Post-Covid life will look remarkably similar to pre-Covid life

Everybody is speculating on how life will look once lockdown is lifted. My guess, says Merryn Somerset Webb, is much the same as it looked before the virus.

Walthamstow Street Market © Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Post-Covid life will look little different © Getty
(Image credit: Walthamstow Street Market © Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

A large part of the nation currently seems to be reading Claire Tomalin’s biography of Samuel Pepys. We are too. But my attention has been grabbed not so much by his experiences in the Great Plague as by the aftermath of the Great Fire, which he also survived.

The shock of the fire prompted all sorts of grandstanding. Take the rebuilding of the city. No one wanted to go back to the messy jumble of a fire hazard they had lived with before. Everything must change they said. A Rebuilding Act was passed stipulating that all new buildings had to be constructed of brick or stone. Splendid plans were produced of grid systems with church-filled squares and of long wide streets with plazas and a huge terrace on the Thames (this was Christopher Wren). None made it past the drawing board. Instead, driven by individuals wanting to get back to normal life, London rebuilt itself in “roughly the same shape as it had burned down,” says Charlie Lawrence Jones on CityMetric.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.