There are cities we pass through, and there are cities that lodge themselves in your biography. You remember them not for their landmarks but for the versions of yourself they happened to witness. London is one of those for me. I first came as a first-year student, eighteen turning nineteen and certain the world was far larger than any classroom. I came back years later as a startup founder, hunting for something I couldn’t quite name in a city that seemed to manufacture ideas by the hour. This summer I walked the same streets again, this time as an energy transition analyst, in town for BloombergNEF’s Annual Training Week, having just turned thirty as I write this. The pavements were the same. The Tube map was the same. The person reading them was not. The city had barely shifted in a decade; I had done nothing but shift.
Returning to a Familiar City
Watching commuters press through the Underground with that particular London briskness, heads down, umbrellas half-furled against a grey that never quite committed to rain, I realised the city had stopped being a destination for me. It had become a kind of measuring stick. Each visit told me less about London than about wherever I happened to be standing in my own life at the time. The streets stayed put. My reading of them kept changing. That is the strange gift cities give you: buildings and bridges outlast us, indifferent, while we do all the changing and quietly pretend it’s the other way around. Coming back was never really about the place. It was about meeting, again, the person each earlier version of me had grown into.
Thirty pushes you toward this kind of accounting. Not because a number rearranges anything overnight, but because it hands you a reason to stop and look back down the road. What I saw, looking back, was how much uncertainty had shadowed every stage. I never knew what university would open up, whether the startup would hold, or how a job in sustainability consulting would end up depositing me in the middle of energy markets. I still don’t know what comes next. What has changed isn’t the uncertainty. It’s me, and how I’ve learned to sit with it rather than wait for it to pass.
A City That Never Stopped Reinventing Itself
Few places wear reinvention as easily as London. The Industrial Revolution was rehearsed here, rewriting the relationship between people, machines, and energy and dragging the global economy along behind it. Coal fed the factories. The banks in the City sent British ideas and appetites out across the world. Centuries on, the money is still here, but the conversations inside those same buildings have turned. Now they are about decarbonisation, about where capital should go in a warming world, about the long unwinding of the very economy the city once built.
There is a neat symmetry in that, and it wasn’t lost on me sitting through Training Week. The work we do at BNEF runs on data and models, but underneath it is one enormous question: how does a place change the way it powers itself without falling over? London answered a version of that question two hundred years ago, in one direction. It is now one of the rooms where people argue about answering it in the other. Progress, it turns out, is rarely a clean break with the past. It is the past, repurposed.
That framing made the week land differently. On paper it was technical: sessions, models, cross-team briefings, the current state of the transition laid out in charts. But it was obvious within a day that the paper version undersold it. Put people from a dozen offices in the same building and things happen that no video call has ever managed. Discussions spilled out of the sessions and into the coffee queue. People I’d only ever emailed turned out to have opinions, senses of humour, interesting take in one thing or another. Long before the programme ended, I understood that the agenda would be one of the smaller part of what I carried home.
The People Behind the Transition
There is a specific oddity to working somewhere global: your closest colleagues start out as names in a thread or Zoom. You know their reports before their face. You learn how a person’s mind works from the way they mark up a report at eleven at night, six time zones away, long after you’ve logged off. For a year and a half I had worked shoulder to shoulder with people I had never actually stood next to. The week collapsed that distance in a matter of hours. The bylines grew voices. The initials in a calendar invite turned out to laugh at their own jokes.
And it was the unscheduled parts that stuck. The presentations were sharp and I learned from them, but the moments I actually remember happened in the gaps between them. A conversation that outlasted the session that started it. A walk to dinner that took the long way on purpose. A table that got louder as the evening wore on and the ordering stopped making sense. You learn different things in those gaps: how someone thinks when they aren’t performing, what they care about, why they got into this work at all. Less information, more perspective.
I noticed it properly only later, scrolling back through the photos on the plane. Almost none were of the sessions. They were meals, a blurry group selfie outside an office, someone caught mid-laugh, a street somewhere going gold at dusk. On any other phone they would be forgettable work-trip snaps. To me they are the whole point. Behind every forecast and every model sits a person who was generous with their time and their attention when they had no particular reason to be. In a job that runs on numbers, it is the people you keep.
Gratitude in the Presence of Uncertainty
One more thing sat with me through the week, quieter than the rest. Annual Training Week has usually been a gathering for BNEF’s permanent staff. I am a contractor. Being asked at all felt like something, and it raised questions I couldn’t answer. Was this the start of another chapter, or a fond send-off for the one I’d already been lucky enough to have? I let the question be. Chasing an answer would only have pulled me out of the room I was actually standing in. What came after the week wasn’t mine to decide. How completely I showed up for it was.
That, at least, was familiar. Every chapter worth anything had started the same way, with no guarantees and no map. I didn’t know where that first student trip would lead. I couldn’t have guessed a startup that eventually folded would permanently change the way I look at cities, or that consulting would turn out to be the door into energy. None of it announced itself as important at the time. It only looked that way afterwards, once there was enough distance to see the shape.
So I’ve stopped waiting for the uncertainty to lift, because it doesn’t. It sits underneath everything, the fixed backdrop against which the rest plays out. Gratitude is the part you actually have to choose. It doesn’t arrive on its own the way worry does. You have to decide to notice the person who made time for you, the conversation you nearly rushed past, the fact that a temporary chapter can still leave a permanent mark on who you become. That decision is the only real reply I’ve found to not knowing what happens next.
The City that Watched Me Grow
On the last day, as everyone headed towards airports, I woke up super early. No plan, just an urge to walk streets that had somehow become familiar without my noticing when. London carried on around me exactly as always: trains in and out, cafés filling for the evening, the Underground swallowing everyone whole at six o’clock. None of it needed me there. And yet I had arrived, every single time, as a different person, and the city’s flat indifference was the only reason I could see the difference at all.
Maybe that is why this visit mattered. Looking back, I don’t see a row of job titles. I see a student who thought the world was his to read, a founder chasing something bigger than he could hold, a consultant working out how change actually moves through an organisation, and whoever I am now, thirty, standing on a bridge in a city that has watched all of them come and go. You never walk into the same London twice, for the plain reason that you are never the same on the way in.
Whether the BNEF chapter runs on or closes is something time will settle without asking me. I’ve stopped measuring these things by how long they last. What I keep is the people they put in my path and the way they left me seeing. When I think back on this week in a few years, I doubt I’ll recall a single slide. I’ll remember coffee that went cold because the conversation was better, dinners that ran too late, a walk on the streets with people who had started the week as names in my inbox. The lesson had nothing to do with energy in the end. It was that the work is always made of people, and that you tend to notice how far you’ve come only when you go back to the place that watched you get there.
Leave a Reply