You laughed too soon Yoshef. Don't forget, I'm always lurking with a retort. :wink2:

better dismount your BMX before administering it then :)

better dismount your BMX before administering it then :)

It's easier for the Manchester City-supporting delinquents of Gorton to do drive by happy slaps with BMXs, hence the need for a national centre of excellence in Manchester :)

Manchester had the most sort after fort posting in Roman times!Wasn't Manchester an outpost of Deva (Chester) which was garrisoned by the 22nd. Legion?:)The Jewel in the crown is yet to come. While that is being polished, numerous diamonds have been added to the crown. (Metrolink, Mediacity, Sports City, Knowledge Capital and a host of other smaller gems stones)And yet! Almost every (1/2 billion) North Americans still think Manchester is located in the great state of New Hampshire. No mistake were Liverpool is located though!:lol:Don't forget, I'm always lurking with a retort. :wink2:Me too.;)

Almost every (1/2 billion) North Americans still think Manchester is located in the great state of New Hampshire. No mistake were Liverpool is located though!:lol:

London? ;)

London? ;)A very understandable mistake seeing as Liverpool has as many attributes as most of the worlds capitals.:)

Oh no.

The Jewel in the crown is yet to come. While that is being polished, numerous diamonds have been added to the crown. (Metrolink, Mediacity, Sports City, Knowledge Capital and a host of other smaller gems stones)

Maybe it will be a 2000ft statue of Rooney.

Like Christ in Rio but a more modern approach to the masses?

Certainly a figure to hoist up on a cross at least?

better dismount your BMX before administering it then :)

I ride a gold and diamond encrusted Chopper. Given to me personally by Sheikh mansour. :colgate:

One hopes the new Yanks will replace the Tracker bike the previous Yanks knocked up with parts from the local tip.(Anfield)

Can't beat cowhorn handlebars and a fixed cog though.

To be fair, the Liverpool Docks/London Docks argument was relevent, because a few of the cockerneys were insinuating (albeit tongue in cheek of course) that the development of wealth in the UK happened only, or predominantly in London.

Who was claiming to have had the biggest basketball attendance in the UK? What a rubbish claim to fame that is.

You used to be the best

Do you see Mancs saying we traded the worlds cotton once!

Comical

Yes it would be, seeing as that didn't happen.

Wasn't Manchester an outpost of Deva (Chester) which was garrisoned by the 22nd. Legion?:)And yet! Almost every (1/2 billion) North Americans still think Manchester is located in the great state of New Hampshire. No mistake were Liverpool is located though!:lol:Me too.;)

Please turn on your speakers and listen to the song that accompanies the video.

5S1KFvQtds0&feature=fvw

Exactly.

Please turn on your speakers and listen to the song that accompanies the video. Exactly.It is usually the way, isn't it? One has to plagiarize someone else's work when one runs out of their own arguments.:lol:

Sloyne - loved Liverpool so much he moved to Hamilton in Ontario to live 4000miles away.

:D

yee haw.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l8nzwqco2G1qzil04o1_500.gif

Sloyne - loved Liverpool so much he moved to Hamilton in Ontario to live 4000miles away.

:D

Should he not be getting his nuts ready for the forthcoming winter, rather than posting in here?

Bloody cold in Hamilton.

It is usually the way, isn't it? One has to plagiarize someone else's work when one runs out of their own arguments.:lol:

How can anyone run out of arguments where your concerned Sloyne? Your a living, breathing, argument on two legs.

In fact your like a punch drunk boxer on the ropes. You just keep on coming back for more, with little hope of ever winning. I've lost count of the amount of times you've been knocked out on SSC. So much so that you retired, only to show up again, with a new name.

BTW, how many tourists have you redirected today? :lol:

PS. Sy Parrish sums you up perfectly. (His obsession was with the family) Yours is with Manchester.

Sloyne Parrish is a mild-mannered travel agent who has worked his entire adult life at a travel agents. A lonely man, Sloyne derives his self-esteem from his craft of redirecting air passengers and lives his life through Manchester and SSC. His fascination with Manchester, turns into an obsession.

Liverpool, Manchester & Birmingham were all mentioned in George Osbourne's 'State of the Nation' speech this afternoon .... Birmingham's £650 million New Street Station all systems go, and a big expansion to Birmingham's Metro network ...... but not a single mention of that 'important' Yorkshire town, LEEDS!!!??

Oh dear .... how sad .... never mind!!!! :lol:

Liverpool, Manchester & Birmingham were all mentioned in George Osbourne's 'State of the Nation' speech this afternoon .... Birmingham's £650 million New Street Station all systems go, and a big expansion to Birmingham's Metro network ...... but not a single mention of that 'important' Yorkshire town, LEEDS!!!??

Oh dear .... how sad .... never mind!!!! :lol:

Leeds is hated in the UK, we are starved when it comes to funding, because London gets all the wealth which i find ironic, but at least we are getting trinity quarter built, and the arena i guess thats something Leeds can be happy about...

Leeds is hated in the UK, we are starved when it comes to funding, because London gets all the wealth which i find ironic, but at least we are getting trinity quarter built, and the arena i guess thats something Leeds can be happy about...

or maybe, just maybe, Leeds really is about the 10th largest city in the UK and local authority boundaries really do not matter as such Leeds gets pretty much what would be expected.

Tell me, if the Manchester HSR station was built on Pomona Dock, straddling Trafford, Salford and Manchester, as it may very well be, if someone asked you where the station was, what would be your answer, and more importantly, where would the vast majority of the population consider it to be?

That is why Leeds gets the funding comparable to the 10th largest city in the UK whereas the larger cities such as Brum and Manc get significantly more infrastructure - because they are miles bigger.

One day you'll spot this relationship for yourself.

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l8nzwqco2G1qzil04o1_500.gif

:banana: :banana: :banana:

Leeds is hated in the UK, we are starved when it comes to funding, because London gets all the wealth which i find ironic, but at least we are getting trinity quarter built, and the arena i guess thats something Leeds can be happy about...

Yes, Leeds should be happy with it's £50 million arena (the NIA in Birmingham cost £60 million to build 20 years ago ... so don't expect the Leeds Arena to ooze quality!!) ... when it is finally built (30 years after a couple of other cities - even Nottingham, Newcastle & Sheffield have had arenas for years!!!) ... by which time, Birmingham - along with it's £650 million New Street Station re-development, a £130 million expansion of it's Metro, will also be completeing it's £200 million Library of Birmingham, it's £150 million extension to it's runway, plus the beginnings of it's share of the £13 BILLION investment of the 250mph high speed railway line between Birmingham and the Capital incorporating a brand new 'state of the art' ultra modern railway terminus in the heart of the city ... plus a plethora of other projects in Birmingham around the £50 million mark and higher!!!

or maybe, just maybe, Leeds really is about the 10th largest city in the UK and local authority boundaries really do not matter as such Leeds gets pretty much what would be expected.

Tell me, if the Manchester HSR station was built on Pomona Dock, straddling Trafford, Salford and Manchester, as it may very well be, if someone asked you where the station was, what would be your answer, and more importantly, where would the vast majority of the population consider it to be?

That is why Leeds gets the funding comparable to the 10th largest city in the UK whereas the larger cities such as Brum and Manc get significantly more infrastructure - because they are miles bigger.

One day you'll spot this relationship for yourself.






Leeds is the third largest UK city, Home to more than 800 thousand people, and is a part of the 4th largest UK Urban zone, which 3.2 million people live within its catchment area of Leeds!! low unemployment, a very high skilled workforce, UK's largest centre and most important for business, legal, and financial services outside London. and the City of Leeds generating an economy of £46 billion GVA... If Leeds doesn't deserve funding then what city does Wirlie?

Leeds is the thrid largest UK city, Home to more than 800 thousand people, and is a part of the 4th largest Urban UK zone, which 3.2 million people live within its catchment area of Leeds!! low unemployment, a very high skilled workforce, UK's largest centre and most important for business, legal, and financial services outside London. and the City of Leeds generating an economy of £46 billion GVA... If Leeds doesn't deserve funding then what city does Wirlie?

My god ... Leeds is the same size as Manchester & Liverpool combined now ... literally over night ... must have an amazing city centre??!!!?? :lol:

When I went to school ... not that long ago, Leeds had a population of just over 400,000 .... how did it double in size so quickly ... or is it just a figment of people's wild imaginations?!?

How many Council Tax payers are there in Leeds paying their dues to Leeds City Council ... use that as a comparison with, lets say Manchester or Liverpool.

My god ... Leeds is the same size as Manchester & Liverpool combined now ... must have an amazing city centre??!!!?? :lol:

such an ignorant ****, why don't you go do some research, you might learn something then.

But not one of you Manconians have refuted my argumenmt that manchester is so well known that half a billion North Americans locate it in the state of New Hampshire.

I have never been to Hamilton, ON. but have seen it at a distance from the waters of Lake Ontario. It is a steel town and looks more impressive than manchester, England.:lol:

Sloyne, none of give a shit what poorly educate yanks like yourself think.

Everlast - so a Pomona Station straddling Salford, Trafford and Manchester's boundary.

Where would you describe that as being?

oh, and the reason Leeds has about as much infrastructure as the th largest city is because it is the 9th largest city and your statistics about local council tax payers in an area are about as relevant as Wiggles' postings on here.

such an ignorant ****, why don't you go do some research, you might learn something then.


Ooooooohhhhh!!! Don't get shirty!!! :lol:

Leeds must be like the Tardis then .....

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_PWa6ZF6gbAc/TC3-Z1XS_xI/AAAAAAAAAAs/NxmpvipIAUM/s1600-R/the_tardis_whoohoo.jpg

.... pretty damned small on the outside ... but plenty of room on the inside!! :rofl:

I love the way you all just come out with appsolute shit when someone makes some true facts about the real world, i know you can't comeback with anything else but appsolute garbage but can you at least post something that matters, instead of just personal biased opinions which are not fact therefore do not matter to the argument, You might think Leeds is the 9th largest city in your fairy tale world, but we all know in reality it's not true.. :)

Tell me Everlast.

Is it a coincedence that if you list the 'cities' by the primary urban area population that your list mirrors the infrastructure you'll find in those 'cities'?

Does this not tell you anything? Are you really that blind to the obvious?

I love the way you all just come out with appsolute shit when someone makes some true facts about the real world, i know you can't comeback with anything else but appsolute garbage but can you at least post something that matters, instead of just personal biased opinions which are not fact therefore do not matter to the argument, You might think Leeds is the 9th largest city in your fairy tale world, but we all know in reality it's not true.. :)

From the man who reckons Leeds is the third largest city in England.

You couldn't make it up :D

Anyway Everlast - why the link between PUA populations and local infrastructure?

From the man who reckons Leeds is the third largest city in England.

You couldn't make it up :D

why don't you do some research on the Largest UK cities and Leeds, you might learn something useful for the argument mate.

Already have done and explained it before.

There is NOT a definative definition of what constitutes a city.

There is certainly not a definative definition of what constitutes Manchester, even if what most people recognise as Manchester is actually a city.

Tell me, why is the Ducati Manchester shop in Sale?
Why is the Holiday Inn Express next the the new BBC office in Salford Quays down on their web site as Manchester?

Why is the Trafford Centre Selfridges store listed as in Manchester on their web site?

There are absolutely countless other examples that contradict your narrow view of the world.

Fair enough, focus on the number of people who live within a local authority, but when it actually means bugger all, such as the lack of major infrastructure, then don't be surprised as your idea of what makes a city really has no relevance in the real world.

Wonder where the Turks at OT think they are tonight? I bet not one of them does not think they are in Manchester - to those without a totally closed mind this would mean something.

You don't appear to have the intelligence to question yourself and open your mind to alternate views though.

Sloyne, none of give a shit what poorly educate yanks like yourself think.

Everlast - so a Pomona Station straddling Salford, Trafford and Manchester's boundary.

Where would you describe that as being?

In South East Lancashire.

Gord blimey are we back to the is Manchester the biggest place on earth? No, Leeds is the third biggest because it says so on some stupid list which is clearly wrong because Leeds is not as big as Manchester or Liverpool if they were measured by similar boundaries.

At least lets go for some more imaginative criticism...I'll start

Leeds is shit.

Fair enough.

I do fully accept that many people do not see what I see, the urban lump that acts as a whole in the SE Lancs NE Cheshire area as a city, many won't see what I see as Manchester as Manchester.

However, there is an entity in that part of the world that functions as one, this can be seen by the amount of infrastructure present in the area, outside London only Brum is comparable.

Fair enough, as I said, there is no single definition of a city, many won't see that area as a city (I am not sure I do to be perfectly honest), many won't see the same part of that area to be Manchester as I do (in fact I doubt anyone does).

However, until someone comes up with a better name to describe that part of SE Lancs / NE Cheshire than Manchester (which IS what most people consider a large part of it to be) then I am afraid that is what we are stuck with. Is it a city? I dunno, to be honest I don't care what label you give it.

