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To gaugewhetherAIAIAIAIXTXAI Your browser does not support the element. Britain is going to make it, go to the central London district of King’s Cross. Exit the station to the west and then head north to Regent’s Canal. Stride past the solitary but well-used children’s swing inside the technicolour birdcage. To your right is Google’s sidescraper—a flat, 300-metre-long slug of wood, concrete and glass, which is due to open next year. To your left is the new headquarters of , a pharma giant, which moved here in 2022. Cut through a snicket and past Universal Music Group, which in 2018 ditched plush Kensington for an area that has gone from industrial wasteland to the best hope for the in barely a decade.On the three-minute stroll, consider what came before. Until the 19th century the story of King’s Cross was a mixture of myth (Boudicca probably did not fight the Romans here) and trivia (the remains of a mammoth were discovered here in 1690). History really began only in 1852, when Lewis Cubitt finished the austere yellow-brick railway station of King’s Cross, sparking a development flurry to rival the one that has just occurred.By the late 19th century the area was the most important transport node in the world’s most important city. By the late 20th century, it was a ruin. Squatters hewed gigantic sculptures in its abandoned factories; , the artist behind the Angel of the North statue, lived in a nearby squat. Drugdealers dealt; sex workers serviced clients in stairwells. A concerned local resident called Tony Blair, then the leader of the opposition, spoke for many when he said in 1997: “It’s actually quite a frightening place.”Stroll onto Granary Square, a vast public square in a city that lacks them, today, and it is anything but. In summer children skip through a giant set of fountains; on unseasonably warm autumn days, people sun themselves on Cornish granite benches. Central Saint Martins, an art school, moved here in 2011, which was a coup for Argent, the developer behind the regeneration of King’s Cross. A public-sector body like a university is a good tenant: they rarely move and rarely go bust. Central Saint Martins had an added bonus: 5,000 art students and staff create a vibe.For waymarkers, use the skinny boys in baggy clothes smoking outside their workshops and head north to Handyside Street. If artificial general intelligence does spring to life, one of the most likely spots for its birth is a ten-storey terracotta building next door to a Gail’s, a bougie bakery. Numbers 14-18 Handyside Street are the headquarters of DeepMind, a British company bought by Google in 2014. DeepMind’s co-founder, Sir Demis Hassabis, won a Nobel prize for chemistry at the start of October for work predicting the shape of proteins.In the 19th century transport companies were pulled to King’s Cross “like iron shavings attracted to a powerful magnet”, in the words of Allies and Morrison, one of the area’s main architects. A similar force is now at play with . The Alan Turing Institute, which researches , has based itself here. Open, DeepMind’s main rival, is setting up on nearby Pentonville Road. , a government research agency that backs high-risk, high-reward ideas, joined in, too. , a market maker that relies on and is perhaps Britain’s most successful private company, has the top three floors of DeepMind’s building.Everyone is here because everyone is here. And everyone is here, in part, because it is lovely. It is also expensive. A two-bed flat in a lovingly restored gasholder overlooking the canal will cost a smidge under £2m ($2.6m). The annual service charge is £14,768, about the annual cost of a mortgage for a large family home in most of the country. Sir Antony, the former squatter, lives in one. (This time he paid.) In 2010 corporate rents in King’s Cross were about half the central London average. Now they are about a fifth more, says Centre for Cities, a think-tank. If engineers are being paid grotesque sums to try to build God, it makes no sense to skimp on location.Walking back along Regent’s Canal, a 200-year-old waterway, it is reasonable to wonder how much of the redevelopment is replicable. Some elements are: other places can be made car-free and mixed-use. But 27-hectare (67-acre) plots of land in the middle of a capital city are rare—never mind ones near leading institutions such as the Francis Crick Institute, University College London and King’s College London. So are sites that have had roughly £30bn spent on infrastructure that stops or passes through the area. The recipe is simple. But few can follow it.At this point, some hand-wringing is obligatory. Next door is Somers Town, a district literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Four in ten children in Somers Town are in poverty; on almost every metric it does terribly. But a path does run from the outstanding primary school in its heart to the world-class universities that lie across Euston Road and, perhaps, into a well-paid job next door. It is at least easier to imagine that journey for a poor child living in subsidised housing in London than for a child in a former pit village in the north-east of England. Poverty is spread out; opportunity is concentrated. The inequality may gall, but there is no better place in Britain to be poor.Some complain that this sleek King’s Cross is a betrayal of its grotty past. Far better to see the district as a sign of a city building its future. If a resurgent Britain finds itself at a technological frontier, it will be thanks to the likes of DeepMind plying their trade in the place where prostitutes once did theirs. If Britain is only to maintain its current trajectory of relative decline, then the success of King’s Cross is still necessary: selling off Victorian gasworks and charging foreign students £28,570 per year in tuition fees is a good living. If even that model fails? Lord knows.
