarah Manavis back on, to answer a question I've been pondering for a while: why, exactly, does she hate London, the city in which she has chosen to live? This takes a while, because she keeps banging on about her dog. To mix things up a bit, we also have our regular Ask The Experts slot with Paul Swinney of the Centre for cities. This...

I’ve been on holiday, and when I came back the entirety of British politics was on fire. So, on this occasion, I’ve fallen a bit behind with my podcasting. Sorry, gang. No matter, though, for here’s a guest episode. City Talks, as you may know, is the monthly podcast from our friends at the Centre for Cities, hosted by chief executive Andrew Carter. Last December it released an episode posing the now depressingly topical quesiton: how will Brexit affect British cities? He’s joined by Naomi...

This week’s podcast is a live show, recorded at the New Local Government Network’s annual conference on 26 February. (We did this last year, and nobody got fired, so here we are again.) The topic under discussion this time is inclusive growth – who is losing out from our current economic model, and how we fix that. To discuss that I was joined by Paul Najsarek, the chief executive of the London Borough of Ealing; Tamar Reay, who runs procurement at Preston City Council, responsible for the...

Two interviews this week, which are both about the future of our cities but are otherwise unrelated except for allowing me to come up with a sort of pun on the word “high”. First up: drones, the remote-operated buzzy flying things that recently managed to shut down several of London’s airports. The innovation charity NESTA has produced a report looking at what drones will do for our society, how we need to regulate them, and what role local government is likely to play in that. I spoke to the...

Baby it's cold outside – or at least it was, in certain parts of the world, when we recorded this, ho hum. Anyway, that's the week's topic. Inspired by the polar vortex, which has seen temperatures of -30C in the US Midwest, we're chatting extremes of weather, with the New Statesman's US editor Nicky Woolf and its in-house midwesterner Sarah Manavis. We also talk about extreme heat and, this being CityMetric, manage a long and detailed argument about which temperature scale is actually...

This week, we’re off to China. Now the U.S. bureau chief for the South China Morning Post, Robert Delaney spent many years as a foreign correspondent reporting from the world’s most populous country. He now has a novel out: The Wounded Muse, based on real events that played out in Beijing as the 2008 Olympic Games approached. He spoke to us about how China, its economy and its cities have changed over the past two decades. This episode we also go back to the Centre for Cities’ Paul Swinney to...

This week’s podcast is a bit of a sandwich. In the middle, you’ll find an informative and nutritious conversation with Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities, in which we try to answer a big question about cites. Generally speaking, in a phenomenon known as “agglomeration theory”, bigger cities are richer and more productive than smaller ones. That, though, doesn't seem to hold true in the UK, where - London excepted - the most productive settlements tend to be smaller. So, does size matter?...

This week, 'tis the season for large chunks of the population of any major city to up-sticks and head back to whatever small town they grew up in. Also this week, the racing driver Lewis Hamilton alienated his entire hometown by saying that he always wanted to get out of the slums. Lewis Hamilton grew up in Stevenage.  At any rate: this feels like a good excuse to talk about, for want of a better phrase, s**t towns, of the sort people tend to run away from so that they can live in the big...

Good news, everyone: this podcast doesn't even glance at Brexit. Bad news: it is about environmental catastrophe, or at least, the infrastructure that might save us from it.  First up, I talk to the New Statesman environmental writer India Bourke about her recent trip to Oslo, where she learned all about carbon capture and storage, and visited a very exciting energy from waste plant. (Christmas has come early to the CityMetric offices.) Next, I talk to Sebastian Maire, chief resilience...

This week, I’m chatting about the housing crisis with the Centre for London. Last summer, research manager Victoria Pinoncely was co-author of the think tank’s report, “Borough Builders: Delivering more housing across London”. She tells me about the role the capital’s 32 boroughs could play in solving its housing crisis, and the barriers preventing them from doing so. We also talk about the lessons all this holds for the rest of the country, as well as the housing market in her native...

