LA and London: why they’re surprisingly similar

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle make the epic decision to de-royalize. Then they decide to leave the UK. The last straw? They choose to settle not in the egalitarian niceness of Canada, nor the cultural “center of the world”, New York, but in Los Angeles.

The move seemed to confirm people’s worst fears about the couple’s commercial ambitions and lack of gravitas. In fact, says Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, the public response just exposed a deeper prejudice: against Los Angeles itself.

The image of LA as a desert philistine oasis dies hard. People still believe it in London as much as they do in New York. Yet the irony is that LA and London have so much in common.

“The organising principle of both LA and London is disorganisation”. Neither have a dominant style of architecture. Neither show much sign of planning. Absent is the grand plan of Hausmann’s Paris, the Cartesian order of Washington D.C. or even the super-concentrated grid of Manhattan.

This “formlessness” is the result of a void of governance. London did not get its own proper mayor until 2000. LA’s mayor only controls a small part of the city’s great urban sprawl.

Both cities are a collection of seemingly unconnected villages and neighborhoods, with often abrupt divides between them. Arts precincts become Skid Rows, financial districts turn into residential areas. And many residents never stray beyond ‘their’ London or LA.

Despite the prejudice against Los Angeles, Prince Harry follows in august footsteps. Aldous Huxley, David Hockney, Morrissey, John Lydon. These British ‘Angelenos’ might have been expected to settle in New York, but they didn’t. Did they find LA’s lack of design, order, and control liberating?

Arguably the best book on LA is by a London professor, Reyner Banham. In Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) he celebrates its motorized chaos and hails it as the city of the future. Banham went against everything the cognoscenti believed made a great city.

The New York Times reviewed Banham’s book with the snide headline, “In praise (!) of Los Angeles” - as if the very idea was a joke. The BBC followed him around LA for a documentary, painting him as a well-meaning eccentric. 50 years later, Banham’s case for chaos “still seems subversive” Ganesh says.

Bottom line: We’ve a prejudice for order, planning, and formal beauty in cities. Yet, LA’s anarchy gets a vote of confidence from a member of the world’s most stuffiest institution: the royal family. “Perhaps it takes someone from one anarchic place” says Janan Ganesh, “to see the charm of another”.