London looks more like a ghost town these days than one of the major capital cities of the world. I haven’t seen it appear so poorly since those difficult days after the Second World War.

While other British cities are also taking a hammering such as Manchester and Birmingham, London is suffering most because it is enormous.

It houses nine million people in a tightly defined area.

By contrast Oslo, the Norwegian capital, occupies the same amount of space for a far smaller population.

No other British city comes anywhere like it in sheer size depending on where you draw the line. Birmingham and Manchester each have about a million souls while Leeds and Liverpool cannot be far behind.

In the South, the gap is even greater. Bristol is the only city of any size but with about 700,000 is far short of London. No coastal city is bigger than Brighton and Hove which has roughly 300,000 people.

The census taken this month will soon present revised estimates for population but they are certain to be too low especially in London where many people have reasons for not wanting to make themselves known.

The pandemic is partly to blame although that affects towns everywhere. But London has been hit harder than most by the British decision to leave the EU.

Already it is being challenged by the Dutch for supremacy in the financial world. London also faces more than one crisis over transport.

Heathrow is falling behind the Dutch and Germans as a major international airport. But it is still faring far better than Gatwick which has lost its major airlines.

HS2, the new rail link to the Midlands and the North, has run into well-publicised financial and political trouble. This has turned the spotlight away from Crossrail, the east-west line in London still not ready several years after the opening date had passed. More urgent still is the need to help Eurostar, the Channel Tunnel rail link to continental Europe, which is almost bankrupt.

When London catches a cold, Sussex is likely to be suffering from pneumonia as is happening now.

The job losses at Gatwick directly affect thousands of people in Crawley. The airport has for years been by far the biggest employer in Sussex.

Many Sussex workers still commute to London although their numbers are well down because of the virus.

Plenty of people who cannot afford London prices are settling down not too far away in Sussex. It’s fine for them but not for poorer local residents.

As if all this was not enough, the BBC has announced that some of its services will in future be run from northern towns and cities instead of London.

At the same time, the Government wants to move thousands of jobs from London northwards.

There had been a previous announcement that the House of Lords was in future to operate in York although I have not heard much of this lately.

London has been a major force nationally and internationally for many years after completing the repairs and renovations needed to cancel out the effects of wartime bombing.

It has created a completely new look for the City and Docklands with thousands of jobs in skyscrapers such as Canary Wharf.

London has become so large and successful it is almost like another country even to places close to it such as Sussex. It is so wealthy that its economy is bigger than that of most countries in the world.

In an astonishing turnabout, drab, grey London in the Forties and Fifties has been transformed into a cosmopolitan city full of invention and experiment. There have been calls for other parts of Britain to be given a boost so that Britain is less London centric. The prime example of this is the Northern Powerhouse venture.

Millions of pounds are also being invested in the seaside towns of Britain which, with a few exceptions such as Brighton and Eastbourne, are not doing well.

There is some jealousy elsewhere over the sheer excitement the capital can generate. It has also produced what many feel is a metropolitan elite of progressive, liberal people prominent in fields ranging from politics to the arts. They tend to be Labour supporters although they include folk such as the present Prime Minister Boris Johnson who in his earlier days had the knack of sensing what the people wanted.

What must not be allowed to happen is for London to be weakened as a result of all the attacks it is facing. Its opponents may be smugly satisfied at first but will not be if the capital’s economy collapses and they are left impoverished as a result.