The is a thing that is commonly recognised as Manchester that extends beyond the local authority boundaries of the city of Manchester, comparing that 'thing' to the equivilent 'things' that are around the other urban centres I see around the country I see that the 'thing' described by many as Manchester to be a bit smaller than Brum, but in the same orders of magnitude, then a large step down to the smaller 'things' like Liverpool and Newcastle, then a further step to the smaller 'things' of Leeds etc.

Now fair enough, do not recognise what I see as a thing as being a city - I full understand that many will have issues for all sorts of reasons - however, these things do tend to get investment, have infrastructure in a growing level as an when the 'thing' gets bigger and I would suggest makes a much better way of comparing an area that the totally arbituary local authority boundary that tells us nothing more than the number of council tax payers plus kids in an area which to be frank is about as relevant as what I had for tea tonight.

Is it a coincedence that if you list the 'cities' by the primary urban area population that your list mirrors the infrastructure you'll find in those 'cities'?


This also confuses me. Leeds claims to have a large catchment area, so why is it so poorly connected with its region infrastructure-wise (compared to rival cities)?

Gord blimey are we back to the is Manchester the biggest place on earth? No, Leeds is the third biggest because it says so on some stupid list which is clearly wrong because Leeds is not as big as Manchester or Liverpool if they were measured by similar boundaries.

At least lets go for some more imaginative criticism...I'll start

Leeds is shit.

Who, where said Manchester was the largest place on earth?

Yes the third largest city in England, about three times the size of what I consider Leeds, but in the European scheme of things very insignificant.

This also confuses me. Leeds claims to have a large catchment area, so why is it so poorly connected with its region infrastructure-wise (compared to rival cities)?

Because if you ignore the totally artificial local authority boundaries it ain't really that big. Really.

Who, where said Manchester was the largest place on earth?

Yes the third largest city in England, about three times the size of what I consider Leeds, but in the European scheme of things very insignificant.

Um, by this criteria isn't it the 15th biggest 'thing' in Europe?

Who, where said Manchester was the largest place on earth?

Yes the third largest city in England, about three times the size of what I consider Leeds, but in the European scheme of things very insignificant.

You seem to be intent on proving that Manchester is signifcantly bigger than all other cities in the North, when nobody really thinks that to be the case. Comes across as desperate and very, very pathetic but if that's what makes you feel good, who am I to stop you?

Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool are all negligibly different in terms of size, but in terms of being a decent city Leeds is dwarfed by everywhere including Kabul.

From the man who reckons Leeds is the third largest city in England.

You couldn't make it up :D

No .... he said, "third largest in the UK" .... bigger than Glasgow .... bigger than Edinburgh .... bigger than Manchester ..... bigger than Liverpool .... bigger than Sheffield .... talk about "bigging" your town up!!!

Leeds is on a par with other 3rd Tier UK cities like Bristol, Cardiff & Newcastle .... sorry Neverlast ... but our eyes don't deceive us!! :)

Um, by this criteria isn't it the 15th biggest 'thing' in Europe?

Possibly, no idea. Not looked at the figures.

From my trips abroad, granted I tend to travel to larger 'things' on city breaks, it does feel insignificant.

Maybe the 'thing' I recognise as Manchester is the 15th largest in Europe, no idea.

You seem to be intent on proving that Manchester is signifcantly bigger than all other cities in the North, when nobody really thinks that to be the case. Comes across as desperate and very, very pathetic but if that's what makes you feel good, who am I to stop you?

Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool are all negligibly different in terms of size, but in terms of being a decent city Leeds is dwarfed by everywhere including Kabul.

or maybe I am just giving my opinion and countering Everlast's posting that Leeds has bugger all major infrastructure due to some sort of bias from London.

Should I not challenge that and leave him to live in his dream world?

Tell me, do you not see the corolation between the size of the 'things' I describe and the amount of major infrastructure in these 'things'?

Do you think that to be a pure coincidence?

No .... he said, "third largest in the UK" .... bigger than Glasgow .... bigger than Edinburgh .... bigger than Manchester ..... bigger than Liverpool .... bigger than Sheffield .... talk about "bigging" your town up!!!

Leeds is on a par with other 3rd Tier UK cities like Bristol, Cardiff & Newcastle .... sorry Neverlast ... but our eyes don't deceive us!! :)

I have a strong suspicion that he has never travelled to Bristol, Cardiff and Newcaste to be able to tell.

Liverpool, Manchester & Birmingham were all mentioned in George Osbourne's 'State of the Nation' speech this afternoon .... Birmingham's £650 million New Street Station all systems go, and a big expansion to Birmingham's Metro network ...... but not a single mention of that 'important' Yorkshire town, LEEDS!!!??

Oh dear .... how sad .... never mind!!!! :lol:

He gave a speech in Leeds last week confirming the £14m southern station entrance and improvements to the M62. Sit on that you tart! :lol:

I love the way you all just come out with appsolute shit when someone makes some true facts about the real world, i know you can't comeback with anything else but appsolute garbage but can you at least post something that matters, instead of just personal biased opinions which are not fact therefore do not matter to the argument, You might think Leeds is the 9th largest city in your fairy tale world, but we all know in reality it's not true.. :)

He's a middle-aged, unemployed divorcee with no mates. You can see why he has to have something to look forward to in his sad little life :)

Gord blimey are we back to the is Manchester the biggest place on earth? No, Leeds is the third biggest because it says so on some stupid list which is clearly wrong because Leeds is not as big as Manchester or Liverpool if they were measured by similar boundaries.

At least lets go for some more imaginative criticism...I'll start

Leeds is shit.I agree, but Manchester's shitter.

He gave a speech in Leeds last week confirming the £14m southern station entrance and improvements to the M62. Sit on that you tart! :lol:

He announced improvements to line speeds across the Pennines too.

or maybe I am just giving my opinion and countering Everlast's posting that Leeds has bugger all major infrastructure due to some sort of bias from London.

Should I not challenge that and leave him to live in his dream world?

Tell me, do you not see the corolation between the size of the 'things' I describe and the amount of major infrastructure in these 'things'?

Do you think that to be a pure coincidence?

Manchester is the biggest of the 3, if you take into account the historical size of Manchester and places directly adjacent which would not have grown without Manchester, which is why it has the most infrastructe, but not just that it also has the best council of the 3 and started its regeneration far earlier than Liverpool and Leeds. I just don't agree with your statement that Manchester is massively bigger than either place, in my opinion they are all large cities(in the UK context) with varying degrees of urbanity, with separate identities, surrounding them.

Manchester is a focal point of lot more people, but that doesn't make these people Mancunians. People from Altrincham aren't Mancs, neither are people from Bolton etc etc, that's what it comes down to, not what so website has a shop down as.

I agree, but Manchester's shitter.

No way, Manchester's class and Leeds is fucking shite with no historical importance, worth and even now nobody gives a flying fuck about it. On top of this the people are insufferable, ape like, neanderthals.

No way, Manchester's class and Leeds is fucking shite with no historical importance, worth and even now nobody gives a flying fuck about it. On top of this the people are insufferable, ape like, neanderthals.

Deep breaths, count to ten...

Leeds folk don't suffer fools gladly, which explains the reception he got when he visited.:D

So why has Trafford (different council), much smaller population got so much more infrastructure?

Who said the population of Alty or Bolton were in Manchester or not?

As I repeat over and over again, and you ignore over and over again, everyone will see Manchester to be a different entity. Their is NOT right definition, it is very subjective.

However, when you use comparable ways of measuring the places Manchester is miles larger than Leeds, about three times so.

I challenge you to go on Goolge Maps and have a look at the area between Bagley, Sale and Altrincham around the major roundabout at the southern end of Brooklands Rd.

Now you tell me, on that map where does 'Manchester' end? Different people will have different ideas.

Flippin' 'eck, bet you're the life and soul of the party...

...

I repeat over and over again

Their is NOT right definition


:dizzy:

I reckon most Mancs are a bit scared of the rise of Leeds, and now see it as it's economic rival, as opposed to Liverpool.

What else would explain the obsession with Leeds? If it really is so insignificant then why spend so much time talking about it?

As a general rule though, if Leeds is as big as it claims then it needs to raise it's game a bit, as aside from Leeds United, Leeds Rhinos, Peter Sutcliffe and those lush Victorian arcades, I'm not sure of it's contribution to the world.

Anyway, neither matter to me much, although I'm a bit pee'd off about subsidising transport improvements for you.

ask albion if he's a manc.

I don't think anyone in Manchester gives a flying fuck about Leeds.

Fair enough.

I do fully accept that many people do not see what I see, the urban lump that acts as a whole in the SE Lancs NE Cheshire area as a city, many won't see what I see as Manchester as Manchester.

However, there is an entity in that part of the world that functions as one, this can be seen by the amount of infrastructure present in the area, outside London only Brum is comparable.

Fair enough, as I said, there is no single definition of a city, many won't see that area as a city (I am not sure I do to be perfectly honest), many won't see the same part of that area to be Manchester as I do (in fact I doubt anyone does).

However, until someone comes up with a better name to describe that part of SE Lancs / NE Cheshire than Manchester (which IS what most people consider a large part of it to be) then I am afraid that is what we are stuck with. Is it a city? I dunno, to be honest I don't care what label you give it.

The is a thing that is commonly recognised as Manchester that extends beyond the local authority boundaries of the city of Manchester, comparing that 'thing' to the equivilent 'things' that are around the other urban centres I see around the country I see that the 'thing' described by many as Manchester to be a bit smaller than Brum, but in the same orders of magnitude, then a large step down to the smaller 'things' like Liverpool and Newcastle, then a further step to the smaller 'things' of Leeds etc.

Now fair enough, do not recognise what I see as a thing as being a city - I full understand that many will have issues for all sorts of reasons - however, these things do tend to get investment, have infrastructure in a growing level as an when the 'thing' gets bigger and I would suggest makes a much better way of comparing an area that the totally arbituary local authority boundary that tells us nothing more than the number of council tax payers plus kids in an area which to be frank is about as relevant as what I had for tea tonight.

When the road surface doesn't change from Salford to Hyde, from Stockport to Rochdale and all the wheelie bins are the same colour, maybe people will see your "thing" as one entity. Until then pipe down, because your obsessive repetition doesn't convince anybody and furthermore it doesn't change the fact (not opinion) that that area is clearly not one city.

I don't think anyone in Manchester gives a flying fuck about Leeds.

Oh but they do.

The fact that Manchester has had no impact on Leeds private funding is pretty poor. Manchester exceeds in Government funding while Leeds relys solely on private funding. Yet Liverpool (Arguably) has been affected by Manchester, why not Leeds???

I don't think anyone in Manchester gives a flying fuck about Leeds.

This conversation says otherwise.

they really, really don't.

Manchester is the only city that enjoys a larger perception by the media in terms of Trafford, Salford and Stockport being called "Manchester", whereas a similar setting in Birmingham City Region and the media would suggest adjoining boroughs like Solihull, Sandwell, Dudley and Walsall as being in the "West Midlands" and not in "Birmingham".

That's the difference, and it's bloody frustrating!

He gave a speech in Leeds last week confirming the £14m southern station entrance and improvements to the M62. Sit on that you tart! :lol:

£14 million quid .... WOW!!! That's what I'd expect places like Nuneaton, Kidderminster or Tamworth to be spending on their stations, not a city with 800,000 people!!!!!!!!

It cost £35 million quid to do the Rotunda up in Birmingham City Centre ... so £14 million should by you a few dozen tins of paint and half a tonne of Polyfiller!!!! :lol:

It cost £35 million quid to do the Rotunda up in Birmingham City Centre ... so £14 million should by you a few dozen tins of paint and half a tonne of Polyfiller!!!! :lol:

And if Urban Splash would just spend another 10k we could hopefully get the bloody top finished off!!

But they are Manchester based so would why they give a flying f-ck about finishing off one of Birminghams best loved landmarks???????????:bash::bash::bash::bash::bash:

And if Urban Splash would just spend another 10k we could hopefully get the bloody top finished off!!

Whats wrong with it?

I reckon most Mancs are a bit scared of the rise of Leeds, and now see it as it's economic rival, as opposed to Liverpool.

What else would explain the obsession with Leeds? If it really is so insignificant then why spend so much time talking about it?

As a general rule though, if Leeds is as big as it claims then it needs to raise it's game a bit, as aside from Leeds United, Leeds Rhinos, Peter Sutcliffe and those lush Victorian arcades, I'm not sure of it's contribution to the world.

Anyway, neither matter to me much, although I'm a bit pee'd off about subsidising transport improvements for you.

Peter Sutcliffe is from Bradford, give us a break!

Leeds was a significant trading centre in agriculture/woollen cloth, later becoming a large manufacturing centre in textiles, clothing, engineering, tanning, printing, chemicals and all sorts. It produced a large number of locomotives from the days of Matthew Murray and his improvements which went all over the world. It gave us such names as Burton's, Next and, erm, ASDA. It gave us much of my family and by extension myself. Plenty to chew on there lol.

As for infrastructure, people always seem to overlook roads on here but Leeds does have two motorway corridors into the city centre, some other motorways around it, a dualled (and partly motorway) inner ring road, a few other fully or largely dualled radial roads. Not pretty but more than quite a few other places. Derby is a lot more staggering on this one when you consider its size like but I digress.

