STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We're going to visit London's coolest postal code - (impersonating British accent) the coolest postal code.
That's what the Lonely Planet travel guide calls the Hackney area of East London. Old warehouses there now house art galleries and cafes, serving oat milk lattes or whatever you want. But as with many upscale neighborhoods in the U.K. and beyond, someone is missing - someone small. NPR's Lauren Frayer reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) Some things were meant to be...
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: On the edge of an Afro Caribbean street market in the East London area of Hackney, there's a brick and stone building overgrown with wildflowers.
This is a beautiful building. It looks Gothic, but it won't be that old.
MIKE COOTER: I can tell you. It's purpose-built as a school in 1861, Gothic revival by T. E. Knightley was the architect.
FRAYER: Mike Cooter loves this school. His son used to go here.
COOTER: It's very familiar and therefore very melancholic to see it with big security signs stapled to the fence and not hearing the sound of children in the playground.
FRAYER: The playground fell silent this year because this is one of four schools that closed this summer in Hackney alone, and four more may do so next year for lack of students. Louis Hodge with the Education Policy Institute says London's birth rate peaked in 2010 and has been falling ever since as the cost of housing and child care spike.
LOUIS HODGE: Parents-to-be are actually moving to other parts of the country. And even those that are staying might be actually just deciding to have less or potentially even no children. So London boroughs such as Westminster, Southwark, Camden - they've all experienced falls that are greater than 10% over the last five years.
FRAYER: That's tens of thousands of children per year. This is also happening in Finland, in Greece and in Rochester, N.Y. But London may have the worst of it. It's a banking center with high earners and a housing shortage. Brexit has restricted some immigrants who tend to have more kids. And austerity has left many U.K. municipalities bankrupt. Hackney has a big supply of public housing, but some of it has been privatized, even converted into Airbnbs, creating what Mike Cooter calls a doom loop.
COOTER: Families move away, and then they never come back, and the rent spirals up, and you end up having a city with no children in it.
FRAYER: The kids that are left here, government statistics show a third of them live in poverty. That's way more than in most of Europe but way less than in the United States. Child welfare expert Kathy Evans calls children an indicator species. That's a biology term.
KATHY EVANS: If that species within that ecosystem is doing OK, then the whole ecosystem works. And if they are struggling, then that's a threat to the whole ecosystem.
FRAYER: A threat to teachers and school janitors, who get laid off, and a threat to free or subsidized nursery school, without which working-class folks can't live here. And that's a threat to the economic diversity of this city.
You have two child seats, space for groceries and luggage and...
YULIYA KESELMAN: Yeah. I used to have a basket, but it fell off. So...
FRAYER: Yuliya Keselman locks up her cargo bike outside her daughter's preschool. If the borough goes ahead with plans to cancel a quarter of slots earmarked for lower-income families like hers, Keselman says she may have to leave the neighborhood she loves.
KESELMAN: Well, if you can't pay the bills, you can't pay the bills, right? You know...
FRAYER: She and other parents are suing the Hackney Council to try to force it to keep two preschools open despite declining enrollment. The U.K.'s new center-left government has pledged to build more housing and make it more affordable. One of the goals is to make this sound...
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FRAYER: ...A little more common in Central London.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, Hackney.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOZZIE'S "ATLAS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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