The Radio 4 presenter's new show about London versus the rest of the UK fell back on old stereotypes of a grim north whose glory days are long gone, argues the Guardian's Northern Editor, *Helen Pidd*
Evan Davis's fascinating documentary on BBC2 last night made grim viewing north of Watford. I watched on my sofa in Manchester, feeling defensive about my adoptive home and irked about the unfair advantages bestowed on our nation's capital at such a high price to everyone else.
Mind the Gap purported to find out how London has come to dominate the UK's economy, culture and politics – and at what cost to the rest of the country.
As Davis kept reminding us, the capital now generates more than a fifth of Britain's income and is rapidly pulling further away from the rest of the country.
"The danger," he acknowledged, "is that while London congratulates itself on global economic success the rest of the country feels left out of it."
We only really saw "the north" twice in the first of two episodes. Next week Davis promises to look more closely at which other city in the UK has the best chance of rivalling London.
But in the opener I was dismayed to see the north portrayed once again as the gloomy home to knackered old mills (Davis visited one particularly dilapidated specimen near Hebden Bridge in order to remind us that at the peak of the industrial revolution the north was contributing more to the UK's economy than London) and beautiful but bleak moorland (he reccied a bit of the Tour de France route in Yorkshire with a local businessman who said he would rather see 2% growth across the country than 3% in London).
London, on the other hand, was portrayed as a bustling metropolis full of world class restaurants and eminently employable, ambitious and productive workers (no whingeing Tykes around here).
Davis followed Glyn Britton, managing partner of creative marketing agency Albion, who commutes to the capital each week from near Stockport. The cameras showed him attending an meeting with an insurance client, where good looking young people had earnest discussions about meerkats. "The meeting lasted for an hour and a half with everyone standing up!" exclaimed Davis, which seemed the carry the hidden subtext: "not like those lazy sadsacks in the north sitting on their bums all day." London's workers produce 29% more per hour than the rest of the country, he added later.
The Today presenter also interviewed Matt Brittin, head of Google in the UK and Ireland, about the £650m new offices the firm is building by Kings Cross in London. The new headquarters will be as long as the Shard is high, taking up 700,000 square feet.
Given that Google's business is online, you might think they could have set themselves up on a Hebridean island and still managed to control the internet in a borderline creepy way, but Brittin said there was no question of building in Manchester or Birmingham. "The attraction of London of course, is it's by far the biggest city in the UK, it's where the most people are and therefore we've got the biggest talent to draw from." He said Google was particularly keen on their new neighbours in Kings Cross, the Central St Martin's, the University of the Arts (and the Guardian, he didn't add).
As Davis explained the concept of agglomeration economics, I mused how I would never have upped sticks to Manchester if the BBC hadn't made the first move by building Media City, and wondered why Manchester University's world class science departments didn't act as more of a magnet in pulling in high tech businesses from around the world.
The thought was underlined by Davis's interview with Tan Sri Liew Kee Sinn, one of Malaysia's richest businessmen, whose firm has bought Battersea Power station in London. He plans to rebuild the power station brick by brick and then knock up thousands of luxury flats on all sides – studios are already on the market for £350,000 and the penthouses are expected to sell for £18m-plus. Ludicrously, 850 of the apartments were sold off plan before one floor-to-ceiling window was fitted.
Davis asked Sinn if he had ever considered building a similar development in Manchester, Sheffield or Birmingham. Giving a rather mischievous look, the Malaysian muttered something about trying to keep his shareholders happy and said that "for now", London was the only place to be.
Boris Johnson would say it is the megarich like Sinn who have made the capital so successful – the mayor likened the city to "a gigantic undersea coelenterate which takes in and then expels", as well as a big blob of jam on a piece of Ryvita which spreads of its own volition.
But watching Mind The Gap it was hard not to be sickened by the vulgar trappings of that wealth. I worry about the consequences of rising house prices for the drones rather than the Queen Bees who can afford the recently renovated town house in Mayfair Davis toured for the programme. With eight bedrooms, three kitchens and a swimming pool, the un-renovated property was bought for £17.5m, just after the financial crash, and is now expected to sell for just under £40m. Michael Eggerton, the estate agent, said he expected the buyer to be a foreign prince or princess who would live in the property for perhaps 30 days a year. It wasn't big or grand enough for an actual king or queen, he suggested.
The house came with a set of gaudy plates hand painted in gold leaf at a cost of £4,000 each – gilded in Stoke-on-Trent, according to Eggerton, providing that the north of England does still make some things.
The human cost of this flood of foreign money was well illustrated by Davis' explorations of the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle, south London, which is currently being demolished. He interviewed Jimi Payne, one of the few owner occupiers in old the concrete monolith, who paid £50,000 for his three-bed flat in 1997. The council compulsarily purchased it from him a few years ago for £163,000. Despite making a superficially fat "profit", Payne found himself priced out of central London and ended up scraping together £187,000 to buy a one-bed place in Walthamstow, in north-east London. Three-bed properties on the revamped Heygate estate are already being advertised to overseas buyers for £700,000.
London's population is projected to reach ten million by 2031. Where is everyone going to live? Are more people going to be joining Glyn Britton commuting down from the north on HS2 if it's ever actually built? Is London going to become ever more like Tokyo, where an apartment is more of a capsule for sleeping than actually living in?
As the credits rolled, someone on Twitter pointed me in the direction of a story which broke in the north yesterday. TransPennine Express, which operates some of the north's busiest cross country commuter routes, including Manchester to Leeds and Hull, has quietly announced plans to move nine of its trains down south to Chiltern Rail in the south-east, apparently to plug a shortfall down there.
The Manchester to Middlesborough morning route is already the third most overcrowded in the country, with 23% of passengers standing during busy times. But nevermind. The greedy coelenterate of the south must get priority. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 hour ago.
