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As someone who lives in the UK, visiting London is like visiting a different country. Sometime's I'm amazed just how 'better' everything looks and is. You can c

As someone who lives in the UK, visiting London is like visiting a different country. Sometime's I'm amazed just how 'better' everything looks and is. You can clearly see that this is where all the money is funneled into. It even has it's own subway covering the whole city! Where is this sort of commitment to anywhere else in the UK? All that really happens is all the money is poured into London, it then slowly expands, and as HS2 is proving, to the detriment of everyone else.

matthew349hall 9y ago
An American in New York...same thing
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  No way. America has plenty of fast growing cities, just none around the NYC area.
  - lifeisstillgood 9y ago
    To be fair that's another way of saying "Europe has plenty of fast growing cities, just none around the London area" I think we have improved transport economics so much that the size of a metro area needs adjusting in our minds - London has commuters from Birmingham, Cambridge and beyond - in the same way that NYC has commuters from Pennsylvania and even Philly. The winning City in an area sucks in all the surrounding populations - it's just now that transport links mean that those surrounding populations are in what used to be called other cities and are now just suburbs. We need better town planning not ways to hold back cities to certain geographic locations
    - wavefunction 9y ago
      Sometimes people live in the city and commute to work in the suburbs. I propose, instead, that New York City is a suburb of Philly.
      - lifeisstillgood 9y ago
        It does not invalidate the argument - they are both effectively the same "metro area"
    - joejerryronnie 9y ago
      The Bay Area, while very far from being a well planned live/work/commute environment, does have a somewhat unique structure. It is made up of 3 geographically dispersed, relatively equitable major cities, albeit with different strengths (SF - international cachet, SJ - largest city plus proximity to Silicon Valley, Oakland - future opportunity). There are arguably more high end jobs in the suburbs surrounding these 3 major cities than in the city centers themselves. While this has removed the issue of one major city sucking in all of the surrounding resources, it has also distributed all of the problems of a major city center throughout an entire region - extremely high housing costs, horrendous traffic, etc. Since each municipality in the Bay Area enjoys near ubiquitous power over local development and policy, it is also very difficult to implement effective regional plans to improve these issues.
      - lifeisstillgood 9y ago
        I would argue it's one metro area with three authorities that plan and co-ordinate poorly and has no decent overall town / civil planning (for example like most cities, there is a focus on increasing land price being a good thing - generally not for future equitable growth)
  - remline 9y ago
    The politics and social Dynamics in the US seem completely wrong for growth that I would consider positive in most regions. There is instead a lot of low density strip mall style growth and the resulting structures and density will largely be protected from reexamination due to risk of losing grandfathered building rights. I would be interested to know which cities are consolidating high density areas while growing such that they will have a Manhattan.
    - goldmouth 9y ago
      Seattle? But I don't think every city needs Manhattan style density. Four, five story mid-rise density is the answer. Austin's urban core is building heavily in that style. I was just in Milwaukee for work as was surprised by the huge number of mid-rise buildings all over downtown. Just to show two midsized cities with insane growth at the core.
- magic_beans 9y ago
  You ever been to LA? Or San Francisco? Chicago? Miami? Boston? New York might be a huge metropolis, but it's by no means the only one.
krona 9y ago
Where is this sort of commitment to anywhere else in the UK It's in, for example, Cambridge, which over the past decade has become living proof of the idea that improved links to London can make a place prosper. I've been living in Cambridge for many years and over that time its acquired a very London-like vibe around the center, business/science and biomedical campuses. The second train station just opened, the 3rd is in planning, and a subway (or underground busway) system is being considered to link them together.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  I went into Cambridge city centre the other day, and was saddened by how much like every other run-down city centre it now looks, how dirty and smelly much of it was, how unremarkable in almost every way. Apart from some nice architecture around the old buildings, the city centre has very little to recommend it these days. We also seem to have more and more seasonal visits from tourists, language school kids and so on, just to make things a bit less pleasant for everyone else. Part of the reason I hardly ever go into the city centre any more is that the transport system is so awful and expensive. At one point it was literally cheaper to park illegally and pay the fine promptly than to park in a major city centre car park! The new railway station and "new" trains into London have come in for plenty of criticism even in just a few weeks that they've been in use so far and, ironically, we're actually predicted to lose out from HS2 here as it pulls some of the attention over to the west. There's still a scholarly feel around the university areas, of course, and a feeling of industry around the out-of-town science and business areas, but I'm not sure how much of that has anything to do with outside investment rather than the business and academic communities themselves. If Cambridge is what "commitment" by the government to areas outside London looks like, they really need to up their game.
  - simonh 9y ago
    A run down city centre that's wall to wall with people and full of busy shops and cafes. '...I hardly go into the city centre any more...' Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