I'm actually pretty positive about Leeds, and despite never having been there, I hear it's a nice city. I think it's definately true that Manchester is looking over it's shoulder at Leeds a bit too, and understandably so because Leeds is a wealthier city..right?

I guess I just think that if Leeds wants to play with the bigboys it needs to exert it's influence a bit more and contribute more to the cultural life of the UK than Asda's and Burtons.

As a southerner, there is absolutely no comparison for me between MAnchester and Leeds. Most people in Cardiff would acknowledge Manchester as a cultural beacon, and arguably the UK's second city. I doubt most would be able to pinpoint Leeds on a map, and I doubt they would be interested about Asda or Peter Sutcliffe.

So yeah, not knocking Leeds, but if you claim 1million people then you need the cultural significance and importance and 'on the map-ability' to go with it. I don't want to sound like Terry Christian, but Manchester does have that certain aura about it that makes people sit up and take notice.

I guess I just think that if Leeds wants to play with the big boys it needs to exert it's influence a bit more and contribute more to the cultural life of the UK than Asda's and Burtons.

What about M&S and Waddingtons, who of course produced Monopoly (or at least the UK version) and Cluedo?

What about M&S and Waddingtons, who of course produced Monopoly (or at least the UK version) and Cluedo?

Now you're talking!

This conversation says otherwise.
I assure you a couple of people on a troll thread on an internet forum are in no way representative of the majority of people in this city.

Second City voted one of the world's 'smartest'
22nd October 2010
By Tamlyn Jones - Business Correspondent
BIRMINGHAM is one of the 'smartest' cities in the world – and that's official.

The Intelligent Community Forum – a think tank which studies the economic and social development of the 21st century community – has shortlisted Birmingham in its annual 'Smart 21' list of global cities.

Those nominated locales, which include just three others from Europe, are now put forward for the 2011 Intelligent City award.

The theme of next year's prize is 'Health in the Intelligent Community' whereby all 21 Smart cities have all shown innovative approaches to the delivery of health care and promotion of ICT in the sector.

The shortlist, which includes Eindhoven, Shanghai and Quebec City, will be brought down to seven cities before the overall winner is unveiled in June.

Birmingham's place on the shortlist was revealed yesterday and coincides with Hello Digital taking place throughout the city this week.

Robert Bell, who co-founded the Intelligent Community Forum, was a keynote speaker at the Beyond 2010 conference yesterday, part of Hello Digital.

Birmingham City Council's deputy leader Cllr Paul Tilsley said the city's success was founded on the work of the organisations which together make up the Digital Birmingham partnership.

He said: "I am delighted that the efforts of the partnership to create a digital city have been recognised on the global stage by the independent Intelligent Communities Forum.

"I recognise that there is still much for us to do to encourage businesses to exploit technology, to make our services more personalised, with more scope for citizen self service, and to reduce the number of digital 'have-nots' in our society.

"However it is great to have independent confirmation that we are moving in the right direction to improve Birmingham for businesses and citizens."

Hello Digital takes places at various venues across Birmingham from October 18 - 22. To find out more about guest speakers and events taking place during the week visit hellodigital.net.

Second City voted one of the world's 'smartest'
22nd October 2010
By Tamlyn Jones - Business Correspondent
BIRMINGHAM is one of the 'smartest' cities in the world – and that's official.

The Intelligent Community Forum – a think tank which studies the economic and social development of the 21st century community – has shortlisted Birmingham in its annual 'Smart 21' list of global cities.

Those nominated locales, which include just three others from Europe, are now put forward for the 2011 Intelligent City award.

The theme of next year's prize is 'Health in the Intelligent Community' whereby all 21 Smart cities have all shown innovative approaches to the delivery of health care and promotion of ICT in the sector.

The shortlist, which includes Eindhoven, Shanghai and Quebec City, will be brought down to seven cities before the overall winner is unveiled in June.

Birmingham's place on the shortlist was revealed yesterday and coincides with Hello Digital taking place throughout the city this week.

Robert Bell, who co-founded the Intelligent Community Forum, was a keynote speaker at the Beyond 2010 conference yesterday, part of Hello Digital.

Birmingham City Council's deputy leader Cllr Paul Tilsley said the city's success was founded on the work of the organisations which together make up the Digital Birmingham partnership.

He said: "I am delighted that the efforts of the partnership to create a digital city have been recognised on the global stage by the independent Intelligent Communities Forum.

"I recognise that there is still much for us to do to encourage businesses to exploit technology, to make our services more personalised, with more scope for citizen self service, and to reduce the number of digital 'have-nots' in our society.

"However it is great to have independent confirmation that we are moving in the right direction to improve Birmingham for businesses and citizens."

Hello Digital takes places at various venues across Birmingham from October 18 - 22. To find out more about guest speakers and events taking place during the week visit hellodigital.net.

More a story for the economic/office news thread, unless you're trying to disprove the city's awful accent being a sign of stupidity (in which case you should have said so :) ).

I think its strange that any other city except Birmingham claim to be the Country's second city. Birmingham is quite clearly number 2. All the debating is interesting but if everyone honestly looked at the UK impartially I think they would struggle to argue with something like this :

Rank 1 : London
Rank 2 : Birmingham
Rank 3 : Manchester
Rank 4 : Glasgow / Newcastle / Liverpool / Leeds
Rank 5 : Sheffield / Bristol / Nottingham / Hull / Edinburgh
Rank 6 : Exeter / York / Norwich / Chester / Aberdeen etc

A lower ranking doesnt mean inferior by the way. I just mean in terms of overall clout in the UK taking into account things like cultural impact, local economy, population, foreign recognition etc.

Rank 1 : London
Rank 2 : Birmingham
Rank 3 : Manchester
Rank 4 : Glasgow / Newcastle / Liverpool / Leeds
Rank 5 : Sheffield / Bristol / Nottingham / Hull / Edinburgh
Rank 6 : Exeter / York / Norwich / Chester / Aberdeen etc

A lower ranking doesnt mean inferior by the way. I just mean in terms of overall clout in the UK taking into account things like cultural impact, local economy, population, foreign recognition etc.

Which would mean that list is wrong.

Sorry, but I really think that Manchester has overtaken Birmingham over the last 10 years.

I'm in my late 20's and growing up Birmingham was always considered the second city. I doubt those growing up now would think so.

The BBC going to Manchester is probably the single biggest indication of this.

I think its strange that any other city except Birmingham claim to be the Country's second city. Birmingham is quite clearly number 2.

it may well still be number two, but it is far from clear these days....imo

Meh, in France both Marseille or Lyon are toted as the second city due to some technicality or other, all it means is that in guide books publications you get some slight contradictions.

I think its strange that any other city except Birmingham claim to be the Country's second city. Birmingham is quite clearly number 2. All the debating is interesting but if everyone honestly looked at the UK impartially I think they would struggle to argue with something like this :

Rank 1 : London
Rank 2 : Birmingham
Rank 3 : Manchester
Rank 4 : Glasgow / Newcastle / Liverpool / Leeds
Rank 5 : Sheffield / Bristol / Nottingham / Hull / Edinburgh
Rank 6 : Exeter / York / Norwich / Chester / Aberdeen etc

A lower ranking doesnt mean inferior by the way. I just mean in terms of overall clout in the UK taking into account things like cultural impact, local economy, population, foreign recognition etc.

You are just judging these on population of the metro area and is a myopic view.

The second city of importance in the UK is clearly Edinburgh closely followed by Belfast then Cardiff (only due to Wales sharing a legal system with England) as these are the seats of government and legal system of their respective countries.

I would even go so far as to say Birmingham is less known internationally than Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester primarily due to the football teams and docks/ports.

Not sure on what metrics Brum is ahead of Manchester on these days.

Talking about the conurbations.

Sport, media, infrastructure I would say Manchester was well ahead.

Brum has the NEC, so clearly ahead then.

Laughable to say Edinburgh is ahead.

Not sure on what metrics Brum is ahead of Manchester on these days.

Talking about the conurbations.

Sport, media, infrastructure I would say Manchester was well ahead.

Brum has the NEC, so clearly ahead then.

Laughable to say Edinburgh is ahead.


Once again, France has more than one city is described as being the second city. It's not a title anyone really cares about or takes too seriously, it's just considered irrelevent cack mostly.

As it stands, unlike Marseille or Lyon, Brum and Manc both make shite second cities.

As it stands, unlike Marseille or Lyon both Brum and Manc both make shite second cities.

Hmm, not sure the slums of Marseille have a comparable location in the country? Perhaps the East end of London in 1945?

Not sure if Marseille has a reputation for anything but violence and seediness.

Lyon is nice.

If one had to use crude rankings, I'd put them thus. I think Glasgow is borderline Rank 2/3, Likewise Liverpool borderline rank 3/4

Rank 1 : London
Rank 2 : Manchester/Birmingham
Rank 3 : Glasgow/Leeds/Edinburgh/Liverpool
Rank 4 : Sheffield/Cardiff/Bristol/Belfast/Nottingham/Newcastle etc
Rank 5 : Aberdeen/Leicester/Plymouth/Brighton/Swansea/Hull/Southampton/Portsmouth/Norwich etc
Rank 6 : York/Exeter/Newport/Chester/Dundee etc

Hmm, not sure the slums of Marseille have a comparable location in the country? Perhaps the East end of London in 1945?

Not sure if Marseille has a reputation for anything but violence and seediness.

Lyon is nice.

Marseille is a real sh1thole. A fascinating and invigorating place to be, but nothing to be proud of really, and I'm not sure what it's business community consists of.

Not disputing it as a (joint) second city of France, but I wouldn't say it's nicer than Manchester or Brummyland

Hmm, not sure the slums of Marseille have a comparable location in the country? Perhaps the East end of London in 1945?

Not sure if Marseille has a reputation for anything but violence and seediness

The vast majority of the city doesn't look like that and the crime rate is no worse (better in fact) than nearby-ish Nice.


Marseille is a real sh1thole.


No, it's not.


Not disputing it as a (joint) second city of France, but I wouldn't say it's nicer than Manchester or Brummyland

Then you need to get out more.

If one had to use crude rankings, I'd put them thus. I think Glasgow is borderline Rank 2/3


Larger retail core than Birmingham and Manchester. Larger, busier rail network (as many people commute by train into Glasgow City Centre every morning as Birmingham and Manchester combined). Underground. Easily comparable sporting and cultural infrastructure. Looking at commercial success of Glasgow bands and artists (Turner Prize, Beck's Future's) over the last decade again the city easily compares/betters. The only thing I can see Glasgow getting marked down on would be the fact that it's metro area is smaller. City for city, easily competes at that level. Some proper inner-city districts too that you don't see in Birmingham or Manchester, which is nice.

To take a leaf out of Sandblast and Leeds Troll's book:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Marseille_hafen.jpg/450px-Marseille_hafen.jpg

and

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d2/Place_du_G%C3%A9n%C3%A9ral_de_Gaulle.jpg/800px-Place_du_G%C3%A9n%C3%A9ral_de_Gaulle.jpg

(from wikipedia)

vs.

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/01/96/75/1967553_7797ac32.jpg

and

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/02/12/05/2120587_1807d7fd.jpg

(from Geograph)

Tough one!

Can't argue with that!

I think its strange that any other city except Birmingham claim to be the Country's second city. Birmingham is quite clearly number 2. All the debating is interesting but if everyone honestly looked at the UK impartially I think they would struggle to argue with something like this :

Rank 1 : London
Rank 2 : Birmingham
Rank 3 : Manchester
Rank 4 : Glasgow / Newcastle / Liverpool / Leeds
Rank 5 : Sheffield / Bristol / Nottingham / Hull / Edinburgh
Rank 6 : Exeter / York / Norwich / Chester / Aberdeen etc

A lower ranking doesnt mean inferior by the way. I just mean in terms of overall clout in the UK taking into account things like cultural impact, local economy, population, foreign recognition etc.



Leeds on a par with Liverpool and Glasgow? :nono:

The vast majority of the city doesn't look like that and the crime rate is no worse (better in fact) than nearby-ish Nice.




No, it's not.



Then you need to get out more.

Okay, yes I'd rather holiday in Marseille due to the sun and sea, but I've never seen poverty in Western Europe like I saw in Marseille..crumbling buildings, rats, astonishing levels of litter, a real edgy atmosphere etc.

Yes, Marseille is a city for the senses..it's invigorating and interesting and I'd recommend people visit it, but it's crumbling, it's underachieving and it's not as 'rounded' as a city as Birmingham or Manchester

Leeds on a par with Liverpool and Glasgow? :nono:

Totally agree, Yoshef, Liverpool is punching way ahead of Leeds & Glasgow.

On a different level.

Liverpool has taken full advantage of access to and proximity to the major UK, non-London growth driver, Manchester.

Leeds has singularly failed to do so.

