Are the UK's cities poor because they are new?

I apologise for presenting a rather inchoate theory, but I am sure I am onto something. Here goes.

This graph, produced by the ever-interesting Tom Forth, has been doing the rounds. 

I don't know if you can see it properly but I hope you get the idea. London (the upper-most orange bar) is rich, but all of the UK's other cities are relatively poor by European standards: even the likes of Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Bilbao can be found in the mass of blue between London and Manchester (the second orange line). 

You could quibble about the numbers (does Poland do surprising well out of the PPP calculation here?) but I would suggest you don't bother: if you've been there you will know that Paris and London are richer than Valencia or Liverpool. (NB. Forth has taken Dublin out because the numbers are misleading and he later removed Oslo for being non-EU. Really don't worry too much about the details.)

Why should this be? Well, perhaps it's the lack of light rail systems or other 'investment' etc etc etc. I suspect that is the direction Forth would like to go in. But I'm inclined to think there's something more fundamental. 

Here's the list of cities from top to bottom in what I hope is a more legible format:

The point that immediately struck me is that most of the European cities are ones that were successful before the Industrial Revolution, while most of the British ones were not. 

Perhaps you're already persuaded of the point - but perhaps not and need proof. So let's start with France, our sweet enemy and the eternal comparator of England/the UK. The French cities in the list are: Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Nice, Marseille, Bordeaux and, between Leeds and Birmingham, Lille. Here's Wikipedia on Early Modern France: "Paris was one of the most populated cities in Europe (estimated at 400,000 inhabitants in 1550; 650,000 at the end of the 18th century). Other major French cities include Lyon, Rouen, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Marseille." What about Lille and Nice? Well, they weren't French at the time! But they were well-established towns.

Now let's look at the biggest towns in England in the 17th century (so far as we can tell from the hearth tax of 1662):

As Wikipedia points out, "Most notable from a modern viewpoint is the fact that Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield do not make the top thirty, whereas within around 100 years they would become England's largest provincial cities". Indeed, Newcastle and London are the only cities on both the chart at the top of this page and this list of 12 cities, while the overlap in France is plainly much higher.

Here's some corroboration of my theory that British towns are 'newer' than French ones. It comes from a proper academic paper: 

I got that from here, courtesy of Tyler Cowen, who drily comments, "These days, the French model is looking somewhat better, as Toulouse has held its ground more readily than has Liverpool." I'll come back to that comment below, but for the moment let's just note that there is a striking contrast here.

So that's France. Now, let's take the cities in the list from Low Countries: Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam and The Hague. I'm sure you don't need to be told that Amsterdam and Brussels were well-established before the Industrial Revolution, but you might not know that Antwerp was of comparable size to them in the Early Modern period. The Hague became the permanent seat of the States of Holland in 1588, so it was a big deal then. (Note also that these are OECD standard definition 'cities', so not quite what you might expect - "London" includes Sevenoaks, for example, and "Leeds" includes Bradford: "The Hague" includes Delft, to give you some idea of the antiquity of the urban area we are talking about.) I grant you that Rotterdam is a late arrival, interestingly mostly after 1872 (it's more of a post-industrial revolution city), but I would suggest that we see a similar pattern to France: pretty much all the successful cities were successful before the Industrial Revolution.

Now I freely admit that I haven't gone down the whole list, but I don't think I need to: if you simply cast your eye over it you'll see cities as old as Athens and Rome. However, in my ignorance I had a quick look at a few that concerned me.

 

- Milan? Maybe not as old as the likes of Florence or Naples? Ah but did you know that the "The Great Plague of Milan in 1629–31 ... claimed the lives of an estimated 60,000 people out of a population of 130,000"? A population of 130,000 in the 1600s! That's twice the size of Norwich at the time. 

- Turin? "From 1563, it was the capital of the Duchy of Savoy, then of the Kingdom of Sardinia ruled by the House of Savoy, and the first capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1865". That's from Wikipedia, which tells me that it had about 90,000 inhabitants in pre-modern times, i.e. 1.5 Norwiches.