    - 9y ago
slap 9y ago
Tax-wise, it's actually the other way around. Taxes paid by Londoners pay are bankrolling all the infrastructure of the country.
- ownagefool 9y ago
  Is it though, or is it simply that companies trade all over the UK but they're mostly incorporated in London and thus the numbers are inflated? Either way, as somebody who has moved to the commuter belt for work, I think investing in the northern powerhouse and high speed rail would probably help the need for us to all be here which forces more taxes to be generated here.
  - mjw1007 9y ago
    Part of it is that; another part is that many people grow up outside London, spend a lot of their working life in London, then retire to somewhere outside London. I think trying to read anything into regional tax flows isn't very productive.
    - westiseast 9y ago
      I think similar arguments have been made about the top 1 or 10% of earners - that there shouldn't be any effort towards curbing their economic activity because they are net contributors whereas low-earners are not net contributors. I think arguments like that ignore the interconnectivity of complex national systems (e.g.) a London business whose customers and suppliers are based around the country.
      - isostatic 9y ago
        > I think arguments like that ignore the interconnectivity of complex national systems (e.g.) a London business whose customers and suppliers are based around the country. And indeed employees. I'm based in Cheshire (home worker), we have offices in most cities and large towns across the country (and indeed globally). How much of my income tax is counted towards 'rural northwest' and how much to 'London' where the HQ is. How much of the profit I generate gets allocated to London.
Symbiote 9y ago
For public investment, this is because spending £1 in London might generate £1.50 of economic improvement, but a similar project in Birmingham or Manchester might generate only £1.05 of improvement. Are you comparing similar areas of London and other cities? If you don't visit anywhere outside central London, it's only fair to compare that with the centre of other cities.
- aninhumer 9y ago
  I feel like this is a self-fulfilling prophecy though. If they never make serious investments anywhere else, then nowhere else can develop the kind of economy that allows London to perform this well.
- northernmonkey 9y ago
  This is something that really needs supporting proof (in so much as there is proof of any economic estimate). I'm sure a convincing case could be made for the contrary. A relatively small investment in a neglected transport system in Leeds (for example) may well yield greater returns.
chrisseaton 9y ago
Getting the train down from where I live in Cheshire to London is like going forward-in-time three years. It really is! It's a silly and trivial example, but there are chains of shops and restaurants that I don't recognise when I go down, but they'll start to appear in the north in three years.
- praulv 9y ago
  I know, we even have a new pound coin down here that might trickle its way up through some petty change.
- isostatic 9y ago
  3 years really isn't a long time. To me going to London is like going back in time 10 years, crowded, terrible transports, and the pubs all shut at half ten!
ptype 9y ago
Nonsense. London is a net taxpayer for the UK [1], hence the periodical discussion of establishing an independent city state (which will not happen IMO). Instead of being jealous of London, the rest of the UK would be better off realising that London competes with other global cities and that the success of London benefits UK (but sadly instead they voted for Brexit) [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-deficit-grows-to-more-than-10bn-as-people-spend-less https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  And what rents does that tax-paying capacity derive from? Extracted from whom?
  - nine_k 9y ago
    Global trade? Production? Tourism?
    - Silhouette 9y ago
      More like farming, harvesting of other natural resources and electricity generation, long-distance transport infrastructure, warehousing, and actual housing for many of the people who commute into London every day to provide vital labour but can't afford to live there. London makes a lot of money because it's dominated by high-return service industries, most famously the financial sector based in the City. It includes relatively little in the way of production, manufacturing and storage, which don't scale as well but are obviously essential to everything else being possible.
      - _benedict 9y ago
        Farming? Are you mad? It contributes as little as 0.5% of the country's GDP. What other natural resources are being "harvested" to enrich London so much? The vast majority of London commuters live in Greater London, so its housing is largely provided for by itself. Even if you assumed every human being in the "commuter belt" travelled to London daily, the GLA would still account for ~73% of the population, and this is plainly an absurd assumption. While London may not contribute as much manufacturing, it still manages ~6% of the UK's manufacturing output. At the same time, just retail in London produces almost as much for the economy as rUK manufacturing. Your whole thesis is laughable. You seem to be upset that the poorer parts of the nation can trade with London to provide it goods and services. Should you not be upset at the farming, storage and transportation rUK "harvests" from abroad? This dwarfs London's "harvesting" of rUK. London itself has nothing to do with profits from this trade being unequally distributed. Westminster, sure, but London? No.
Z1515M8147 9y ago
> It even has it's own subway covering the whole city! Not the same I know, but Milton Keynes (a UK garden city supposedly planned and designed like an American city) has a mostly interrupted cycle path network covering the whole city, which to some hugely preferable to a subway network. The only problem with this is that things are too spaced out for the average person to want to cycle so barely anyone uses it, which is strange because Milton Keynes buses charge £4-5 per person to travel only a couple of miles.