Marseille's a beauty, bit scruffy in bits but overall it has some really nice areas. In terms of comparing it with Birmingham and Manchester, it's just different. In terms of urbanity and genereal quality of life it's comparable to other great mediterranean cities like Barcelona, Palma, Naples etc. North European cities have a completely different feeling its like comparing apples to oranges.
As for our cities they maybe lack compared with German or Scandinavian in terms of their inner city suburbs but as a whole they're much closer than people think.

Totally agree, Yoshef, Liverpool is punching way ahead of Leeds & Glasgow.

On a different level.

Liverpool has taken full advantage of access to and proximity to the major UK, non-London growth driver, Manchester.

Leeds has singularly failed to do so.


Well I wouldn't say that. You could make a case to compare Liverpool and Glasgow, two cities with a lot in common.

If one had to use crude rankings, I'd put them thus. I think Glasgow is borderline Rank 2/3, Likewise Liverpool borderline rank 3/4

Rank 1 : London
Rank 2 : Manchester/Birmingham
Rank 3 : Glasgow/Leeds/Edinburgh/Liverpool
Rank 4 : Sheffield/Cardiff/Bristol/Belfast/Nottingham/Newcastle etc
Rank 5 : Aberdeen/Leicester/Plymouth/Brighton/Swansea/Hull/Southampton/Portsmouth/Norwich etc
Rank 6 : York/Exeter/Newport/Chester/Dundee etc

Interesting that you put Edinburgh so high up. Presumably because of its capital status, financial sector and sporting heritage such as Murrayfield? I lived there for many years and its certainly one of the best cities in the UK but purely on a personal opinion I think its hard to place Edinburgh above Newcastle and I would definitely say Liverpool and Leeds are more significant.

Whatever the ranking I would also place Bristol and Edinburgh at the same level - both regionally significant cities, large university populations, big arts scene, developed financial sectors etc.

Interesting that you put Edinburgh so high up. Presumably because of its capital status, financial sector and sporting heritage such as Murrayfield? I lived there for many years and its certainly one of the best cities in the UK but purely on a personal opinion I think its hard to place Edinburgh above Newcastle and I would definitely say Liverpool and Leeds are more significant.

Whatever the ranking I would also place Bristol and Edinburgh at the same level - both regionally significant cities, large university populations, big arts scene, developed financial sectors etc.

I think I'd place Edinburgh highly because of it's history, it's huge financial influence, it's political influence, it's significance to Scotland, it's festival, it's world renowned status etc, and of course it's size..it's not enormous, but it's hardly small.

Most places can be compared and contrasted, but I think Edinburgh needs to be pretty high up the list. Newcastle (or the Tyne/Wear Metro) may be larger, but I'd say it's less 'on the map' than Edinburgh, and has less influence on the UK, and I think investors/companies/retailers would view Edinburgh as a 'must have' city location over Newcastle.

Totally agree, Yoshef, Liverpool is punching way ahead of Leeds & Glasgow.

On a different level.

Liverpool has taken full advantage of access to and proximity to the major UK, non-London growth driver, Manchester.

Leeds has singularly failed to do so.

Exactly why Liverpool has failed to grow to the extent Manchester has. Leeds and Manchester will always exists side by-side, one not affecting the other. The same can't be said for Liverpool. You could well argue all other Yorkshire cities have taken full advantage of Leeds.

If we look at Leeds train station you would see it's the busiest outside of London, so everyone who lives in York, Harrogate, Bradford etc must be using the economic growth and power of Leeds. In the same way nearby towns and cities use Manchester.

There are other cities such as Manchester you know.. There are reasons why Leeds financial and business sectors outperform that of Manchester's.

"Leeds is the UK’s largest centre for business and financial services outside London"

"Leeds is widely recognised as the most important legal centre outside London"

Exactly why Liverpool has failed to grow to the extent Manchester has. Leeds and Manchester will always exists side by-side, one not affecting the other. The same can't be said for Liverpool. You could well argue all other Yorkshire cities have taken full advantage of Leeds.

If we look at Leeds train station you would see it's the busiest outside of London, so everyone who lives in York, Harrogate, Bradford etc must be using the economic growth and power of Leeds. In the same way nearby towns and cities use Manchester.

There are other cities such as Manchester you know.. There are reasons why Leeds financial and business sectors outperform that of Manchester's.

"Leeds is the UK’s largest centre for business and financial services outside London"

"Leeds is widely recognised as the most important legal centre outside London"

Glasgow and Birmingham New Street are both busier than Leeds, but your point still stands.

Glasgow and Birmingham New Street are both busier than Leeds, but your point still stands.

Yeah there's some room for debate. I just Googled it

http://www.leedsliveitloveit.com/visitors/travel/train

Glasgow and Birmingham New Street are both busier than Leeds, but your point still stands.

In terms of what though?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-11606949

Leeds has the best tall building in the world. Officially.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-11606949

Leeds has the best tall building in the world. Officially.

That is fantastic!! thank you for posting that ill tonkso.

I find Marseilles & Lyon far more interesting cities than Paris. Paris is like a favourite band that was overplayed to death, so now you it bores you. I always find the underdogs more interesting.

In terms of what though?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_stations_in_Great_Britain

and I think investors/companies/retailers would view Edinburgh as a 'must have' city location over Newcastle.

Thats an interesting point.
Edinburgh certainly has cache associated with it that retailers seek for their flagship stores. Its also has a lot of good quality independent retailers. Interstingly, other than London its actually smaller places that tend to have this - York, Cambridge, Tunbridge Wells, Bath, Chester and so on. Rightly or wrongly the larger regional cities tend to be associated with chain stores.

Exactly why Liverpool has failed to grow to the extent Manchester has. Leeds and Manchester will always exists side by-side, one not affecting the other. The same can't be said for Liverpool. You could well argue all other Yorkshire cities have taken full advantage of Leeds.

If we look at Leeds train station you would see it's the busiest outside of London, so everyone who lives in York, Harrogate, Bradford etc must be using the economic growth and power of Leeds. In the same way nearby towns and cities use Manchester.

There are other cities such as Manchester you know.. There are reasons why Leeds financial and business sectors outperform that of Manchester's.

"Leeds is the UK’s largest centre for business and financial services outside London"

"Leeds is widely recognised as the most important legal centre outside London"

Leeds V Manchester

is not correct comparison is it.

`Manchester' begin a thin slither, much much smaller than Leeds.

Not comparing like for like.

You look after your figures and believe them if you want.

We'll move on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_stations_in_Great_Britain

Thats in terms of passengers, in terms of trains Leeds is by far the busiest.

Leeds V Manchester

is not correct comparison is it.

`Manchester' begin a thin slither, much much smaller than Leeds.

Not comparing like for like.

You look after your figures and believe them if you want.

We'll move on

I laugh at the fact you think Manchester out preforms Leeds at everything. :lol:

Thats in terms of passengers, in terms of trains Leeds is by far the busiest.

Surely to everyone other than a train spotter, passengers are more important than trains?

duplicate post

Thats in terms of passengers, in terms of trains Leeds is by far the busiest.

Leeds is an interchange. Glasgow Central is end of the West Coast Line and serves the suburbs and City Region. We also have Queen Street, another busy Station serving Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland. And as JamesWales points out, passenger numbers are more important.

Surely to everyone other than a train spotter, passengers are more important than trains?

Leeds train station is like a hub, thousands of passengers pass through Leeds every single day, the survay that he provided only counts the passengers which actually get off at Leeds Station, it's not taking into account all them thousands of people which pass through Leeds everyday....

Leeds V Manchester

is not correct comparison is it.

`Manchester' begin a thin slither, much much smaller than Leeds.

Not comparing like for like.

You look after your figures and believe them if you want.

We'll move on

Okay whatever you say. BTW does Manchester have the 'Big six' law firms? Oh wait Leeds does :lol:

Glasgow and Birmingham New Street are both busier than Leeds, but your point still stands.

Depends on how its measured. ORR ticket sale estimates put Glasgow central and new street as more ticket sales, altho network rail, which owns and operates all 3 stations says Glasgow central is its busiest station outside London with 104,000 ppl using the station each day, followed by Leeds with 101,000. They say Birmingham new street is 3rd busiest.

Totally agree, Yoshef, Liverpool is punching way ahead of Leeds & Glasgow.

On a different level.



On what planet is that?

Depends on how its measured. ORR ticket sale estimates put Glasgow central and new street as more ticket sales, altho network rail, which owns and operates all 3 stations says Glasgow central is its busiest station outside London with 104,000 ppl using the station each day, followed by Leeds with 101,000. They say Birmingham new street is 3rd busiest.

To be honest, I'm no expert on the intricacies of the statistics and theories behind train passenger numbers. I agree that all statistics can be adapted and are the result of a certain methodology, and likewise they can all be interpreted in different ways.

Nonetheless, I'd say that Network Rail's official Entries and Exits lists is a fairly standard dataset to use.

Either way, if Leeds is the second, third or fourth busiest station in the UK, that is a pretty impressive statistic, and certainly not what I thought would be the case.

On what planet is that?

presumably the same one where Liverpool benefits from being in Manchester's Jupiter-like pull?

:lol:

how many stations in Leeds centre compared to other core cities?

presumably the same one where Liverpool benefits from being in Manchester's Jupiter-like pull?

The fly told me that Manchester is the 2nd city of whole the galaxy, :'( he said that no other City compares ;)

how many stations in Leeds centre compared to other core cities?

Glasgow City Centre has 6 heavy rail stations and 3 subway stations.

From the transport section :

Based on station size Edinburgh and Leeds are top. If Leeds have added their 3 new platforms since this was posted then they now have the biggest station outside London.

So updated list, taking into account people's additional information:

Edinburgh Waverley: 18
Leeds City: 17 (3 planned)
Manchester Piccadilly: 14 (2 planned)
Glasgow Central: 13 (+2 low level)
Birmingham NS: 13
Reading: 12 (4? planned)
Newcastle: 12
Crewe: 12
York: 11
Glasgow Queen Street: 9 (+2 low level)
Liverpool Lime Street: 9 (+1 low level)

From the transport section :

Based on station size Edinburgh and Leeds are top. If Leeds have added their 3 new platforms since this was posted then they now have the biggest station outside London.

Glasgow Central now has 17 platforms. Edinburgh Waverley is the largest station outside London by area ( second in the UK to Waterloo ) and platform count.

At one time there were 7 train stations in Leeds city centre, altho thankfully over the years these have been merged into one station.

presumably the same one where Liverpool benefits from being in Manchester's Jupiter-like pull?

Correct.

There's Manchester.(Jupiter) And there's Liverpool in the bottom right corner.(look how small and barely visible it is) Leeds(which also begins with an L) is to the right of Manchester. :colgate:

http://zh-cn.astronomycamerasblog.com/wp-content/uploads-extra/20070511-jupiter-galilean-moons.jpg

Lol

That was actually quite funny

Correct.

There's Manchester.(Jupiter) And there's Liverpool in the bottom right corner

You mean Left :weird:

You mean Left :weird:

Indeed I do Leeds Troll. For that you can have Hull, which is to the right of Leeds.

Okay, yes I'd rather holiday in Marseille due to the sun and sea, but I've never seen poverty in Western Europe like I saw in Marseille..crumbling buildings, rats, astonishing levels of litter, a real edgy atmosphere etc.

Yes, Marseille is a city for the senses..it's invigorating and interesting and I'd recommend people visit it, but it's crumbling, it's underachieving and it's not as 'rounded' as a city as Birmingham or Manchester

What are you on about, it'd be apt to call fairly large (and larger) parts of Manc and Brum to what you're describing Marseille as. Isn't as 'rounded'? lol wut? You're going to have to clarify as that just sounds ridiculous.

Manchester and Birmingham are very decent but as second cities they suck, Liverpool and Glasgow before they were depopulated made a much better second city pairing.

Correct.

There's Manchester.(Jupiter) And there's Liverpool in the bottom right corner.(look how small and barely visible it is) Leeds(which also begins with an L) is to the right of Manchester. :colgate:




I think you're mixing up a gas giant with a hot-air giant. :wink2:

Manchester and Birmingham are very decent but as second cities they suck, Liverpool and Glasgow before they were depopulated made a much better second city pairing.


:okay: I endorse this post.

how many stations in Leeds centre compared to other core cities?

B'ham has 3 stations national stations i guess you can all it, although at the moment one of them has two platforms (Moor Street) and is a through to Snow Hill Station.

Birmingham has a bigger economy and population than Manchester.

European cities report rate Manchester higher than Birmingham

Manchester has a bigger airport than Birmingham

My biceps are bigger than Langurs:banana:

etc etc

Which city apart from you know where has the most rail platforms in its city centre
Another one to cock wave about

I think you're mixing up a gas giant with a hot-air giant. :wink2:

:lol:

What are you on about, it'd be apt to call fairly large (and larger) parts of Manc and Brum to what you're describing Marseille as. Isn't as 'rounded'? lol wut? You're going to have to clarify as that just sounds ridiculous.

Manchester and Birmingham are very decent but as second cities they suck, Liverpool and Glasgow before they were depopulated made a much better second city pairing.

