Skylines, the CityMetric podcast

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 regio

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– with my pal Claire Cocks in Palermo, about what lockdown, Italian-flavour, looks like – is already a little out of date.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 fasci

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

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 mo

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 o

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&n

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

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

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

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 qu