matthew349hall 9y ago

An American in New York...same thing

3pt14159 9y ago
No way. America has plenty of fast growing cities, just none around the NYC area.
- lifeisstillgood 9y ago
  To be fair that's another way of saying "Europe has plenty of fast growing cities, just none around the London area" I think we have improved transport economics so much that the size of a metro area needs adjusting in our minds - London has commuters from Birmingham, Cambridge and beyond - in the same way that NYC has commuters from Pennsylvania and even Philly. The winning City in an area sucks in all the surrounding populations - it's just now that transport links mean that those surrounding populations are in what used to be called other cities and are now just suburbs. We need better town planning not ways to hold back cities to certain geographic locations
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    Sometimes people live in the city and commute to work in the suburbs. I propose, instead, that New York City is a suburb of Philly.
    - lifeisstillgood 9y ago
      It does not invalidate the argument - they are both effectively the same "metro area"
  - joejerryronnie 9y ago
    The Bay Area, while very far from being a well planned live/work/commute environment, does have a somewhat unique structure. It is made up of 3 geographically dispersed, relatively equitable major cities, albeit with different strengths (SF - international cachet, SJ - largest city plus proximity to Silicon Valley, Oakland - future opportunity). There are arguably more high end jobs in the suburbs surrounding these 3 major cities than in the city centers themselves. While this has removed the issue of one major city sucking in all of the surrounding resources, it has also distributed all of the problems of a major city center throughout an entire region - extremely high housing costs, horrendous traffic, etc. Since each municipality in the Bay Area enjoys near ubiquitous power over local development and policy, it is also very difficult to implement effective regional plans to improve these issues.
    - lifeisstillgood 9y ago
      I would argue it's one metro area with three authorities that plan and co-ordinate poorly and has no decent overall town / civil planning (for example like most cities, there is a focus on increasing land price being a good thing - generally not for future equitable growth)
- remline 9y ago
  The politics and social Dynamics in the US seem completely wrong for growth that I would consider positive in most regions. There is instead a lot of low density strip mall style growth and the resulting structures and density will largely be protected from reexamination due to risk of losing grandfathered building rights. I would be interested to know which cities are consolidating high density areas while growing such that they will have a Manhattan.
  - goldmouth 9y ago
    Seattle? But I don't think every city needs Manhattan style density. Four, five story mid-rise density is the answer. Austin's urban core is building heavily in that style. I was just in Milwaukee for work as was surprised by the huge number of mid-rise buildings all over downtown. Just to show two midsized cities with insane growth at the core.
magic_beans 9y ago
You ever been to LA? Or San Francisco? Chicago? Miami? Boston? New York might be a huge metropolis, but it's by no means the only one.

krona 9y ago

Where is this sort of commitment to anywhere else in the UK It's in, for example, Cambridge, which over the past decade has become living proof of the idea that improved links to London can make a place prosper. I've been living in Cambridge for many years and over that time its acquired a very London-like vibe around the center, business/science and biomedical campuses. The second train station just opened, the 3rd is in planning, and a subway (or underground busway) system is being considered to link them together.

Silhouette 9y ago
I went into Cambridge city centre the other day, and was saddened by how much like every other run-down city centre it now looks, how dirty and smelly much of it was, how unremarkable in almost every way. Apart from some nice architecture around the old buildings, the city centre has very little to recommend it these days. We also seem to have more and more seasonal visits from tourists, language school kids and so on, just to make things a bit less pleasant for everyone else. Part of the reason I hardly ever go into the city centre any more is that the transport system is so awful and expensive. At one point it was literally cheaper to park illegally and pay the fine promptly than to park in a major city centre car park! The new railway station and "new" trains into London have come in for plenty of criticism even in just a few weeks that they've been in use so far and, ironically, we're actually predicted to lose out from HS2 here as it pulls some of the attention over to the west. There's still a scholarly feel around the university areas, of course, and a feeling of industry around the out-of-town science and business areas, but I'm not sure how much of that has anything to do with outside investment rather than the business and academic communities themselves. If Cambridge is what "commitment" by the government to areas outside London looks like, they really need to up their game.
- simonh 9y ago
  A run down city centre that's wall to wall with people and full of busy shops and cafes. '...I hardly go into the city centre any more...' Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
  - 9y ago

slap 9y ago

Tax-wise, it's actually the other way around. Taxes paid by Londoners pay are bankrolling all the infrastructure of the country.

