Daniel Shepherd

Went to first West End musical in years with my two youngest today… The centre of London was heaving with visitors, in a way unrecognisable from the image percolated on this site… The stats underline this… West End has fully recovered and more from pandemic and now has overtaken Broadway on tickets sold - millions more, and more tickets sold than the Premier League… This isn’t mirrored in all visitor attractions but seems an interesting and resounding success. Industry reports interesting new trends such as very last minute ticket purchases. Ticket prices do seem extortionate/ dynamically priced… but the stats suggest they are down a bit in real terms. British Museum visitors at a 10 year high of 6.5 million… Visitors generally fully recovered from pandemic, interestingly driven by domestic tourists and North Americans… seemed pretty clear that summer 2025 for example, London was world capital of live music. Comes day after the Mayor of London wrote to Anthropic to come to London after their troubles with the Trump Administration and a marked change in the vibe around the investment in AI and tech… While there’s obvious some challenges in any modern day mega city, and in Britain right now, strikes me that the stats show taking your cues from the mildly bizarre cultivated campaign against Britain and our capital on this site is likely to lead to erroneous perceptions. Interested in any insights as to how the west end has overtaken the premier league and Broadway… and how other parts of UK have fared - as I’ve written before visitor numbers to places like Manchester are also booming re football, unis and now the music at the once laughed at Coop Live… PS yes it was Wicked. And it was good.👍🏽 🧙