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Originally Posted by CityAmateur
I don't disagree with you but I think your focus is too narrow if only focussing on the EU.
What really kick-started London's resurgence was the fact that it essentially captured the eurodollar phenom from the 1960s onwards. This a consequence of several factors not least the famously light-touch regulation with the City free to do as it pleased to an extent.
The increasing importance of global insurance, commodities trading and the forex market - all sectors of the international finance world in which London is remarkably strong are also important.
London is "useful". It's remarkable connectivity based on language, law, and crucially GMT, It's forex window, its vast depth of common law legal expertise, Lloyds merely the tip of the vast Insurance panoply run from there etc etc. We'll find that it will weather the Brexit storm.
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I agree that globalism also played a role, but I think being part of the EU in the era of globalism is critical to establishing modern day London. London and the U.K. were an economic disaster post WW2 and all the way into the 1970s. The U.K. pulling itself out of that slump coincided very neatly with forming a single market economy with western Europe.
Globalism also greatly helped New York in the post-industrial era too, btw. And I would argue that New York and London developed into analogous post-industrial cities because they were the two largest English speaking cities on Earth, located in the two largest economies on Earth.