We’re too obsessed with cities. Or at least the prime minister thinks so. As the Conservative Party began its conference in Manchester staring down the wrong end of a polling deficit, Rishi Sunak claimed: “Politicians have for too long taken towns for granted and focused on cities.”
In fact, a quiet revolution is happening in the UK’s cities. One that might hold answers for our struggles with loneliness and the environment.
Plans are afoot in Glasgow to turn the city’s main shopping streets into something new, repurposing empty shops and creating “a more European cafe culture”.
In East Kilbride, the council wants to reduce retail space by 40%, freshening up the town centre with housing and public spaces.
The first buses on Manchester’s long-awaited Bee Network of integrated public transport have just launched, with the promise that residents will have quicker, greener ways to travel. Leeds city centre is in the midst of a transformation, with fewer places for cars and more for pedestrians.
With the government’s £100 million English Cities Fund going to places like Liverpool, Salford and Plymouth, cities seem to be a priority in Westminster too. But there’s another narrative forming. The cities fund is dwarfed by £1 billion in levelling up funding just spread out across towns from Bexhill-on-Sea to Wrexham.
Announcing this, Sunak said: “We need to change the way this country does politics. We need to change our economic geography away from cities.”
If you want to understand a possible political motivation for doing this, look at a map showing 2019’s election results. The red bits are the cities.
Last week, we looked at Sunak’s big U-turn on net zero, which experts painted as a “cynical” attempt to avoid a drubbing at the next general