.... if Birmingham "sucks" ....

http://www.advantagewm.co.uk/Images/birmingham-council-house-in-spring_tcm9-23656.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2319/1876994903_4f1c4905ce.jpg
http://www.advantagewm.co.uk/Images/Birmingham,%20Canal%20at%20Brindley%20Place_tcm9-24884.jpg
http://www.urban75.org/photos/birmingham/images/birmingham-bullring-07.jpg http://www.artsfest.org.uk/files/images/pageimage/91.6a105f34/450x330.fitandcrop.jpg
http://i472.photobucket.com/albums/rr87/rhys71/2299small.jpg?w=840
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2790/4190665220_07bfc11550.jpg
http://www.brindleyplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/central_square_675x250.jpghttp://www.birminghamuk.com/BrumFoto/brindleyplace/brindleyview3.jpg
http://media.rightmove.co.uk/30k/29654/29654_2409bt_IMG_04_0000.jpghttp://www.gbrpb.co.uk/show-image/1275482295/550http://www.businessnetexplorer.com/construction/electricalexplorer/news/638a.jpghttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Hyatt_Regency_-Birmingham_-UK.jpg/248px-Hyatt_Regency_-Birmingham_-UK.jpg

.... then all cities in this country are in a very bad state!!!

for some reason this is the 3rd most read article on the telegraph site atm. i approve.

London fails to make top 50 'most live-able' cities

London has failed to make the top 50 “most live-able” cities, according to worldwide analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Canada’s Vancouver scooped the top spot having met an impressive 98% of the criteria set by the surveyors, including the quality of healthcare, culture, environment and infrastructure.

Vienna in Austria is ranked second, closely followed by Melbourne, Australia. The top 20 includes five Australian cities, three Canadian cities and two German cities.

Manchester is the only UK city to make the top 50, coming in at 46th place and beating London’s ranking of 51st place.

The poorest performing locations were Africa and Asia “where civil instability and poor infrastructure present significant challenges,” the survey found. Harare in Zimbabwe was ranked 140th out of 140 having met just 37.5% of the criteria set by the surveyors.

:okay:

for some reason this is the 3rd most read article on the telegraph site atm. i approve.



:okay:

We all know it.

Give it 50 years and Manchester will be the capital.

Mark my words, if you are lucky to be around and my marbles still roll, I'll post back.

I would hate to actually live in London with all its disadvantages,but afterall its only a two and a bit hours train stop away for a day visit(I go a couple of times a year) yes I do like London in small doses:lol: the station is just a mile from my house where I can hop on a pendelino.

Living halfway between the countries two best cities Liverpool and Manchester and a two hour train ride to London .Why would you want to live anywhere else.

I can see why Manchester and surrounding areas are more livable,so many obvious reasons.

Birmingham has a bigger economy and population than Manchester.

That's true. And Manchester has just been screwed to the tune of £250K per week, by a SCOUSER.

That's true.

Any stats to back that up? :)

Any stats to back that up? :)

http://www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination

That moon to the right of Jupiter doesn't start with an L - it's called io.

Funny how those who want to play Manchester down always describe it as a place that no normal person recognises as Manchester.

How about SELNEC along with Central west Midlands are by far and away the second tier things in the UK. Well below the major on in the SE and well above the one in SWL and the one in the middle of WY?

If calling it Manchester sticks in your throat then fair enough. Call the think SELNEC. It's name really doesn't matter, the fact it's there with the infrastructure and the economy it does is the relevant bit.

So from now on, get onto the BBC, Sky, all the newspapers etc and get them to start using term SELNEC instead of the commonly used Manchester. It'll make you all much happier.

Arf.

Just listening to 5Live - J3 Hyde on the M67 in Manchester is currently closed.

Radio 2 travel dollies always quote the M6 from Cannock (J11) to Castle Bromwich (J4) as "Birmingham" which is nice to hear. Whereas 5Live seem to think Spaghetti Junction (J6) as being in the "West Midlands" which is plain stupid!

Theeason SELNEC con be considered one in my opinion, and the figures back this up, see the Centre of Cities recent study, that overall in SELNEC the population is far more likely to work in say Salford, live in Trafford and play in Manchester.

The figures for the % of the population that make up the working population of central Manchester are something like 30% from the city of Manchester yet 90% for the city of Leeds. Even all of GM only make up for 85% of the working population of central Manchester.

Now, if you want to try to put down SELNEC and pretend that city of Manchester is comparable to city of Leeds or city of Birmingham then fair enough.

But at least accept what you are comparing.

You are not comparing the economic power, the level of infrastructure or the population of those places.

What you are comparing is the number of people who live within a councils area that share the same colour wheelie bin :lol:. and what difference does that REALLY make to northern cities but not the councils in the south east?

Radio 2 travel dollies always quote the M6 from Cannock (J11) to Castle Bromwich (J4) as "Birmingham" which is nice to hear. Whereas 5Live seem to think Spaghetti Junction (J6) as being in the "West Midlands" which is plain stupid!

I strongly doubt that there is any formal guidlines on this, rather the reporter in question views the highway agency web cams and then looks at a map to see where it is.

It was a very light hearted comment to those that claim that no one believes anything outside of city of Manchester is never recognised as Manchester (as some of the Leeds chumps do).

Just been passed one of the Holiday Inn Express Manchester and the Manchester Audi dealership.

Who can guess which 'city' the tram I am in is?

THAT is the difference between SELNEC and the other places people insist on comparing it with.

Does it matter to anyone in SELNEC that the Audi dealership has different coloured wheelie bins? Really?

You can blow as many gaskets as you like, but it still doesn't make Wigan Stockport or Salford Ashton. They are each towns in their own right and will remain so.

Stockport links to Didsbury (Manchester). It's seamless. Whilst a town in its own right you'd have to live here to understand the connection. The same goes for Salford.

It in no way compares to the Wigan comparison.

Indeed.

but that is not really the point.

Almost all discussions on this forum talk about infrastructure and economies.
What I do not get is why people insist on confining SELNEC to being only within the artificial boundaries of one local authority?

How is that in anyway relevant to anything?

Why does the colour of a wheelie bin in Old Trafford differing from the colour in Hulme and Ordsall make any difference in the scheme of thing?

Ashton, Stockport, Sale, Anywhere can and cannot be considered to be part of SELNEC - different people have differing views.

What I am interested in is why changing local authority matters in the slightest. Businesses don't hence why you get Manchester this and Manchester that all over Tameside, Trafford, Stockport, Slaford and other boroughs.

Does it really matter to anything which authority the locals of OlD Trafford pay their taxes to? Is someone on the west bank of the Irwell really contributing less to the urban fabric of SELNEC than someone in Wythenshawe?

Think about it.

Businesses are about making money Kurt, not defining city boundaries. Some businesses locate just outside a city as it is cheaper, but will label their location as that of the nearby city for association, and draw more custom from people looking for a particular service or product in or near that city, amongst other reasons. Simples. Some businesses would put sugar on a dog turd and label it as chocolate if they could if they thought they could get away with it.

.... if Birmingham "sucks" ....

.... then all cities in this country are in a very bad state!!!

Oh my gosh.... wow.... I can't believe that is Birmingham... you must be so glad to live there.... I mean WOW..... Seriously.... a city is that beautiful.... oh my...

-___-

If I wanted a tacky Toby Carvery I would go to Brindley place. I'm assuming this is the only nice place in Birmingham as you have posted it several times.

Yoshef, but the Audi dealership and the Holiday Inn Express are very close to the 'city centre'.

Not sure how they are saving money by being out of 'town'.

Are you seriously suggesting someone in Wythenshawe contributes more to the urban fabric and adds more demand on SELNECs infrastructure and core economy than someone living on the west bank of the Irwell?

Really?

Yoshef, but the Audi dealership and the Holiday Inn Express are very close to the 'city centre'.

Not sure how they are saving money by being out of 'town'.

Are you seriously suggesting someone in Wythenshawe contributes more to the urban fabric and adds more demand on SELNECs infrastructure and core economy than someone living on the west bank of the Irwell?

Really?


I'm not suggesting anything to do with Wythenshaw, I'm addressing your suggestion of using what businesses call themselves or their branches to define what Manchester is.

.... if Birmingham "sucks" ....

.... then all cities in this country are in a very bad state!!!

No, it sucks as a second city and half those pics you posted didn't exactly help either.

I am not using it to define Manchester or anything though.

I am using it to point to a difference between SELNEC and say Leeds.

There are literally hundreds of examples of the business community, very close to the city centre describingg the place they live in as Manchester, just as the normal joe public do.

I'd be surprised if anyone could provide many examples of Leeds hotels or Leeds offices that exist outside of city of Leeds.

All I do is point out the differences, why they are not comparable if you care about anything other than the number of purple wheelie bins in an area.

To some on here the 5 star Lowry hotel is not a sign of the economy of central SELNEC but somehow hotels down in Wythenshawe, 10miles from the centre tell you more about the local economy and infrastructure of SELNEC.

I'll bore you again, business, you and I all have a different idea what makes up SELNEC, unless you confine yourself to only consider the city of Manchester, which tells you nothing really very acurate about the place then no two people will ever agree.

Oh my gosh.... wow.... I can't believe that is Birmingham... you must be so glad to live there.... I mean WOW..... Seriously.... a city is that beautiful.... oh my...

-___-

If I wanted a tacky Toby Carvery I would go to Brindley place. I'm assuming this is the only nice place in Birmingham as you have posted it several times.

No, 10123 ... I don't actually live there, I live in a beautiful Cotswold village 40 miles away.

And in the 'beauty' stakes ... yes, there are plenty of areas of Birmingham that wouldn't be classed as "beautiful" ... but the parts that are, leave Leeds in the shade, mate :)

http://contentadmin.livebookings.com/dynamaster/image/6244eb503eade2c3c4123d5868aa47d1_400x700.jpghttp://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/birmmail/aug2009/4/0/piccolino-415945842.jpg
http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/birmpost/mar2008/4/6/F140E5B8-A8F3-E427-2853AE05D12B767C.jpghttp://www.pace-uk.co.uk/files/thaiedge.jpghttp://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/birmmail/jan2010/7/0/edmunds-555392077.jpg
http://www.elevenbrindleyplace.co.uk/images/content/news-nuvo.jpghttp://www.paradisecircus.co.uk/images/right-col/argent-brindleyplace.jpg

Just a sample above .... with Jamie Oliver also opening a restaurant at Brindleyplace shortly, and Conran at the Cube ... some of the best restaurants in the UK are located in this area.

No, 10123 ... I don't actually live there, I live in a beautiful Cotswold village 40 miles away.

And in the 'beauty' stakes ... yes, there are plenty of areas of Birmingham that wouldn't be classed as "beautiful" ... but the parts that are, leave Leeds in the shade, mate :)

I would love to see them but I worry they don't exists ;), why else do you always post the same images of Birmingham?

One of the many collages of Leeds..

http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/6773/leedscollage.jpg

Brum, and SELNEC, for second tier 'cities' (I know, but you know what I mean), are piss poor in European terms.

Even much smaller places along the lines of Lille, very medium sized German city, Any Scando city are much much nice than SELNEC or Brum.

Can I ask a question?

How many years has this f***ing stupid argument been going on?

Manchester.

http://www2.arkansas.net/~mgee/manchstr.gif

London.

http://www.mapsofworld.com/united-kingdom/maps/london-map.jpg

Exactly. It doesn't take a genius to work out what I'm getting at.

Worrayer torkinabar Willis?

I would love to see them but I worry they don't exists ;), why else do you always post the same images of Birmingham?

One of the many collages of Leeds..

http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/6773/leedscollage.jpg

What a dreadful collage ^^^^^^!!!

How many "Pret a Manger's" are there in Leeds ... or is it the same place :lol:

Btw .... we've also seen all those images, time after time, after time, after time ...... could be the centre of Wolverhampton! :)

http://www.byp.cc/cities/wolverhampton/WolverhamptonArtGallery.jpg http://aff.bstatic.com/images/hotel/org/748/748604.jpg
http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/birmmail/may2009/1/8/tram-route-512401562.jpghttp://www.wolverhamptonjobs.org.uk/Wolverhampton.jpg

Wolverhampton ^^ .... third tier city like Leeds ... but without TRAMS!!! :

Why does Sandblast post the same old pictures? i mean come on how many times have we seen them pictures!! i know your getting old and you forget you've already posted them pictures 50x already but come on sandblast there is no excuse for posting them over and over again for every arguement you have on this thread, your not fooling anyone with them pictures we all know what Birmingham really looks like and to be fair it isn't nice, it's one of the worst looking places in the UK!! it's a concrete hell hole brutal in most places with the odd ok looking architecture here and there, but apart from that appearance wise Brum is a fucking shit hole!!

