Tom Forth

GB needs to shift some of the overheating in London to it's second cities (Leeds, Manchester etc). Young, ambitious people in London are doing fantastic in their jobs and bring so much energy into their careers but are increasingly getting nowhere in their personal lives without help from bank of mum and dad. For many I know, it's driving increased rates of burnout and most are simply checking out of the country for the likes of Dubai/Singapore et al. because they see no desirable alternative. Those that continue to grind on in London have to choose one of the tradeoffs between getting a home within an hour of their work, getting married or starting a family. To do any of these means drastically cutting back your expenditure, and as a result local independents/ pubs etc start to close down and get replaced by your clone town shops. Planning, gentrification and other reasons also contribute to all of this, but it means grassroots in the country are just getting stamped out and it makes it hard to ever really imagine a 'garage startup' in a cheap part of town being a realistic image. The problem is though, that because a vast majority of the jobs, institutions and national infrastructure revolves around London, it's hard for any other cities to rise up to provide an alternative. So you get graduates who are ambitious flocking to the city, which attracts their friends and their friends friends. This overflowing workforce attracts more companies, more industries more…

Thanks for reading. For my precise work on the hyper-local angle you're asking after I did this analysis of Greater Manchester when I lived there in 2018 and it holds up really well. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/inequalityingreatermanchester/ Specifically on the GDP per capita numbers you quote, it's important to know what the "capita" means here. In your numbers, the capita is of residents. So people who commute into Manchester to work are counted in the GDP side of the equation and not in the capita side of the equation giving a largely meaningless number when comparing the strength of an economy. In the case of Leeds and Bradford that you mention it's largely the same effect. When someone commutes from Ilkley or Harrogate to Leeds to work their GDP is counted in Leeds but their capita is counted in Bradford or North Yorkshire. While I agree that looking at smaller geographies is useful, and indeed I do in the link top, we need to consider that overall Greater Manchester, and all of the North's other cities, just have very little prosperity to go around. There are pockets of wealth, but they are pockets against a backdrop of poverty. And of course in London there are pockets of poverty, but they are pockets against a backdrop of wealth. You can convince yourself of this by looking at the ONS small area income estimate dataset and…

Random unrelated point: in a 100km radius circle between Atlanta and Augusta there are ~2,000,000 people (calculated using https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/ )

> everyone in that 3km circles are being received by your device too. This could be pretty intense. Using the below tool I had a play and found that you could have about 1.1 million people within 3km of you when in Cairo. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/

As regions they are pretty similar population wise. At 100km radius (centring for maximimum population) LA is 18M people and NYC is 22M. It's clear why they are the cultural centres of the US. Chicago, Washington DC, and the Bay Area are next highest at ~10M each. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/