You'll be delighted, I'm sure, to learn this podcast is not about Brexit. I've been in Newcastle, capital in the north east of England, for a couple of days: partly for work, partly just because I wanted to get out of London for a bit, and it was the largest British city I'd never been to, and people kept telling me it was cool. And it is. It really, really is. Stunning architecture, great cultural offering, some seaside, a metro and the best collection of bridges you will find pretty much...

110. The rise of the robots This week, it’s about work, automation, fear and loathing in god’s own county of Essex. New Statesman tech writer Sarah Manavis has been to Tilbury to visit an “Amazon fulfilment centre”, which is almost exactly as fun as it sounds. She tells me what the experience taught her about modern corporate culture, as well as complaining about having to get up in the morning and also about her puppy Martha. Dove-tailing neatly with the issues raised by that conversation,...

This is a repeat – sorry gang, I’ve been horrendously busy. But, there are quite a lot of episodes of this thing now. And as the audience has grown, that means a lot of you haven’t heard our early work. So, to plug the gap, here’s an example of it. What follows is the original blurb, from August 2016. On this week's podcast, we're talking gender. Which of course is not actually the same as sex – the former is social, the latter biological – but until such time as HBO makes a hit sitcom called...

This week, it’s all about mayors, and also someone who the smart money says will never become one. I’ve dragged Stephen Bush back into the podcasting catacomb to discuss Shaun Bailey, the Conservative candidate to be the next mayor of London. Bailey, alas, declined an invitation to appear on Skylines earlier this year - but given how well his contact with journalists is going at the moment, it’s by no means clear this was a mistake. Anyway: Stephen and I discuss his faltering campaign,...

This week, we’re off to an English city that, to my shame, I’ve been neglecting: Bristol, the largest city in the south west, and indeed the largest city in the south outside London. I’m joined by Sian Norris, founder of the Bristol Women’s Literary Festival, to talk about the city she’s lived in since her childhood. She tells me what makes Bristol so liveable, why it’s struggling with inequality, and how it’s coping with the recent influx of London expats bidding up house prices. Since we’re...

It’s a bit of a game of two halves this week. First up, I talk to Eric Klinenberg – director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University – about his new book, Palaces for the People. He argues that what he terms ‘social infrastructure’ has a major effect on everything from crime to disaster resilience. Solving the problems of the future, he suggests, is going to mean investing more in infrastructure, public space and community links. After that, it’s our semi-regular “Ask the...

Crossrail is running late. The opening of London’s £15bn new railway, also known, horribly, as the Elizabeth line, has been delayed by the better part of a year, to autumn 2019. This came as a bit of a surprise – but, given the horrible tendency of mega-projects like this to run both overtime and over-budget, should it have done? To find out, I decided to walk the length of the new section of track, from Woolwich in the east to Paddington in the west, to see, basically, whether or not the new...

Exciting news, lads: Skylines has been on tour! Well, sort of: this is the first episode we’ve ever recorded primarily outside London. I’ve just got back from Liverpool, where I was attending the Labour party’s annual conference. While I was there, friend of the podcast Neil Atkinson, the host of the Anfield Wrap football podcast who appeared way back Skylines 22, very kindly agreed to let us use his studio next to Albert Dock to record this week’s episode. The two of us are joined by his...

And so to the second of our London Tory mayoral candidate interviews. This time it's Joy Morrissey: an American-born Ealing councillor, former staffer at Iain Duncan Smith's Centre for Social Justice, and private renter. She tells me how she got into the race largely to talk about housing policy, which lies at the root of the city's other social problems – and how she didn’t entirely expect to make it this far. Ideally there would be a part three of this series, in which I spoke to the third...

There are three people on the shortlist to be the Conservative candidate for London mayor in the 2020 election. So this week, we're speaking with them. First up: Andrew Boff, a long-serving member of the Greater London Assembly and former leader of Hillingdon council, who has run for this particular gig five times now. Andrew tells me why housing targets should focus on bedrooms, not front doors; why he believes stop and search remains a valuable part of the Metropolitan Police's work; and...