ABSTRACT
The economy of London has undergone a dramatic transformation over the course of the last thirty to forty years. Until the mid-1960s it was a major centre of British light industrial production, and a third of its labour force were employed in manufacturing. Although it had long functioned as an important national and international financial centre, the importance of finance and business services for overall employment was relatively small until the 1980s. In 1961 only about one in ten of all London’s workers were employed in this sector. But in the last forty years the proportionate importance of manufacturing industry and finance and business services has been totally reversed. In 1998, finance and business services employed almost a third of London’s workers,
whereas manufacturing industry employed about 8 per cent. This chapter looks at the nature of this transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial economy and the structure of London’s economy at the end of the twentieth century.