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Leeds Cenotaph And Town Hall (http://www.flickr.com/photos/27677450@N05/5102654674/) by popmanstensgaard (http://www.flickr.com/people/27677450@N05/), on Flickr


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Leeds Town Hall (http://www.flickr.com/photos/27677450@N05/5102053601/) by popmanstensgaard (http://www.flickr.com/people/27677450@N05/), on Flickr

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Leeds

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799 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037444734/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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797 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037443270/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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741 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5036784573/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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742 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037403812/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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740 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037401974/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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739 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037400920/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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737 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5036780749/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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735 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5036778715/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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736 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037398244/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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778 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5036813499/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr

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777 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037431182/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr


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781 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5036815523/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr



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817 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037457632/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr


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818 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037458354/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr


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814 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037455072/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr



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813 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037454046/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr



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804 (http://www.flickr.com/photos/20546789@N00/5037448692/) by Herbaltablet (http://www.flickr.com/people/20546789@N00/), on Flickr



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Birmingham hasn't got anything close

amazing how people focus on the tiny tiny section of the cities - the centres, totally ignoring the spaces that 95% of the populations of said areas spend 95% of their time in - the surrounding suburban areas.

Well I find it interesting anyway.

Some real places, where real people spend the majority of their lives in SELNEC, a picies of the west, north, east and south off the inner 'city'...

Ordsall...

http://www.salford.gov.uk/i/ordsall-exterior-web.jpg

Moston...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2170/2176837668_e293b93c71.jpg

Gorton...

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/05/97/059712_4d9c5db7.jpg

Moss Side...

http://www.photoeverywhere.co.uk/britain/manchester/moss_side_manchester_terracesPC298789.jpg

btw folks Birmingham new street as a "through" station actually has 24 platforms as every platform is a A and B, So you can have a train on platform 8B to Manchester piccadilly and at the same time on platform 8A is the local train service to Lichfield trent valley, so it can handle 24 trains at one time if it really wanted to.

And soon Birminghams fantastic Moor street station will have its new Platforms 3 and 4 open with its new and fast direct service to London Marlybone station. Who needs to go to Manchester or Leeds anyway??????????????????????????


Birmingham will also be the "hub" of HS2 with a fantastic new city centre station

btw folks Birmingham new street as a "through" station actually has 24 platforms as every platform is a A and B, So you can have a train on platform 8B to Manchester piccadilly and at the same time on platform 8A is the local train service to Lichfield trent valley, so it can handle 24 trains at one time if it really wanted to.

Sp there are 12 platforms, whether they they are shared or not is largely irrelevant.

Yes it has 12 platforms, but the point is it can handle 24 trains, so when finding out which city centre station has the most platforms, that becomes very important in my opinion m8

Yes it has 12 platforms, but the point is it can handle 24 trains, so when finding out which city centre station has the most platforms, that becomes very important in my opinion m8

As much as I'm loathed to get into this pissing contest, at least 5 of the 17 platforms at Leeds go up to 'D' and can handle 4 trains each.

Does that mean Leeds has 32 platforms? :nuts:

Or, does it mean it has 17?

Piccadilly's 2 through platforms are A & B and will soon have 2 through platforms for the Metrolink in it's undercroft...

Stockport links to Didsbury (Manchester). It's seamless. Whilst a town in its own right you'd have to live here to understand the connection. The same goes for Salford.

It in no way compares to the Wigan comparison.

I agree, but Manchester is not unique in this as there are other places where boroughs run into one another. They are unlikely to be seamless however, as road surfaces and possibly street lights will differ from place to place, and there will also be the inevitable "Welcome to .......... please drive carefully" signs.

It's Kurt's contention that GM is a single city that I disagree with. It is no more a city than the EU is a country. I doubt, for example, that someone in Rochdale saying "I am going into town" means he/she is going anywhere other than Rochdale town centre. If they were going into Manchester they would say "I am going into Manchester."

Greater Manchester is NOT a single city, it certainly cannot be described as 'Manchester'.

I have NEVER ever said it could.

Your only way to dispute what I say is by putting words into my mouth, words that I have often said not to be true.

In MY view, a view that is NOT the definative - Rochdale, Wigan, Bolton and MANY other places around Greater Manchester are NOT part of SELNEC / Manchester / whatever.

However, in my view PARTS of Trafford, Salford and other PARTS of Greater Manchester boroughs are part of something that does not have to be described as a city. It does not have to be described as Manchester, however, they are part of something.

So, I repeat as you clearly struggle to read and understand - Manchester does NOT equal Greater Manchester.

What I consider to be SELNEC/Manchester/whatever is not important. It is not even important as to whether or not it is a city. These are all arbituary terms that mean different things to different people.

ALL, and I mean ALL, I am saying is that there is an urban lump, that acts as a single economic region (Centre for Cities is a source) that shares much infrastructure that is MUCH bigger than city of Manchester but is NOT Greater Manchester.

It does not have to be a city. It does not have to be called Manchester.

But it is there.

Piccadilly's 2 through platforms are A & B and will soon have 2 through platforms for the Metrolink in it's undercroft...

add in the numnber of people who arrive in Manchester by rail each day - heavy and light - and it'll piddle over any other English, non-London city.

It piddles over Manchester all the time.

But what about SELNEC?

oh yes, East.

You say some scouser has screwed £250k / week out of the Mancs.

Though OT wasn't in Manchester???

Greater Manchester is NOT a single city, it certainly cannot be described as 'Manchester'.

I have NEVER ever said it could.

Your only way to dispute what I say is by putting words into my mouth, words that I have often said not to be true.

In MY view, a view that is NOT the definative - Rochdale, Wigan, Bolton and MANY other places around Greater Manchester are NOT part of SELNEC / Manchester / whatever.

However, in my view PARTS of Trafford, Salford and other PARTS of Greater Manchester boroughs are part of something that does not have to be described as a city. It does not have to be described as Manchester, however, they are part of something.

So, I repeat as you clearly struggle to read and understand - Manchester does NOT equal Greater Manchester.

What I consider to be SELNEC/Manchester/whatever is not important. It is not even important as to whether or not it is a city. These are all arbituary terms that mean different things to different people.

ALL, and I mean ALL, I am saying is that there is an urban lump, that acts as a single economic region (Centre for Cities is a source) that shares much infrastructure that is MUCH bigger than city of Manchester but is NOT Greater Manchester.

It does not have to be a city. It does not have to be called Manchester.

But it is there.

Of course it's there, but only in the same physical/geographical way it was there on 31 March 1974, the eve of LG reorganisation. It's not as if someone waved a wand and the area was transformed into something bigger and better because it was given a pretentious and domineering name on a particular date.

It should have been called South East Lancashire in keeping with other met counties which were given old county designations embellished with compass points.

Greater Manchester is an old, artificial arbituary unimportant county name for the ten boroughs.

What relevance does it have to this discussion though?

You do not seem to be able to get your mind around the idea that authority boundaries are not very important.

Manchester is NOT Greater Manchester IN MY VIEW.

Greater Manchester IS NOT a city IN MY OPINION.

oh yes, East.

You say some scouser has screwed £250k / week out of the Mancs.

Though OT wasn't in Manchester???

And I also thought nobody was bigger than the club. Seems I was wrong. :)

Seems you often are. Just like the rest of us.

oh yes, East.

You say some scouser has screwed £250k / week out of the Mancs.

Though OT wasn't in Manchester???

:lol: Happens a lot this doesn't it.

Pathetic really, noticed how many people dont like the fact that Trafford is part of Manchester when it is seen to make it look bigger or any other positive things, and claim it is somewhere different or its own place.

However if it is something negative they lump it in with the City of Manchester and suddenly its all 'Manchester'

So what if more people arrive into Manchester by train, what does that mean??????



More people probably arrive into Birmingham by car every day, so what. And probably by Bus????????

So what if more people arrive into Manchester by train, what does that mean??????



More people probably arrive into Birmingham by car every day, so what. And probably by Bus????????

not a huge amount other than (outside London) Manchester has a fairly decent and developing rail network where as Brum has a better road network and better bus network.

that's all.

Just like the discussion about city centre platforms and station told you something, but not a huge amount.

Speaking of which can someone help me out...

Victoria 6 heavy 2 light = 8
Shudehill 2 light
Market St 2 light
Picc Gardens 2 light
Picc 14 heavy 2 light = 16
Mosley 1 light
St Peters 2 light
Deansgate Castlefield 2 light
Deansgate 2 heavy
Oxford Rd 4 (???) heavy
Salford Central 4 (????) heavy

Any mistakes? Not sure about Ox Rd and Sal Central.

Anyway, if correct currently 45 platforms in the city centre with another 4 on the way with 2CC but losing Mosley soon so will have 48.

edit - not sure if Victoria is getting 2 new platforms with 2CC., could make a grand total of 50.

Birmingham already has a fairly decent local rail network, crosscity line is the "best" outside London in my opinion.

I agree.


Brum has a very decent heavy rail network, served by much better trains that we see in Greater Manchester.

I've travelled Moor St to Solihull a fair few times - it is a very good service.

Brum is better for medium and long distance rail journeys, Greater Manchester is better for short and very short rail journeys (due to Metrolink).

Brums buses seem much better in the organisation.

I cannot comment on the roads as I never drive into Manchester during the rush hour and have not done so in Brum either so cannot comment.

The rail service between the two cities is shockingly poor though.

Decent frequencies but far too slow.

Now you're talking!

A few days old but never mind. We were talking about contributions to the world etc. and Burton's has had a rather illustrious past that you might not guess today. Apart from those distinctive tiled shop frontages you still get around Britain, it had the largest clothing factory in the world in the early twentieth century in Leeds, still there now but pretty much just a warehouse. I believe it was one of the early (not sure if it can claim any firsts here or what) large scale providers of mass market clothing with a very significant market share. It made a sizeable proportion of the 'demob' suits for WWII soldiers returning home which apparently became known as the full monty (after the founder Montague Burton).

Obviously nowadays things are different but it has contributed quite a lot.

Couple of links:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/leeds/content/articles/2005/07/05/local_history_montague_burton_feature.shtml

and one from that history of the world in objects BBC project: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/fUA_R4bBT2Shubxy-aj8Zg

Have all 500 pages on this thread been about Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool? :lol:

^speaking of which, I wonder who will get post number 10,000? ;)

^speaking of which, I wonder who will get post number 10,000? ;)

:lol:

I've only been to Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds once, as a tourist. I liked the incredible Victorian arcades in Leeds. I vaguely remember the enormous Anglican cathedral in Liverpool too. What they're actually all like as cities, I have no idea.

Manchester is pretty grim for a huge number who live there to be honest.

It is no surprise that as people have the means to flee the city more the suburbs and then out into the surrounding rural countryside they do so.

It's nothing like as bad as it once was, but crime, education and aspirational levels in vast swathes of the city are not exactly desirable.

Businesses are about making money Kurt, not defining city boundaries. Some businesses locate just outside a city as it is cheaper, but will label their location as that of the nearby city for association, and draw more custom from people looking for a particular service or product in or near that city, amongst other reasons. Simples. Some businesses would put sugar on a dog turd and label it as chocolate if they could if they thought they could get away with it.

Very true - many 'Leeds' branches (e.g. Ikea) can be found in adjoining settlements, such as Birstall and Castleford. Business does not care about administrative boundaries too much - hence why the functional economic areas of the city regions are the way forward.

Some real places, where real people spend the majority of their lives in SELNEC, a picies of the west, north, east and south off the inner 'city'...

Ordsall...

http://www.salford.gov.uk/i/ordsall-exterior-web.jpg

Moston...

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2170/2176837668_e293b93c71.jpg

Gorton...

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/05/97/059712_4d9c5db7.jpg

Moss Side...

http://www.photoeverywhere.co.uk/britain/manchester/moss_side_manchester_terracesPC298789.jpg


I take my hat off that you can acknowledge, unlike a lot of people on these forums, that cities are a pathwork of good and bad areas. Perhaps a 'post pictures of your city's deprived districts' thread would be a good idea.

Not that I could see the likes of Sandblast and his rose-tinted specs rushing to add anything, he thinks Lozells and Sparkbrook are full of Jamie Oliver restaurants and Prada boutiques :lol:

I think a thread on your cities most deprived areas would be quite interesting actually. Am I alone, in that when I hear of a murder somewhere I sometimes go onto googlemaps to the street it happened in to see what it looks like? Or is that weird?!

That said, while the thread would be interesting, it wouldn't be nice to denegrate areas, and I'm sure the crappy parts of all cities would look pretty much the same.

I think a thread on your cities most deprived areas would be quite interesting actually.

There is one knocking around somewhere in the depths of City Talk. It seems people prefer to show off new city centre developments and skyline pictures.

There is one knocking around somewhere in the depths of City Talk. It seems people prefer to show off new city centre developments and skyline pictures.



http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=934100&page=3

http://www.europeancitiesmonitor.eu/2009/

Manchester ranked 12th in 2010!!!

