HOW BRITAIN ACCIDENTALLY MOVED ITS ECONOMY SOUTH Here’s something nobody seems to explain when they talk about Britain’s North-South divide. Britain wasn’t always dominated economically by London. In Victorian Britain, Manchester had cotton. Liverpool had one of the greatest ports in the world. Sheffield had steel. Newcastle had coal and shipbuilding. Birmingham was an industrial powerhouse. Glasgow built ships for the world. And there was a very simple reason. You couldn’t mine coal in Mayfair. You couldn’t build an ocean liner in Canary Wharf. Industry had to go where the coal, ports, rivers, factories and workers were. So Britain’s wealth was naturally spread around the country. Then the economy changed. Coal collapsed. Shipbuilding moved to Asia. Textiles moved overseas. Steel automated. Between 1979 and 1983 alone, Britain lost roughly TWO MILLION manufacturing jobs. But here’s where it gets interesting. At almost exactly the same time, Britain was becoming incredibly successful at finance, banking, law, consulting and professional services. And unlike coal, money doesn’t care where it lives. After London’s financial Big Bang in 1986, banks, lawyers, accountants, investment firms and highly paid workers increasingly clustered around London. And success attracted more success. The banks wanted the lawyers. The lawyers wanted the corporations. The corporations wanted the talent. And the talent moved south because that’s where the best jobs were. Britain didn’t simply lose its old industries. It replaced a geographically distributed economy with one increasingly concentrated around ONE enormously powerful city. Compare that with Germany. Germany has Frankfurt for finance, Munich for manufacturing, Hamburg for trade and Berlin for government. America has New York, Silicon Valley, Houston, Boston and Los Angeles. Britain has Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Edinburgh — but none comes close to London's combination of finance, government, media and corporate