ownagefool 9y ago
Is it though, or is it simply that companies trade all over the UK but they're mostly incorporated in London and thus the numbers are inflated? Either way, as somebody who has moved to the commuter belt for work, I think investing in the northern powerhouse and high speed rail would probably help the need for us to all be here which forces more taxes to be generated here.
- mjw1007 9y ago
  Part of it is that; another part is that many people grow up outside London, spend a lot of their working life in London, then retire to somewhere outside London. I think trying to read anything into regional tax flows isn't very productive.
  - westiseast 9y ago
    I think similar arguments have been made about the top 1 or 10% of earners - that there shouldn't be any effort towards curbing their economic activity because they are net contributors whereas low-earners are not net contributors. I think arguments like that ignore the interconnectivity of complex national systems (e.g.) a London business whose customers and suppliers are based around the country.
    - isostatic 9y ago
      > I think arguments like that ignore the interconnectivity of complex national systems (e.g.) a London business whose customers and suppliers are based around the country. And indeed employees. I'm based in Cheshire (home worker), we have offices in most cities and large towns across the country (and indeed globally). How much of my income tax is counted towards 'rural northwest' and how much to 'London' where the HQ is. How much of the profit I generate gets allocated to London.

Symbiote 9y ago

For public investment, this is because spending £1 in London might generate £1.50 of economic improvement, but a similar project in Birmingham or Manchester might generate only £1.05 of improvement. Are you comparing similar areas of London and other cities? If you don't visit anywhere outside central London, it's only fair to compare that with the centre of other cities.

aninhumer 9y ago
I feel like this is a self-fulfilling prophecy though. If they never make serious investments anywhere else, then nowhere else can develop the kind of economy that allows London to perform this well.
northernmonkey 9y ago
This is something that really needs supporting proof (in so much as there is proof of any economic estimate). I'm sure a convincing case could be made for the contrary. A relatively small investment in a neglected transport system in Leeds (for example) may well yield greater returns.

chrisseaton 9y ago

Getting the train down from where I live in Cheshire to London is like going forward-in-time three years. It really is! It's a silly and trivial example, but there are chains of shops and restaurants that I don't recognise when I go down, but they'll start to appear in the north in three years.

praulv 9y ago
I know, we even have a new pound coin down here that might trickle its way up through some petty change.
isostatic 9y ago
3 years really isn't a long time. To me going to London is like going back in time 10 years, crowded, terrible transports, and the pubs all shut at half ten!

ptype 9y ago

Nonsense. London is a net taxpayer for the UK [1], hence the periodical discussion of establishing an independent city state (which will not happen IMO). Instead of being jealous of London, the rest of the UK would be better off realising that London competes with other global cities and that the success of London benefits UK (but sadly instead they voted for Brexit) [1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-deficit-grows-to-more-than-10bn-as-people-spend-less https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...

dredmorbius 9y ago
And what rents does that tax-paying capacity derive from? Extracted from whom?
- nine_k 9y ago
  Global trade? Production? Tourism?
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    More like farming, harvesting of other natural resources and electricity generation, long-distance transport infrastructure, warehousing, and actual housing for many of the people who commute into London every day to provide vital labour but can't afford to live there. London makes a lot of money because it's dominated by high-return service industries, most famously the financial sector based in the City. It includes relatively little in the way of production, manufacturing and storage, which don't scale as well but are obviously essential to everything else being possible.
    - _benedict 9y ago
      Farming? Are you mad? It contributes as little as 0.5% of the country's GDP. What other natural resources are being "harvested" to enrich London so much? The vast majority of London commuters live in Greater London, so its housing is largely provided for by itself. Even if you assumed every human being in the "commuter belt" travelled to London daily, the GLA would still account for ~73% of the population, and this is plainly an absurd assumption. While London may not contribute as much manufacturing, it still manages ~6% of the UK's manufacturing output. At the same time, just retail in London produces almost as much for the economy as rUK manufacturing. Your whole thesis is laughable. You seem to be upset that the poorer parts of the nation can trade with London to provide it goods and services. Should you not be upset at the farming, storage and transportation rUK "harvests" from abroad? This dwarfs London's "harvesting" of rUK. London itself has nothing to do with profits from this trade being unequally distributed. Westminster, sure, but London? No.

Z1515M8147 9y ago

> It even has it's own subway covering the whole city! Not the same I know, but Milton Keynes (a UK garden city supposedly planned and designed like an American city) has a mostly interrupted cycle path network covering the whole city, which to some hugely preferable to a subway network. The only problem with this is that things are too spaced out for the average person to want to cycle so barely anyone uses it, which is strange because Milton Keynes buses charge £4-5 per person to travel only a couple of miles.