The City is Worth Speaking Up For

Why I’m proud to stand with the Lady Mayor’s #TeamUK campaign — and why telling the truth about our City is a job for all of us.

The Square Mile has been my home for my entire adult life and still is. I began as a specialist technician in the iconic Lloyd’s Underwriting Room and, one way or another, never really left the ecosystem. In that time, I’ve watched the City weather more storms than I care to count — crashes, scandals, recessions, a referendum, a pandemic. Each time, someone confidently announced that London was finished. Each time, London quietly got on with the business of proving them wrong.

So, you’ll forgive an incurable optimist for bristling at the latest chorus of decline. Because this time something is different. The pessimism isn’t just the usual grumbling over a pint in Leadenhall Market. Increasingly it is manufactured, amplified and weaponised — and it is beginning to seep, as these things do, deep into the national psyche.

Which is why I want to put my name, and this website, firmly behind a campaign I believe in: #TeamUK, launched by the Lady Mayor of the City of London, Dame Susan Langley.

A first, and a fitting one

A little context, because it matters. In November 2025, Dame Susan Langley DBE became the 697th Lord Mayor of London — only the third woman ever to hold the ancient office, and the first to take the title of Lady Mayor. Born and raised in the East End and an insurance leader by trade, she is the perfect person to make this argument.

I feel that keenly. I’ve spent nearly fifty years in the same insurance market she knows so well, so it is a particular pleasure to watch one of our own carry the standard for the whole City. Her theme for the year is a “Modern Mayoralty” — and #TeamUK is that idea in action.

The problem: what starts online doesn’t stay online

The campaign, launched in June 2026 in partnership with the City’s trade associations, brings together a coalition of more than 200 advocates — from FTSE companies, industry bodies and global partners — to promote a clear, confident and, crucially, evidence-based narrative about the UK’s strengths, and to challenge the misleading ones.

It responds to a real and measurable trend. The Corporation’s launch announcement reports that negative perceptions of London had risen by as much as 150–200% over the preceding two years, drawing on analysis by the Greater London Authority. The GLA’s own rapid evidence review of March 2026 bears this out, and this is not organic grumbling: further GLA research has traced much of the negativity to organised, monetised operations — a Vietnam-based network with a following of around 1.25 million pushing AI-generated content, content farms in Sri Lanka and Nigeria, and amplification by hostile state-linked and extremist groups. The Lady Mayor puts the danger better than I could: what starts online doesn’t stay online. It “seeps into boardrooms and companies,” she says, and once it colours an investment decision, the damage is done.

This isn’t about pretending London is perfect, or refusing to hear fair criticism. It’s about refusing to let a false story go unchallenged when the true one is so much better.

The facts are on our side

And here is the part that ought to be shouted from the rooftops. The figures that follow are all drawn from the City of London Corporation’s own Team UK launch announcement, and they are strengths no amount of online cynicism can wish away:

●        London has been named the world’s most desirable city to live, work and visit for eleven years running, according to a global Ipsos poll.

●        The UK is home to 2,760 fintech companies — the most in Europe.

●        Its insurance market is larger than all other competitors combined — a fact this old underwriter feels entitled to enjoy.

●        It hosts the largest and most active capital market in Europe and is the continent’s leading destination for foreign direct investment in financial and professional services.

●        London’s homicides are at their lowest level in over a decade, with violent crime rates lower than many of its global peers.

And the recognition keeps coming. Earlier this year London was named Laureate of the 2026 World City Prize, the award often called the ‘Nobel Prize for cities’, recognised for its rare ability to keep reinventing itself. There’s a strength I care about especially, too: two in every five cross-border financial transactions, anywhere in the world, are governed by English law — a quiet vote of confidence money cannot buy and rivals cannot easily replicate.

From the Square Mile outwards

This was never a London story dressed up as a national one. Financial and professional services are a genuinely nationwide industry: two-thirds of the sector’s 2.5 million jobs sit outside the capital — in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff and Belfast. The City Corporation works hand in glove with those nations and regions, in formal partnership with the Scottish Government among others, to sell the UK to the world as a single, investable whole. #TeamUK is the banner for precisely that. The City, as the Lady Mayor argues, competes for the regions, not against them.

And the City has long made this case in deeds, not just words. Its own campaign, The Global City, sells the UK’s financial and professional services to the world on a single evidence base of research, statistics and partner stories — the very habit #TeamUK now asks the rest of us to adopt. The idea is spreading beyond the Square Mile, too, with the Greater London Authority running a parallel campaign of its own. Good ideas travel.

I’ve bet my career on this City

I don’t say any of this as a detached observer. I’ve staked a working lifetime on the City’s capacity to reinvent itself. After two decades inside the market, I left employment in the late 1990s to found the UK’s first dedicated outsourced claims management business — a pioneering ‘dotcom’ venture that grew into a nationally recognised brand. Years later I was part of the founding family of Wrisk, an early insurtech mover, spanning innovation from dotcom to fintech.

None of that happens in a City in decline. It happens in a City that keeps generating the talent, the capital and the appetite to build. I’ve seen it up close mentoring at the Lloyd’s Lab since its founding, and in the social inclusion work closest to my heart. As Trust Chair at City Gateway, I supported some of the most vulnerable NEETs, young people not in education, employment or training, and I continue that mission today as a trustee of NEURO, the neuroinclusion charity, opening the Square Mile to talented people too often overlooked. It’s a mission the Lady Mayor shares: this summer she brought more than 250 young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds into Mansion House for Discover Finance: City Edition, to show them our sector isn’t reserved for people from a certain place, or who speak a certain way. The City that gave me a life is still, every day, giving others theirs.

Substance, standing and the stories we tell

Substance and standing are not the same thing, and the second is the more fragile. London’s substance has never been in doubt; the figures settle that. What the disinformation attacks is its standing, and standing left undefended will, in time, drag the substance down with it. The happier truth is that this City has always been antifragile — it doesn’t merely survive its shocks, it grows through them. #TeamUK is simply that instinct, organised.

Not defensive — proud

The Lady Mayor framed the whole endeavour in a line I keep returning to: it’s down to all of us to tell the truth about our City, “not because we are defensive, but because we are proud”. That distinction is everything. Defensiveness is a crouch. Pride is a stance.

So, this is my contribution to #TeamUK: a promise to keep telling that true story, loudly and often. If you build, invest, advise or simply care about the Square Mile — or any of the towns and cities it works alongside — I’d encourage you to do the same. Learn the facts. Share them with confidence. Correct the record when it’s wrong. In support of the campaign the Lady Mayor has created Brilliant City, a curated archive of true stories from the Square Mile and beyond, gathered under the banner of #TeamUK and, my personal favourite, #InconvenientlyBrilliant. It is where I’d send you to start.

The truth about London is a genuinely good story. We just have to be bothered to tell it. The doors, as ever, are open — and this City is very much worth speaking up for.

Mark ‘Hux’ Huxley FRSA is the founder of Huxley Advisory, with nearly 50 years’ service to the insurance industry and the City of London. A serial entrepreneur who has spanned ‘dotcom to fintech’, he is a Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs and Chair of the Financial Services Group of Livery Companies. He mentors and advises founders across brand, proposition, purpose, leadership and growth.