What has the south of Britain got that the north really wants? Short answer: the economic and social stimulus of a London. What has the south got that it would be well rid of? Short answer: the inefficiency of a congested central London. The arguments for reinvigorating the north are only too well known to every politician and economist. The chief arguments for decongesting the southeast are that a prolonged and unregulated influx means a high cost in road building and traffic jams; excessive journeys to work; and the effect of soaring urban land values on the provision of housing and other social needs. The troubles of the north and south are complementary. If only something could be done to move one of London's fundamental magnets to employment up to the north, the problem of Britain's steady relapse into "two nations" could be solved at a single blow.
Up to now, all political parties have assumed that the right magnets to try to move northwards are manufacturing industries. This policy has never really worked, because it means trying to cajole private commercial enterprises to go to one part of the country when they know in their hearts that they would make bigger profits if they operated somewhere else. In the near future this policy is likely to work even less well still. The pull of Europe, whether Britain is in the common market or not, is calculated to increase the flow of industry and population into the southeast. No government, Tory or Labour, could bring itself to prohibit this movement into the British segment of the largest consumer goods market in western Europe. But, in return, is there any major, non-manufacturing, non-market-located and really magnetic growth industry that could be safely and profitably transplanted north of the Trent? The most obvious candidate is the industry of central government itself.
London's past pride and present headache is to have become three capitals in one: the centre of commerce, finance and administration. In the 19th century, it was the financial capital and the administrative capital only. The centre of gravity for industry and commerce in those days lay in the north. As industry has congealed into large corporate agglomerations, and as boards of directors have therefore become financial tycoons rather than men of the workshop manager type, the centre of commercial power has inevitably moved down into the financial capital of the country. The financial mechanism of the City of London could not be successfully uprooted and shifted. But administration is different, it is more detached and happens to be directly under the government's own control. A civilised Peter the Great is what Britain needs.
With modern means of communication (telephones, teleprinters, television) it is no longer a handicap to have the administrative capital of a country separated from its financial capital. America, Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, West Germany and others have them separated; they have even found that there are advantages in that fact.
The proposal of this article is to start building a new administrative capital for Britain-a Washington, a Canberra, a Berne, a Brasilia-somewhere north of the Trent, and to move Queen, parliament and civil service into it. A site on, say, the land between York and Harrogate (the Marston Moor country) might best fit the bill. It is midway between Thames-side and Clydeside; it would have good north-south communications; it would be within easy reach of the industrial areas of Lancashire and the West Riding; it would have on one side an historic city with a new university and, on the other, a potential posh-suburb with an impressive stock of hotel accommodation.
The only workers whom the Government would be directly responsible for moving would be the 75,000 headquarters civil servants in the London region, plus another 25,000 members of the royal household, MPs, embassy staffs and miscellaneous dogsbodies. The new city of Elizabetha would thus have a basic bureaucratic population, at the family ratio of 3.5 persons per salary earner, of 350,000 at the end of the first stage (five to seven years after construction began). But with the build-up in service employment, Elizabetha would rapidly pass the half-million mark; it would draw northwards to itself or its radial satellites such institutions as the law courts, elements of Fleet Street, the big lobbying groups and, increasingly under the aegis of Bishopsthorpe, the Church of England.
Elizabetha would be at once the greatest single enterprise in Britain, or anywhere else, in modern architecture and town planning-and the effect of having one city securely anchored in modernity might be healthily cumulative elsewhere. The net loss of population and even spending power to London would be small by London's standards; the potential gain to the north (by northern standards) would be very substantial.
To the north, the stimulus would not only be psychological. It would bring it into much closer contact with, and influence upon, government; the Establishment would live in the new capital, and to retire to and visit the north would become one of the In things to do.
For London, shorn of its one movable industry, there would come the last, great chance to plan itself properly in a situation of temporarily relieved congestion. To pay for the move the abandoned high-value sites should be sold to the highest bidder. The more historic buildings could be turned into the nucleus of London's second and third universities; nobody except dons and students will easily put up with the discomfort of actually living and working in them much longer. The shopping and entertainment centres would remain in the old financial capital (Broadway and Fifth Avenue have not moved to the Potomac).
None of this would therefore knock the economic stuffing out of London. It would, indeed, give it the opportunity to become again an efficient commercial capital and port, secure in its own large local consumer market and poised to make the most of a Channel bridge or tunnel or dam with the continent.
There are no prizes for spotting difficulties with all this. But really and truly-if politicians are serious about the need for long-term planning in Britain-why not?
Edited from the original 1962 article by Alastair Burnet and Norman Macrae