Evan Davis's fascinating documentary on BBC2 last night made grim viewing north of Watford. I watched on my sofa in Manchester, feeling defensive about my adoptive home and irked about the unfair advantages bestowed on our nation's capital at such a high price to everyone else.
Mind the Gap purported to find out how London has come to dominate the UK's economy, culture and politics – and at what cost to the rest of the country.
As Davis kept reminding us, the capital now generates more than a fifth of Britain's income and is rapidly pulling further away from the rest of the country.
"The danger," he acknowledged, "is that while London congratulates itself on global economic success the rest of the country feels left out of it."
We only really saw "the north" twice in the first of two episodes. Next week Davis promises to look more closely at which other city in the UK has the best chance of rivalling London.
But in the opener I was dismayed to see the north portrayed once again as the gloomy home to knackered old mills (Davis visited one particularly dilapidated specimen near Hebden Bridge in order to remind us that at the peak of the industrial revolution the north was contributing more to the UK's economy than London) and beautiful but bleak moorland (he reccied a bit of the Tour de France route in Yorkshire with a local businessman who said he would rather see 2% growth across the country than 3% in London).
London, on the other hand, was portrayed as a bustling metropolis full of world class restaurants and eminently employable, ambitious and productive workers (no whingeing Tykes around here).
Davis followed Glyn Britton, managing partner of creative marketing agency Albion, who commutes to the capital each week from near Stockport. The cameras showed him attending an meeting with an insurance client, where good looking young people had earnest discussions about meerkats. "The meeting lasted for an hour and a half with everyone standing up!" exclaimed Davis, which seemed the carry the hidden subtext: "not like those lazy sadsacks in the north sitting on their bums all day." London's workers produce 29% more per hour than the rest of the country, he added later.
The Today presenter also interviewed Matt Brittin, head of Google in the UK and Ireland, about the £650m new offices the firm is building by Kings Cross in London. The new headquarters will be as long as the Shard is high, taking up 700,000 square feet.
Given that Google's business is online, you might think they could have set themselves up on a Hebridean island and still managed to control the internet in a borderline creepy way, but Brittin said there was no question of building in Manchester or Birmingham. "The attraction of London of course, is it's by far the biggest city in the UK, it's where the most people are and therefore we've got the biggest talent to draw from." He said Google was particularly keen on their new neighbours in Kings Cross, the Central St Martin's, the University of the Arts (and the Guardian, he didn't add).
As Davis explained the concept of agglomeration economics, I mused how I would never have upped sticks to Manchester if the BBC hadn't made the first move by building Media City, and wondered why Manchester University's world class science departments didn't act as more of a magnet in pulling in high tech businesses from around the world.
The thought was underlined by Davis's interview with Tan Sri Liew Kee Sinn, one of Malaysia's richest businessmen, whose firm has bought Battersea Power station in London. He plans to rebuild the power station brick by brick and then knock up thousands of luxury flats on all sides – studios are already on the market for £350,000 and the penthouses are expected to sell for £18m-plus. Ludicrously, 850 of the apartments were sold off plan before one floor-to-ceiling window was fitted.
Davis asked Sinn if he had ever considered building a similar development in Manchester, Sheffield or Birmingham. Giving a rather mischievous look, the Malaysian muttered something about trying to keep his shareholders happy and said that "for now", London was the only place to be.
Boris Johnson would say it is the megarich like Sinn who have made the capital so successful – the mayor likened the city to "a gigantic undersea coelenterate which takes in and then expels", as well as a big blob of jam on a piece of Ryvita which spreads of its own volition.
But watching Mind The Gap it was hard not to be sickened by the vulgar trappings of that wealth. I worry about the consequences of rising house prices for the drones rather than the Queen Bees who can afford the recently renovated town house in Mayfair Davis toured for the programme. With eight bedrooms, three kitchens and a swimming pool, the un-renovated property was bought for £17.5m, just after the financial crash, and is now expected to sell for just under £40m. Michael Eggerton, the estate agent, said he expected the buyer to be a foreign prince or princess who would live in the property for perhaps 30 days a year. It wasn't big or grand enough for an actual king or queen, he suggested.
The house came with a set of gaudy plates hand painted in gold leaf at a cost of £4,000 each – gilded in Stoke-on-Trent, according to Eggerton, providing that the north of England does still make some things.
The human cost of this flood of foreign money was well illustrated by Davis' explorations of the Heygate estate in Elephant and Castle, south London, which is currently being demolished. He interviewed Jimi Payne, one of the few owner occupiers in old the concrete monolith, who paid £50,000 for his three-bed flat in 1997. The council compulsarily purchased it from him a few years ago for £163,000. Despite making a superficially fat "profit", Payne found himself priced out of central London and ended up scraping together £187,000 to buy a one-bed place in Walthamstow, in north-east London. Three-bed properties on the revamped Heygate estate are already being advertised to overseas buyers for £700,000.
London's population is projected to reach ten million by 2031. Where is everyone going to live? Are more people going to be joining Glyn Britton commuting down from the north on HS2 if it's ever actually built? Is London going to become ever more like Tokyo, where an apartment is more of a capsule for sleeping than actually living in?
As the credits rolled, someone on Twitter pointed me in the direction of a story which broke in the north yesterday. TransPennine Express, which operates some of the north's busiest cross country commuter routes, including Manchester to Leeds and Hull, has quietly announced plans to move nine of its trains down south to Chiltern Rail in the south-east, apparently to plug a shortfall down there.
The Manchester to Middlesborough morning route is already the third most overcrowded in the country, with 23% of passengers standing during busy times. But nevermind. The greedy coelenterate of the south must get priority. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 hour ago.