London Dominates British Life

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London Dominates British Life
Londoners exhibit excellent queue-forming skills at a Tube station
Living the London dream: Dick Whittington in his post-knapsack days
Ever since the days of Dick Whittington, those living outside London have often seen the capital as a city with streets paved with gold. But, asks David Stenhouse, does the city dominate British life?
It is the British city which joined the super-league, the world capital which ranks with Paris, New York and Tokyo.
It is the epicentre of Britain's political, economic and cultural life, the seat of our government, hub of our media and home to one of the world's biggest financial markets.
But even fans of London admit it is too expensive, too dirty and too crowded. And its critics say that it sucks talent, money and opportunities out of the rest of the country.
So how should those of us who live outside London cope with the mega city in our own back yard?
"The one thing that you cannot deny, whether you are in or outside it, is that London is a vast, dominant thing inside the United Kingdom," says Tony Travers, director of the London School of Economics Greater London Group.
Because of its enormous population - at 7.7 million, London has only slightly fewer inhabitants than Scotland and Wales combined - and its economic and political importance, the capital dominates the nightly news.
It is home to national museums, galleries and theatres and the place where multinational companies have their headquarters.
It is also where the British media is based - from the BBC's Television Centre to Channel 4, Sky, ITN and the major national daily and Sunday papers.
No wonder that it is also the place where ambitious people from the provinces of Britain - and further afield - flock to make their names.
And many are convinced that they couldn't have made it by staying at home.
The Scottish fashion designer Deryck Walker first went on a pilgrimage to London after seeing an edition of the South Bank Show devoted to Vivienne Westwood.
"For me it was like a Pandora's box of dreams," he says. "Going to London was key to me becoming a designer."
But in a global context, London is the exception rather than the rule.
The East Coast of the US has New York - the capital of media and commerce - and Washington DC - the capital of government.
Australia has Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra; Spain has Barcelona and Madrid. And Britain has... London, the sprawling, unrivalled capital whose gravitational force exerts a distorting effect on the rest of the country.
Londoners have to pay the price for the capital's status. Residents have sky-high house prices in many areas of the capital - the average house price is now over £1.25m in Kensington and Chelsea - and have high-cost travel, congestion, crime and grime.
But what cost does the rest of the country pay for London?
Talk to business people and civic leaders around the UK and it is not hard to draw up a charge sheet against the capital.
Londoners are said to be rude and insular, and they look down their nose at anyone from the provinces.
"It's an unresolved issue," says Jude Kelly, director of London's Southbank Centre. "Is London a rival to other cities in its own nation, or a repository of their knowledge?"
Those trying to run businesses in the north of England or Scotland have to incur serious expense to even make it to a meeting in the capital, leaving home at four in the morning to make it to London for 9am.
But the biggest charge against London is that it sucks talent and resources out of the rest of the country
Ever since Dick Whittington left the Forest of Dean in the 14th Century in search of his fortune in London, ambitious provincials have headed to the city in search of streets paved with gold.
Did Dick Whittington need London's size and variety to find his niche? Or did his departure to the capital deprive the Forest of Dean of an outstanding Lord Mayor, maybe even one who could have arranged some golden paving for his home town?
Given the concentration of power in London it's no surprise that since the 1960s successive British governments have tried to move key government departments out of London.
The BBC is the latest public body to follow suit, with the relocation of key staff and programmes to Salford Quays in Manchester.
But even devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has done little to reduce London's power.
The gravitational pull of the capital is hard to resist: not least because many people who have made their career in London find it hard to imagine life outside the M25.
For many people in Britain's public life, London is the only place to be.
But not so long ago the political and cultural landscape of Britain was a good deal less uneven than today.
In the Victorian era, Britain's economic landscape was made up of powerful city states, with their own local governments, distinct political cultures and vibrant economies.
In the north of England, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool were the workshops of the world.
Further north, Glasgow described itself as the "Second City of the Empire" and the mighty Clyde shipyards produced vessels which sailed the seven seas.
But as the manufacturing bases of these other cities declined and London's population and economy soared, London started to seem less and less like a big British city and more and more like a global city which just happened to be based in the south-east of England.
It has amplified the faults - as well as the virtues - of the capital.
Now, as historian and politician Lord Hattersley puts it, London is "hugely crowded, hugely busy and full of people who are not really interested in each other".
The size of London's economy has led some to suggest that the capital should go it alone, and declare independence from the rest of the country.
There are plenty in the rest of the country who might be glad to see it go.
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Published May 5, 2015 at 3:13 PM EDT







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"If you go to other places in Europe, they have like three or four major cities. So I think it's a bit weird that we've only got the one."









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Ari Shapiro has been one of the hosts of All Things Considered, NPR's award-winning afternoon newsmagazine, since 2015. During his first two years on the program, listenership to All Things Considered grew at an unprecedented rate, with more people tuning in during a typical quarter-hour than any other program on the radio.


Nearly every country in the world has its major hub city, often the capital, with smaller cities feeding into it. The United Kingdom takes this structure to a whole new level. London is one of the richest cities in the world, and its population is the size of the next six British cities combined.

A global hub, London completely dominates the political, cultural and economic life of the U.K. to an extent rarely seen elsewhere. The U.K. has struggled with this imbalance for decades. This Thursday's election is highlighting the divide.

You can clearly see this imbalance play out in a city like Newcastle, in England's northeast. The city no longer produces much coal. Newcastle Brown Ale isn't even brewed there anymore. And without those two claims to fame, international visitors often don't know what to make of the place.

"I work for a global company, so we get that," says 30-year-old Cat McGinty. She's a Newcastle native — a Geordie, in the local slang.

