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Make the UK less London heavy?

Tsarytsya

Tsarytsya

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So, is there anyway the UK could end up with London not being so big/holding so much of the country’s population? Be that through having other cities be larger or have the population remain more rural?

This isn’t about the country being politically dominated by London either, just the actual population

I’m working with an unrelated POD in 1800, also don’t have a potato famine in this world alongside a different history of free trade in the UK which allows tarrifs to stop farming from dying as hard as it did at the end of the 1800s in otl. I figure either or both of those could help towards this goal
 
Tsarytsya said:
So, is there anyway the UK could end up with London not being so big/holding so much of the country’s population? Be that through having other cities be larger or have the population remain more rural?

This isn’t about the country being politically dominated by London either, just the actual population

I’m working with an unrelated POD in 1800, also don’t have a potato famine in this world alongside a different history of free trade in the UK which allows tarrifs to stop farming from dying as hard as it did at the end of the 1800s in otl. I figure either or both of those could help towards this goal
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How much do you want to challenge London? Right now, adding the second to fourth metro areas don't beat it, but that'd be reasonably easy to get to with a fairly late POD leading to the big industry cities remaining popular and growing rather than taking a turn for the worse.

If you want any single city to stand up to London though, that's going to require some more thorough change.

If you want to go the more rural way rather than make competing cities, you can look at how enclosure happened, and maybe try to angle for something closer to the French situation on the question of supporting rural population. Maybe an early republic deals away with the landlords before they can push most of the population to seek livelihood in the cities and the republican establishment in turn decide to show support for rural smallholders as liberalism's bulwark against more radical city dwellers?
 
1800 is probably to late, possibly a more successful Stuart rebellion leading to a demarcation and economic build up in the North that once the fight is over sustains itself as an administrative and economic unit

Otherwise maybe something Tudor or immediately post-Tudor
 
Artaxerxes said:
1800 is probably to late, possibly a more successful Stuart rebellion leading to a demarcation and economic build up in the North that once the fight is over sustains itself as an administrative and economic unit

Otherwise maybe something Tudor or immediately post-Tudor
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Sounds like a neat alternate timeline, unfortunately it isn’t this one
Nyvis said:
How much do you want to challenge London? Right now, adding the second to fourth metro areas don't beat it, but that'd be reasonably easy to get to with a fairly late POD leading to the big industry cities remaining popular and growing rather than taking a turn for the worse.

If you want any single city to stand up to London though, that's going to require some more thorough change.

If you want to go the more rural way rather than make competing cities, you can look at how enclosure happened, and maybe try to angle for something closer to the French situation on the question of supporting rural population. Maybe an early republic deals away with the landlords before they can push most of the population to seek livelihood in the cities and the republican establishment in turn decide to show support for rural smallholders as liberalism's bulwark against more radical city dwellers?
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I’m not really interested in challenging or standing up to London, this isn’t how can I make another city bigger it’s how do I make London smaller. I already have a timeline going so wild Republican ideas or whatever don’t really apply, I did figure that british agriculture not collapsing/collapsing less would help in regards to stopping migration to the cities though as I mentioned -is that true?. I am very interested in what you have to say on the industry cities, sounds like a perfect part of how to do it
 
Maybe a bigger badder public health crisis drives growth and industry away from London and to the other cities. The problem is that London is in a really good place to access both continent and the interior of the UK and there’s never been a problem that it didn’t try to apply more centralisation to and centralisation is London.
 
Artaxerxes said:
Maybe a bigger badder public health crisis drives growth and industry away from London and to the other cities. The problem is that London is in a really good place to access both continent and the interior of the UK and there’s never been a problem that it didn’t try to apply more centralisation to and centralisation is London.
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Oh I’m not trying to kill London by any means just reduce it. Napoleone Buonaparte isn’t really an option
 
Charles EP M. said:
The two obvious ways are cities outside of London are more prosperous or less people want to/can emigrate into Britain: less people moving into London (and less babies born in London) either way.
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I’ve always thought that a scenario where the Midlands and Lower North becomes more Prosperous and Politically Dominant (successful Chartists could work for this given how a lot of them congressed in Leeds, Nottingham and Birmingham) could lead to a significantly smaller London I guess as the wealth is spread.
 
I think 1800 is quite a difficult POD for meaningful change outside of, yeah, nuking London or anything like that; a lot of the self-fulfilling processes which funnel people and power to London are already in play by then (real ones will write a timeline preventing the Harrying of the North, helping to keep York a major city...)

The biggest issue to overcome is that London just has a big headstart and is really well-placed. So if the aim is to make London smaller rather than anywhere else larger... I think its a bit difficult. You can probably lessen the gap if elsewhere is viable jobs-wise, but I'm not sure how big an impact even that would have. I think the closest you can get to a counterweight is trying to get the Northern cities as close as possible to Rhine-Ruhr, but you have a few problems there (the cities are spread further than RR's centres, they're divided by the Pennines, you have to prevent Greenbelts from coming to pass, you need manufacturing and primary industry to remain in the north; tariffs might help with this in the short-term, but long-term it's going to lead to structural issues - oh, it would also require investment from central government and, well, yes!).