Location 2010 2010 2009 2009 1990
European Cities Monitor Rank Score
London 1
Paris 2
Frankfurt 3
Brussels 4
Barcelona 5
Amsterdam 6
Berlin 7
Madrid 8
Munich 9
Düsseldorf 10
Milan 11
Manchester 12
Zurich 13
Geneva 14
Hamburg 15
Stockholm 16
Lisbon 17
Birmingham 18
Lyon 19
Dublin 20
Prague 21
Vienna 22
Leeds 23
Warsaw 24
Copenhagen 25
Istanbul 26
Edinburgh 27
Rome 28
Glasgow 29
Budapest 30
Helsinki 31
Bratislava 32
Moscow 33
Oslo 34
Bucharest 35
Athens 36


I think its strange that any other city except Birmingham claim to be the Country's second city. Birmingham is quite clearly number 2. All the debating is interesting but if everyone honestly looked at the UK impartially I think they would struggle to argue with something like this :

Rank 1 : London
Rank 2 : Birmingham
Rank 3 : Manchester
Rank 4 : Glasgow / Newcastle / Liverpool / Leeds
Rank 5 : Sheffield / Bristol / Nottingham / Hull / Edinburgh
Rank 6 : Exeter / York / Norwich / Chester / Aberdeen etc

A lower ranking doesnt mean inferior by the way. I just mean in terms of overall clout in the UK taking into account things like cultural impact, local economy, population, foreign recognition etc.

Old news fella!

I take my hat off that you can acknowledge, unlike a lot of people on these forums, that cities are a pathwork of good and bad areas. Perhaps a 'post pictures of your city's deprived districts' thread would be a good idea.

Not that I could see the likes of Sandblast and his rose-tinted specs rushing to add anything, he thinks Lozells and Sparkbrook are full of Jamie Oliver restaurants and Prada boutiques :lol:

The Manc subforum is full of me making similar such comments.

It's a shame that some people consider it inappropriate to talk about the issues that affect the majoirty of the citizens in most of the cities.

Post anything that can possibly be considered negative and people will jump on you a ton of bricks which is a shame - most ignore the fact that I am (miles)more critical of the place I live than anywhere else I post about and I would suggest strongly that what I do post about has more relevance to normal peoples day to day lives than most of the bull shit posted on here.

Funny that. We had a suburbs thread (http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=934100&page=4), and all you could muster was 3 pictures, one of a concrete MSCP, a massive picture of a bus station supervisors lodge and this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/images/2007/04/26/shameless_01_450x300.jpg


:lol:

Manchester is pretty grim for a huge number who live there to be honest.

It is no surprise that as people have the means to flee the city more the suburbs and then out into the surrounding rural countryside they do so.

It's nothing like as bad as it once was, but crime, education and aspirational levels in vast swathes of the city are not exactly desirable.

I think as with many of your negative posts you overstate the case while making a valid point. Yes large numbers of people in Manchester (and other cities) are horribly poor, but that doesn't mean that these districts are uniformly awful or that they are being abandoned.

I live in Moss Side and for the most part it's fine. I don't mean it's fine in a 'poor working class people scraping to make ends meet' way but in a 'my neighbours actually own their houses and have decent jobs way (teachers, journalists, scientists). They could move out, but they don't. I know that this isn't true of everyone/the whole area, but you're mistaken if you think that just because an area looks run down it's a hell-hole. It may be disproportionately poor, but that doesn't mean that everyone within it (and by extension in Gorton, Moston or Ordsall) is poor or has a poor quality of life.

There's evidence that the abandonment of our inner cities is reversing. Not to the extent that would make them paradises, but in Manchester at least (and certainly in London and Leeds) middle class people have firmly repopulated their traditional inner suburbs and young professionals are moving to the inner city districts. I'd relish a discussion of our cities that's less about buildings and poorly understood statistics, but if you're going to start one don't simply rely the cliches of 20 years ago. Crime, education etc. are outcomes with long lead in periods. Look at demographics and deprivation stats to see the direction of travel.

Well that's all well and good for the middle-class professionals, but still for a lot of the poorer their areas are still blighted by crime, poor education etc.

Too much emphasis is put on the middle-class and their apsirations, shops and poncy restaurants.

Strange to see people using how many platforms their stations have as way of measuring the greatness, superiority of their city. Places in the centre of the country are likely to have many, and also very isolted but significant conurbations like Newcastle also.

Having said that I do think Liverpool could do with repoening their direct link to Scotland and Wales also, changing at Piccadilly is a massive hassle.

Oh and make the Liverpool-Hull trains more regular, and not just at 20 past seven once a day. The Hull-Liverpool is even worse, 6:30 am ffs.

Oh and make the Liverpool-Hull trains more regular, and not just at 20 past seven once a day. The Hull-Liverpool is even worse, 6:30 am ffs.

You could always change in Leeds :)

I do sometimes change in Leeds by walking to the coach station and getting a national express coach to Liverpool, much cheaper.

I shall be making a proper trip to Leeds next month for the Leeds v Hull game, so shall probably spend a few hours around Leeds' drinking establishments.

Cardiff City beat Leeds 4-0 last night.

Over 1,000 city fans went to the game, but were kept in for 30 minutes after the game while some knuckle-draggers were cleared from outside.

Apparently while waiting inside the ground, they all sang to the tune of Sloop John B: "I wanna go home, I wanna go hoooome, Leeds is a shit hole. I wanna go home"

Anyway, i thought it sounded mildly amusing, and some of you Leeds haters might find it funny. The Cardiff fans obviously hadn't visited the Victorian arcades prior to the game anyway.

Just to clarify, I think Leeds seems a nice place, i just likes the chant..

There will be lots of other examples of chants joking about rival cities, as opposed to clubs too.

Cardiff City beat Leeds 4-0 last night.

Over 1,000 city fans went to the game, but were kept in for 30 minutes after the game while some knuckle-draggers were cleared from outside.

Apparently while waiting inside the ground, they all sang to the tune of Sloop John B: "I wanna go home, I wanna go hoooome, Leeds is a shit hole. I wanna go home"

Anyway, i thought it sounded mildly amusing, and some of you Leeds haters might find it funny. The Cardiff fans obviously hadn't visited the Victorian arcades prior to the game anyway.

Just to clarify, I think Leeds seems a nice place, i just likes the chant..

There will be lots of other examples of chants joking about rival cities, as opposed to clubs too.

That chant is often used against us as well, more often than most probably.

Slightly worried about our fans being kept in when we play them in a couple of weeks, I have to be at Leeds coach station for 10:30 after the match and not sure how far it is from Elland Road to the coach station or whether they have loads of black cabs flying about like here.

who do you follow?

I'm a Hull City fan.

That chant is often used against us as well, more often than most probably.

Slightly worried about our fans being kept in when we play them in a couple of weeks, I have to be at Leeds coach station for 10:30 after the match and not sure how far it is from Elland Road to the coach station or whether they have loads of black cabs flying about like here.

Usually takes about half hour to walk to town from Elland Road - maybe add another 10 mins if you're trying to get to the coach station. There should be plenty of cabs around, otherwise there's buses (but they'll be packed).

The area around Elland Road is a bit of a dive, but that tends to be the case with the areas surrounding most football grounds in the country I suppose.

Usually takes about half hour to walk to town from Elland Road - maybe add another 10 mins if you're trying to get to the coach station. There should be plenty of cabs around, otherwise there's buses (but they'll be packed).

The area around Elland Road is a bit of a dive, but that tends to be the case with the areas surrounding most football grounds in the country I suppose.

Cheers.

Yer, most grounds are based in formerly working-class areas which are have gone to the dogs.

Cardiff City beat Leeds 4-0 last night.

Over 1,000 city fans went to the game, but were kept in for 30 minutes after the game while some knuckle-draggers were cleared from outside.

Apparently while waiting inside the ground, they all sang to the tune of Sloop John B: "I wanna go home, I wanna go hoooome, Leeds is a shit hole. I wanna go home"

Anyway, i thought it sounded mildly amusing, and some of you Leeds haters might find it funny. The Cardiff fans obviously hadn't visited the Victorian arcades prior to the game anyway.

Just to clarify, I think Leeds seems a nice place, i just likes the chant..

There will be lots of other examples of chants joking about rival cities, as opposed to clubs too.

Bluebirds' got it right.

I wonder how many of them were the sort of valleys pikeys that mobilise en masse to turn cardiff city centre into a puke and broken glass filled warzone most Saturday nights?

Hull having a pop at valleys loons...mein gott.

Not having a pop, most city centres are similar. You get your Bigg Market's, Deansgate Locks' and Concert Squares' in 'Mingland' too.

Cardiff City fans aren't cuddly and witty all the time. You might find out next year, if they don't go up.

Very fair and valid point che.

Albion - I specifically stated the number of platforms meant not very much other than it signified a decent local rail network.

Nowt else.

Not having a pop, most city centres are similar. You get your Bigg Market's, Deansgate Locks' and Concert Squares' in 'Mingland' too.

Cardiff City fans aren't cuddly and witty all the time. You might find out next year, if they don't go up.

Concert square is minging but it's not in Mingland.

Concert square is minging but it's not in Mingland.

Nope, it's in England.

That M62 is like a conduit of bile and pure hatred lol!

Nope, it's in England.

Have you not heard? Liverpool is actually in Wales :lol: I have read it on the Liverpool subforum. :D

Concert Square could be good, which is the most depressing aspect, the buildings are pleasant and the outdoor seating is brilliant on a hot summer's night(rare in Liverpool I know). It's just the clubs that put around there are the most appalling, generic thug attractors and its almost guaranteed you'll either get started on once or twice, molested by a 32 year old mother of 8 or at best, spend the whole night listening to the shittest music on earth whilst drinking pints which are at least 99% water.

That M62 is like a conduit of bile and pure hatred lol!

Is right, the Balkan road of ire.

The M62 is the artery of Britain.

Im so glad Birmingham is away from all that close "northern" cluster of cities as you lot do my head in, LOL

Im so glad Birmingham is away from all that close "northern" cluster of cities as you lot do my head in, LOL

Yeah living in easy reach of Manchester & Liverpool is pretty devastating.

Yeah living in easy reach of Manchester & Liverpool is pretty devastating.

The North West is where its at.

it's

Being at the centre of things though does give us an opinion that you lot in the SE, SW, NW and NE are out on a limb lol. Look at any world map and you see that the UK is in the centre and in the centre of that little island.....

Blackburn?

Being at the centre of things though does give us an opinion that you lot in the SE, SW, NW and NE are out on a limb lol. Look at any world map and you see that the UK is in the centre and in the centre of that little island.....

England... Birmingham

Uk... Leeds

Some say Liverpool but if you didn't include Northern Ireland, which most people don't anyway it's Leeds all the way.

England... Birmingham

Uk... Leeds

Some say Liverpool but if you didn't include Northern Ireland, which most people don't anyway it's Leeds all the way.


UK includes Northern Ireland, there is no 'buts' or 'ifs'



Liverpool is the nearest big city to the geographical centre of the British Isles (Great Britain & Ireland). The UK's busiest air route outside London is Belfast to Liverpool. :cheers:

Erm....... :shifty:

Got to agree with him. That said, as he points out, Manchester has got off pretty lightly compared to many other UK cities. Sounds like an interesting read. Definitely a stocking filler.

MEN.

New book attacks modern Manchester as 'New Labour boom town' that's lost its cultural edge

http://m.gmgrd.co.uk/res/210.$plit/C_71_article_1367086_image_list_image_list_item_0_image.jpg?03%2F11%2F2010%2011%3A27%3A26%3A808

When people talk about Manchester’s planning mistakes, it is not long before conversation turns to the Hulme Crescents.

The leaky, crime-ridden concrete streets-in-the-sky were finally demolished in the early 1990s, and good riddance, said most.

But Owen Hatherley, Southampton-born academic and author, offers another version of history.

After the families had moved out of the Crescents, a population of alternatives had moved in – many neglecting to pay the city council any rent.

These people enjoyed an eastern European aesthetic, the brutalist architecture chiming perfectly with the chilly emotions of the music produced by the likes of Joy Division and the art films at the local Aaben cinema.

Those bleak crescents had a thriving, independent culture.

More than 20 years later, Manchester has another kind of urban living, and Hatherley for one is not too impressed by it.

His book, A Guide To The New Ruins Of Great Britain portrays Manchester as “a flagship for urban regeneration and immaterial capitalism”. After the financial crash, Manchester can be seen as “the ultimate failure of the very recent past, a mausoleum of Blairism”

“If your benchmark is the rest of the UK, Manchester is doing pretty well in terms of architecture,” says Hatherley. “If your benchmark is the rest of the world, it’s terrible.”

The book casts a despairing eye across a dozen areas of the UK, bemoaning box-like “luxury” flats and an encroaching American-style urban landscape of gated communities and malls.

Dubbing these “new ruins”, he says they “represent everything wrong with New Labour and the Third Way in a built form”. But cuts may mean those cities now being “left to rot”.

“What is about to happen is so worrying, we might look back on New Labour with nostalgia,” Hatherley adds.

Of Manchester, he says the new Civil Justice Centre is a “genuinely striking building”, and Homes For Change in Hulme is “the most interesting housing scheme in contemporary Manchester”.

Mediocre

He says the work of Ian Simpson – architect of Number 1 Deansgate and Urbis – is “undeniably superior to the run of the regeneration mill”, though Simpson’s Beetham Tower he damns with faint praise as the work of “a mediocre architect at the very top of his game”.

But it is the new Manchester beyond the iconic structures for which Hatherley reserves most bile.

“As soon as you get out of the ring road you find some really shoddy stuff,” he says.