McGinty works as a marketing manager for a fishing supply company, and I met her for an after-work drink at a trendy pub called the Town Wall.

"We get people coming into our office and they're like, 'Can I get to London from here?' And we're like, 'Well, you can ...' "

But it's a three-hour train ride. And besides, McGinty tells them, Newcastle has great nightlife, hiking and more. So why not explore what's here?

It's not only foreigners who take this London-centric view. At Newcastle University, student Georgie Namule says all of her friends are moving to London after they graduate.

"If you go to other places in Europe, they have like three or four major cities," she says. "So I think it's a bit weird that we've only got the one."

Lack Of Resources Makes Imbalance Worse

People outside London say the capital too often ignores the rest of the country. For example, the road from Newcastle up to Edinburgh, Scotland, is single-lane. Northeast England has been begging for money to expand it.

"It only takes one piece of slow-moving traffic or an incident, and that road is closed," says Jonathan Walker of the Northeast Chamber of Commerce. "And that is an investment decision for a business. It's a huge cost for them."

Without good infrastructure, businesses won't invest in northeast England. And without business investment outside the capital city, the London imbalance just gets worse.

"Britain is one of the more, or even the most centralized democracies in the world," says political scientist Martin Farr of Newcastle University.

Far more than other democracies, Britain concentrates its money and power in the capital. You can look at British government, business or entertainment — London is where it's at. Much more than, say, Berlin compared with the rest of Germany, or Rome compared with the rest of Italy.

And Farr says this has been true for a long time.

"Churchill was alive to this when he was chancellor of the exchequer in the 1920s," says Farr. "He said he wanted to see finance less proud and industry more content. He wanted to rebalance Britain away from financial capitalism as based in the City of London" — referring to the British equivalent of Wall Street in New York.

'Like A Relationship Between A Grumpy Couple'

But Winston Churchill couldn't make it happen. And today, the divide is even more extreme.

Now, some fringe politicians are trying to ride that discontent to positions of influence.

Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party , has proclaimed: "We do, as a party, believe in Britain!"

Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the left-wing Scottish National Party , says her party wants "progressive policies that will benefit people in all parts of the U.K."

Both hope that voters outside of London will give them a boost during national elections next month.

Meanwhile Prime Minister David Cameron warns that shifting power away from London could lead the country to "economic ruin."

The dynamic between London and the rest of the country is "a bit like a relationship between a grumpy couple," says political scientist Tony Travers of the London School of Economics. "They know they've got to be together, but they always sort of see each other's weaknesses more clearly than anybody else would."

The relationship may evolve. But at least for the moment, divorce is not in the cards.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.





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London, always a cosmopolitan city, grew steadily more polyglot and multicultural. The Commonwealth connection accounted for only part of the transformation. Despite restrictive immigration laws, the flux of refugees and asylum-seekers from many countries continued, and new communities of Vietnamese, Kurds, Somalis, Eritreans, Iraqis, Iranians, Brazilians, and Colombians sprang into being. Many of the foreigners settled into housing estates in the poorer parts of Inner London, particularly the crescent of inner boroughs to the east of the City. At the other end of the economic spectrum, London’s position at the crossroads of the global economy brought transient populations of the international business world as well as schools, shops, and renting agencies and services to support them. Their social geography was entirely different, spreading in an arc through the northwest and southwest suburbs. London also attracted wealthy foreigners to become property owners and seasonal residents. Thus, people from the Middle East , East Asia, and Latin America purchased real estate and internationalized neighbourhoods such as Mayfair , Park Lane, and Belgravia . Shopping streets that lead north from Hyde Park , such as Queensway and the southern end of Edgware Road, were almost entirely taken over by Arabs.
Though it is not easy to establish reliable figures on London’s ethnic composition , the columns of names in the telephone books and school registers are testimony to the transformation of a population that in the middle years of the 20th century was still chiefly British-born and Anglophone. Nearly one-third of the resident population of 21st-century London comes from overseas. The western boroughs best reflect the multiethnic quality of the city (partly because of their proximity to Heathrow), while the boroughs of Havering , Barking and Dagenham , Bexley , and Bromley form an arc of almost entirely British-born white populations on the far eastern edge of London. Those are also the areas least touched by the cosmopolitan restaurants, clubs, and shops that have banished old, insular dining habits elsewhere in the metropolis.
London’s social geography is never static. The city has never had ghettos or strong policies of segregation. The areas of local government are too large and the housing stock too diverse for exclusionary practices of the kind encountered in some North American cities. There is intermixture even in the areas having a high concentration of one particular group, such as those of the extreme orthodox Jews at Stamford Hill, the Sikhs at Southall, or the West Indians at Brixton. Boundaries and distributions are perpetually shifting. Minorities follow one another in the familiar sequence of arrival, consolidation, and outward and upward mobility. Jews who came to Whitechapel in the 1890s shifted eastward to the semidetached suburb of Ilford. Cypriots who had settled along the Seven Sisters Road moved north along the old drovers’ road, Green Lanes, to Tottenham and Haringay. Traces of earlier diasporas are scattered through Inner London. Most of London’s 11 Welsh churches are grouped around the centre. The Welsh Congregational Church at Radnor Walk in Chelsea today serves a dispersed instead of a local congregation. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish Lutherans drive eastward on Sunday mornings to worship in their old churches at the dockyard gates.
London has been described elsewhere in this article as a polycentric city. The map of Elizabethan London shows that fields and the river separated distinct centres: the City of London with its shipping, trade, and crafts; Southwark with its gardens, hospitals, and theatres; and the royal court at Westminster . The economy of contemporary London has evolved continuously from th
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