Ed: Forgot to mention the most important bit! In the modernish day, the most important thing really is to prevent the other cities' populations from going down. It's sort of lefft the popular imagination, but for example, Sheffield experienced rapid growth up until the 1920s, meagre growth from then until the 60s, stagnated from then until the 80s, and then nosedived from then until the 00s; it was only in the mid 2010s that Sheffield overtook its previous peak from the 1950s! A lot of other big cities experienced this kind of thing; so killing the green belts/new towns and easing or preventing deindustrialisation is also important in terms of keeping other cities viable.
 
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Approaching this the other way and going a bit Cronon-what if we take a bit of a different tack about how London stayed big and have one or more industrial centers "pull a Chicago" (or even Pittsburgh) and start moving from industry to service sector substantially earlier so London's monopoly there is weaker? Say, Manchester decides to take advantage of University of Manchester and subsidize it heavily at an earlier date in a UK version of "meds and eds" growth or Leeds/Birmingham/etc making a play even in the early 20th century to subsidize corporate headquarters locating there.
 
The only thing I can think of is no/weaker green belts and letting the built-up areas spread out more than they did IOTL, but that'll still make the London metropolitan area just as dominant.
 
I believe there were some proposals to move the capital of the UK from London to Liverpool in the 19th century (albeit never with a serious chance of happening). Liverpool is really the obvious potential capital for the British Empire at the time- central to the UK when it included Ireland, major port, etc. It was even known as the New York of Europe. Having no potato famine that could help further cement Liverpool's location as the centre of the British economy including Ireland.

The question is what impetus there could be to discourage the development of London as the main financial centre and encourage it to move to Liverpool
 
fluttersky said:
The question is what impetus there could be to discourage the development of London as the main financial centre and encourage it to move to Liverpool
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...hmm, 1908 is later than ideal but, have the Tunguska event happen in the North Sea, causing a tsunami along the North Sea coasts
 
fluttersky said:
I believe there were some proposals to move the capital of the UK from London to Liverpool in the 19th century (albeit never with a serious chance of happening). Liverpool is really the obvious potential capital for the British Empire at the time- central to the UK when it included Ireland, major port, etc. It was even known as the New York of Europe. Having no potato famine that could help further cement Liverpool's location as the centre of the British economy including Ireland.

The question is what impetus there could be to discourage the development of London as the main financial centre and encourage it to move to Liverpool
Click to expand...
DUnno about "discouraging" but an alt-Irish policy plus different trade policies could massively increase grain shipments to Liverpool, which in turn would snowball nicely with commodity exchanges, service sector, trade and insurance, etc all coalescing in Liverpool in addition to or separately from London.
 
A large part of London’s expansion was public works projects: the Underground allowed urban and suburban expansion into ever more distant rural areas (Metroland being the ur-example of this, but there are greater or lesser examples from most lines), while Bazalgette’s sewer system made greater population density possible without the sanitary problems that had previously meant – and, famously, made allowances for the city’s continued growth in its design.

Curtailing either or both of these projects might not be enough in and of itself to inhibit London’s growth, but it could shape attitudes among the powers that be against aiding said growth.
 
Coiler said:
The only thing I can think of is no/weaker green belts and letting the built-up areas spread out more than they did IOTL, but that'll still make the London metropolitan area just as dominant.
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Yeah this is a prime example of why this doesn’t work as a method, the whole idea behind this is that every timeline I’ve see is something with London just does a “what if bigger”
 
fluttersky said:
I believe there were some proposals to move the capital of the UK from London to Liverpool in the 19th century (albeit never with a serious chance of happening). Liverpool is really the obvious potential capital for the British Empire at the time- central to the UK when it included Ireland, major port, etc. It was even known as the New York of Europe. Having no potato famine that could help further cement Liverpool's location as the centre of the British economy including Ireland.

The question is what impetus there could be to discourage the development of London as the main financial centre and encourage it to move to Liverpool
Click to expand...
Roger II said:
DUnno about "discouraging" but an alt-Irish policy plus different trade policies could massively increase grain shipments to Liverpool, which in turn would snowball nicely with commodity exchanges, service sector, trade and insurance, etc all coalescing in Liverpool in addition to or separately from London.
Click to expand...
While I’m not really interested in the tall order that is ending London’s political domination the growth of Liverpool economically and physically could be a perfect impetus, who knows if it could overtake London and become a proper New York/DC parallel but it doesn’t need to

spellcheck is weird on here, how on earth does it manage to make lonodn into Komodo
 
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