- Gothenburg? That's a city which, it turns out, "was founded in 1621 and became the big town in the west. The underlying strategy of the Swedish government was to create a seaport in the western part of the country that could function as an important link between Swedish trade and a global market ... 17th century Gothenburg was an internationally oriented seaport with a lot of foreign people living in the town". (In fact, both Gothenburg and Rotterdam made money from pre-industrial far eastern trade.) Note that Birmingham wasn't even one of the 30 biggest towns in England while Gothenburg was already a cosmopolitan entrepot.

- Stuttgart? Sure, it's a big car-making place now, but it was a big deal before the Thirty Years War, with Dukes of Württemberg, Hapsburgs and so on involved in complicated ways.

Katowice is an industrial revolution town, as is Mannheim-Ludwigshafen (BASF's headquarters), so it's not just the UK that has large new cities. But the UK is surely unusual in the extent to which its largest cities are the product of the Industrial Revolution.

So what do we make of all that? The Brit-booster approach - and, frankly, not a silly one - is to say that the UK has done the amazing job of creating, essentially overnight in European historical terms, metropolises with wealth to rival ancient and historic cities such as Lisbon, Dresden, Bordeaux, Athens and Seville - while sparing its own equivalent cities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, York, Norwich - from the depradations of industrialisation. Good job UK!

There's something to that. Many places that left industrialisation to the new boys are going strong. Here are the 20 least affordable (which I am taking as a proxy for most sought-after) towns in the UK according to the Halifax in 2021.

1. Winchester
2. Oxford
=3. Truro
=3. Bath
5. Chichester
6. Cambridge
7. Brighton and Hove
8. London
=9. St Albans
=9. Chelmsford
11. Salisbury
12. Exeter
13. Leicester
14. Norwich
15. Bristol
=16. Southampton
=16. Canterbury
=16. Gloucester
19. Worcester
20. Cardiff

We see a number of towns famous for Georgian (Brighton, Bath) or older architecture, and several Roman towns on the list (all those "chesters", plus St Albans). There's also a fair degree of overlap with the list of biggest towns in 1662: Oxford, Cambridge, Canterbury, Norwich, Bristol, Salisbury, Exeter, Worcester. By contrast, Bradford, Newcastle, Glasgow and Liverpool all feature in the equivalent "most affordable" list.

To be absolutely blunt, we all know that nice old towns that escaped the Industrial Revolution are lovely places to visit or live. Durham and Stamford are small, pretty and expensive: this house is very lovely, but it's a 6 bedroom terraced house in Stamford, not a mansion in London, and yet it went for £2.8m (actual sale price). This 5 bedroom house in Durham has an asking price of £2.75m. These are big sums (and a bit different from nearby Newcastle or Peterborough).

So far, I've been talking about England in 1662 and comparing it with the UK today. That's not right: what about Scotland? Well, the picture is similar. The Scottish city in the list is Glasgow, another Industrial Revolution boom town, while Edinburgh, the charming combination of old Old Town and Georgian New Town and the biggest town in Scotland in the 1755 census, doesn't make the cut. A quick check on Rightmove says that Edinburgh is at least 50% more expensive than Glasgow. I accept that Glasgow was a well-established town before the Industrial Revolution, like Newcastle in that respect, but I don't think I'm stretching a point in saying that its post-Industrial Revolution history predominates.

Let's assume I'm right. On the Continent, for whatever reason, they have a number of big cities which are the equivalent of what would have happened if York or Norwich had taken Manchester's place in our industrial history, while our cities are Milton Keyneses or Dubais, shiny newbuilds or johnny-come-latelys. So what?

Let's go back to Forth's concern and Cowen's comment. The UK is richer than, say, Poland. So surely it's a bit odd that the UK's big cities are no richer than Poland's? Why should this be? Is there any reason to think that the fact that the UK's cities are "new", while the rest of Europe's are "old" is relevant?

This is a little speculative but I can think of two reasons why it might be relevant.

(1) The UK's cities, except London and Newcastle, are boom towns created for a boom that busted. They are like mining villages after the mine has closed. Why are they there at all? We know why towns that were big before the Industrial Revolution exist: something to do with ports, rivers, (Roman) roads, prevailing winds and all the rest of it. They had a raison d'être before industrialisation and it's not surprising that they still have one. But the UK's new cities? Aren't they just European Detroits? Big congolomerations of built stuff in the wrong place? The big German industrial cities look terribly rich and successful now, but assuming Germany lives to see a post-industrial future, won't the likes of Mannheim-Ludwigshafen have to endure Detroitification as well?

(2) Or try this idea instead. Let's look at where people want to live in a post-industrial age. The capital city of any country always has a pull and it's not surprising that we see many capitals in the list above (e.g. Berlin, which was transformed by the Industrial Revolution). But apart from that people will, surely, tend to choose nice places to live - and a city with a pre-Industrial Revolution history is, other things being equal, just, well, nicer. I am a big fan of Victorian architecture! I've got nothing against the likes of Leeds. But Oxford has some pretty good Victorian architecture - plus some rather older examples too. Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, but I'm surely getting at something. A European city - here or abroad - that consists of a mediaeval or early modern core, surrounded by 19th or 20th century developments, has the edge on one that only has a 19th century core. People go on holiday to Vienna, Amsterdam, Munich, Prague or Barcelona - they will get on a plane and spend hundreds of pounds just to visit one such city. The second cities of the UK simply don't have that appeal. There's a cheese called "Cathedral City" but there's no cheese called "Industrial Conglomeration".

All in all, I strongly suspect that pouring investment into the Industrial Revolution towns of the UK is not going to make the same returns as similar investments in, say, Amsterdam or Munich. Wealthy, successful middle-class people can make money in Amsterdam and Munich, and they want to live there. Their equivalents in the UK either struggle to make big money in cities built around industries that don't exist, or perhaps, if they can make big money, they prefer to live in Stamford or Durham, the Cotswolds or Rye, Royal Leamington Spa or Royal Tunbridge Wells, or ... 

Perhaps that means that there is a fantastic opportunity for the UK? Surely we could just take the likes of Norwich, York, Oxford, Cambridge, Ludlow, Chester, Canterbury etc and turn these fantastically appealing towns into the cores of much larger but nonetheless still appealing cities with Turin/Antwerp/Prague levels of wealth and income? All we need to do is build them out in the same way that Turin etc have been built out. 

Possibly. But that wouldn't be easy. Take York, for example, a town so rich and lovely that, according to The Economist, it seeks to avoid any new developments at all. And who could blame it? It's been a long time since anyone could be confident that major developments on the edge of a cathedral city would result in a more attractive or pleasant town at the end of the process. 

But what's the alternative? As ever with these things, it's a bit of a mix and match. The UK has moved its centres of (non-London) activity around before, from the Suffolk wool towns to northern industrial cities, for example, and no doubt it can do so again. There are geographical constraints on some of the smaller cities that people want to live in (Bristol and Brighton spring to mind), but towns that already have a dense Georgian street pattern can probably grow in numbers, at least to some extent, without growing in physical footprint. Other towns may find developers more sympathetic to their needs than those York has seen recently, and they will be able to grow outwards: Cambridge might be an example. Some big Industrial Revolution cities will find new life in the post-industrial age: Manchester may become a media-and-university powerhouse, for example, and it seems to do well in IT services too. 

But perhaps we also need to appreciate that some cities are just in the wrong place. There's a danger that 'investing' in some towns simply amounts to bribing their inhabitants to stay away from the places where they could be more usefully or happily employed. Are we subsidising the maintenance of industrial revolution heritage theme parks at the expense of a post-industrial future based in places that people really want to live?

And there are positives to people moving on too. In the 14th century, King's Lynn was England's most important port. It's not now. That has left King's Lynn with some lovely things - Hanseatic architecture, the largest chapel of ease in the country - that make it a nicer place than a purely modern town of an equivalent size. Maybe the glories of Bradford Town Hall will one day grace a lovely little village that people who live and work in the thriving hubbub of Hebden Bridge Spaceport visit for a quiet weekend? Is that not at least as enticing a vision as the idea of pouring taxpayers' money into light rail schemes?