“I’m thinking of things like the Green Quarter, Islington Wharf, quite a lot of the stuff in Ancoats, the stuff over the river in Central Salford is incredibly badly-made, incredibly bad architecture. In Salford, the old towers are badly maintained and, in some cases, badly-built, but in most of them you get Parker Morris-sized flats, double-aspect windows, a certain amount of space and light.

“In a recent tower block, you’re quite likely to get single-aspect, the rooms will be much smaller.

“Although it’s not a lot of poor people stacked up together, and so it’s never going to become a sink estate, it terms of what you are living in, you’re living in something worse.”

Hatherley describes life in new “luxury” flats as “barricading oneself into a hermetically sealed, impeccably furnished prison against an outside world seldom seen but assumed to be terrifying”.

But Hatherley’s key criticism is that Manchester now makes property developers, not vital pop music, and the constant harking back to Factory Records, Joy Division and the Smiths begins to resemble Liverpool’s obsession with The Beatles.

“We shouldn’t forget that Joy Division etc ... all this came from a city which probably wasn’t a great deal of fun to live in, but which had low rent, lots of space to rehearse and record.

“In a place with high rents, you’re not going to get good art.

“I think it’s partly the gentrification, partly Oasis, but most of the interesting music that has come out over the last ten or 15 years has come from London, Glasgow and Yorkshire, and Manchester has been nowhere, particularly with dance and electronic music.

“The swaggering, vainglorious machismo of Oasis seems quite similar to the swaggering, vainglorious machismo of Urban Splash and the Beetham Tower and so forth. It’s all about front and it’s all about arrogance.”

So which places on his travels did Hatherley like?

“I’m very keen on Sheffield, Glasgow, weirdly keen on Halifax, though I wouldn’t want to live there. I quite like Bradford. Obviously, I like Greenwich because I live there,” he says.

And which did he hate?

“Leeds is the pits,” he says. “Of the new architecture there is one building that’s quite good – a building at Leeds Met University – but the rest of it ... it’s Manchester without the confidence. They’ve done all the redevelopment but with none of the wit or arrogance. It’s shocking.

» A Guide To The New Ruins Of Great Britain, by Owen Hatherley, is published by Verso at £17.99.

The devastating opinion of a 29 year old author!

He really isn't keen on Leeds.

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley

For all their bright colours and cladding, the new urban regeneration schemes of the last property boom represent a new kind of bleak. By Owen Hatherley

A man-made stretch of water – a dock or an industrial canal, is traversed by a steel bridge painted white, forming a distinctive, thin arch. A small but heavily landscaped piazza sits between some vaguely symbolic public art and some new, but already worn-looking buildings. One of them is a museum of some description, clad in shiny metal; but what really dominates the view is the apartment blocks. They're dressed in various materials – glass, often green, a pale red brick, with efflorescence dripping from the mortar, anodised aluminium, brightly coloured render, pink stone, and most of all, various clipped-on pieces of wood and steel. Next to them, similar new towers are emerging, their bare concrete frames strikingly minimal compared with the bet-hedging display around.

A few other people are sitting near me, sipping coffee in the branch of Costa Coffee next to the gift shop. It makes little difference where I am – at Clarence Dock in Leeds, or Liverpool One, or Salford Quays, Cardiff Bay, the Tyne Quayside, Glasgow Harbour, Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, Greenwich Millennium Village in London. But why am I here?

The short explanation is that I have become intrigued by the fate of "urban regeneration" in the light of the financial crisis; what the speculative redevelopments of inner cities look like after the debts have been called in. They have become the new ruins of Great Britain. These places have ruination in abundance: partly because of the way they were invariably surrounded by the derelict and un-regenerated, whether rotting industrial remnants or the giant retail and entertainment sheds of the 80s and 90s; partly because they were often so badly built, with pieces of render and wood frequently flaking off within less than a year of completion; but partly because they were so often empty, in every sense. Empty of architectural inspiration, empty of social hope or idealism, and often empty of people, Clarence Dock and Glasgow Harbour had a hard time filling their minimalist microflats with either buyers or buy-to-let investors.

The Cardiff Bays and Clarence Docks weren't postmodernist, not in the old sense of jokey historical references and Las Vegas borrowings, and they weren't suburban, low-rise and car-centred like the developments that proliferated after Nicholas Ridley tore up the urban planning laws. This was modernism, of a sort.

But while the modernism of council estates, comprehensive schools, "plate glass universities", co-operatives and libraries was driven to a large degree by socialist commitments and egalitarian politics, these entertainment centres, luxury flats, city academies and idea stores were driven by exclusivity, tourism and the politics of "aspiration".

In stylistic terms, the differences were even more marked. The blocks of flats clad themselves so as not to look like the repetitive concrete-framed tower blocks they actually were; the office blocks did the same via the "barcode façade", a ubiquitous method of making a glass box look vaguely irregular. Meanwhile, the "showpiece" buildings, such as Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, Michael Wilford's Lowry, Capita Percy Thomas's Cardiff Millennium Centre, Norman Foster's Sage Gateshead or Hamilton Architects' atrocious Liverpool Pier Head Terminal, appear to have been designed from the outside in, shapes and logos waiting around for appropriate functions to be conjured out of them. If form once claimed to follow function, then here form was the function – to be eyecatching, to attract tourists, to get the cameras snapping. If Modernism was about revealing structure, showing the workings, and attempting to transcend the divide between architect and engineer, now the architect draws a shape and asks the engineer to make it stand up.

It's possible to argue over the appropriate terminology for this stuff. Some have floated Iconism, Neo-Modernism, Bilbaoism. I prefer to call it Pseudomodernism, a modernism of concealment, a stylistic shell left after all the original social and moral ideas have been stripped out. The most droll prospective term came from Rory Olcayto of the Architects Journal, who calls it Cabeism, after the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, the aesthetics quango that was, appropriately enough, headed at its inception by a property developer, Stuart Lipton. Cabe's stock recommendations for mixed use, mixed materials and mixed heights may have created a whole new architectural aesthetic by itself (Olcayto meant it as a compliment, but it could just as easily have been a denunciation). What was especially striking was how quickly these places changed, once you left the icons and looked around a little – in short, how little of them ever actually featured in the pictures published in architecture magazines. For instance, photographs of Gateshead's Baltic, a generous and well-designed arts centre, almost invariably crop out the Baltic Quays flats, designed in a vague approximation of the Baltic's colour scheme.

There is little point in patronising these places. Over the last 15 years there have been countless articles in which London-based architecture critics descend on some benighted northern city and crow with triumph that "culture" has been brought to the proles via amorphous centres for this and that. As much as these new spaces were a means of ensuring that unproductive spaces – empty docks, industrial sites, former cotton mills – could be put back into profitable service, this was also a serious attempt to claw back some sort of civic pride after the disastrous results of Thatcherism across the inner cities of urban Britain. Great cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool, Cardiff and Glasgow were keen to proclaim their greatness once again, after decades during which they had been deliberately depopulated, with even their inner cities suburbanised – by both left and rightwing local and central governments.

The lack of confidence behind this apparent resurgence becomes obvious when you look at the results. The European equivalents of these schemes – the Céramique in Maastricht, say, or HafenCity in Hamburg – serve the same pecuniary interests and display a similar pseudomodernist aesthetic, but are scrupulously put together, expensively detailed, with a great deal of money and thought put into the design of the public space.

Here in the UK, with a tiny handful of exceptions, we've been keen to parcel off these spaces to the cheapest available firms, and to let the property developers lead the way on what was, for the most part, publicly owned land, out of the fear that they and their money might disappear if they were in any way challenged. In Leeds, especially, the result is astoundingly cheap-looking architecture, with the developers assuming we wouldn't notice the meanness and cheapness if they put a wavy roof on top and plenty of contrasting materials on the façade; the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment found that in many cases the "luxury flats" in these "stunning developments" were well below the Parker Morris minimum standards established for council housing in the early 60s.

The architects hired veered from local developers' favourites – Benoy, Carey Jones, Capita, Aedas and a variety of other faceless megafirms – to the occasional famous name hired from outside, usually Norman Foster.

The city architects who could once have stemmed the tide of dross have long been sacked. The last major city architect was, ironically, employed by Leeds, whose new towers, such as the 37-storey halls of residence Sky Plaza, designed by Carey Jones, are perhaps the tackiest of them all. The municipal architect John Thorp retires this month, and the council does not plan to replace him. What we've lost is clear. Leslie Morrison, president of the Society of Chief Architects of Local Authorities, puts it pithily: "Things get approved for political reasons if you don't have a design architect at the top to say 'That's rubbish; go back to the drawing board.'" Since few of the architects have much local knowledge, each "unique", "visionary" and "stunning" scheme appears strangely similar. This homogeneity, ignoring the particularities of these very different cities, is reflected even in the modishly chic one-word names – there are several Pinnacles, a fair few Icons, even a couple of towers called Strata – one in Cardiff, the other in the Elephant & Castle.

In the unforgiving light of the crash, these remade places looked even more desolate. The confidence trick appears to have failed, with the desired influx of wealthy residents from the suburbs into the inner city either a failure or a deeply ambiguous success, resulting in polarised spaces, gated communities and lots of private security. When I visited certain of these places, I was told that housing associations had been approached to buy up the new flats, but refused because they were far below Parker Morris standards.

There is a windswept bleakness about many of the new enclaves, but it's a curious new kind of bleak. While the ruins of the postwar settlement's architecture – the under-maintained estates, the yawningly wide plazas, the vertiginous new spaces of towers and walkways – elicited aesthetic responses in post-punk and electronic music that matched the starkness, power and modernity of their setting, how do you respond critically to something that is trying so desperately not to offend?

One feature I noticed almost everywhere was the fences. Around the sites of Sheffield's "New Retail Quarter", the "Heart of East Greenwich" and practically the entirety of central Bradford, we found brightly coloured fences covering up uncompleted schemes, the wasteland behind carefully screened off; various means were employed to distract attention from the collapse. In Greenwich, a regeneration hole was hidden by subsidised graffiti, dramatising the area's putative transformation from chemical works to the home of the Millennium Dome.

The hole in Bradford concealed the foundations of a shopping mall, part of a Will Alsop masterplan that intended to flood a city centre lacking in picturesque water features. The fence was emblazoned with all the propaganda of regeneration – "Café Culture", "Urban Energy". When I was there, somebody had scrawled the message "BEST AMONG RUINS". The planned shopping district has been indefinitely shelved, turned into a municipal park, albeit a temporary and slightly shabby one. It would be very tempting to claim this as a small victory, an example of failure transformed into something worthwhile. Yet its first appearance in the national press occurred when the English Defence League staged a "static demonstration" there in August – a first sign of the horrible weeds that might be growing out of the ruins.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/16/owen-hatherley-ruins-great-britain

Erm....... :shifty:

Got to agree with him. That said, as he points out, Manchester has got off pretty lightly compared to many other UK cities. Sounds like an interesting read. Definitely a stocking filler.

MEN.

Well while I agree most Big UK city's suffer from some very poor architecture, Leeds has probably faired the worst.

But for him to say there is only one new building in Leeds which is quite good is not ture... so for that reason alone I have disregarded his opinion.

Granary Wharf is how it should be done:)

He really isn't keen on Leeds.

In stylistic terms, the differences were even more marked. The blocks of flats clad themselves so as not to look like the repetitive concrete-framed tower blocks they actually were; the office blocks did the same via the "barcode façade", a ubiquitous method of making a glass box look vaguely irregular. Meanwhile, the "showpiece" buildings, such as Daniel Libeskind's Imperial War Museum North, Michael Wilford's Lowry, Capita Percy Thomas's Cardiff Millennium Centre, Norman Foster's Sage Gateshead or Hamilton Architects' atrocious Liverpool Pier Head Terminal, appear to have been designed from the outside in, shapes and logos waiting around for appropriate functions to be conjured out of them. If form once claimed to follow function, then here form was the function – to be eyecatching, to attract tourists, to get the cameras snapping. If Modernism was about revealing structure, showing the workings, and attempting to transcend the divide between architect and engineer, now the architect draws a shape and asks the engineer to make it stand up.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/16/owen-hatherley-ruins-great-britain



You have to hand it to him. Not many people will stand at Liverpool's Pier Head and identify the ferry terminal as being a "showpiece building". Christ on a bike.

From this angle the Leeds skyline looks decent enough
http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/125/leedsskyline1.png

No, it doesn't.

I mean it sounds stupid, but whoever said "legoland" first is spot on. Leeds more so than anywhere else is just scarred with terrible, terrible architecture.

No, it doesn't.

I mean it sounds stupid, but whoever said "legoland" first is spot on. Leeds more so than anywhere else is just scarred with terrible, terrible architecture.

I've got nothing against Leeds, but I have to agree with Kids. You lot should get down to the town hall and kick the f*** out of your councillors and your planning officers for approving most of those buildings.

The only people laughing are the property developers who have blighted Leeds and have made a killing out of it, before the property crash. They're probably reading this from a tax haven in the Caribbean.

I'm going to agree with them both, but i think Leeds does have some nice new builds but its very little compared to most major UK cities, i blame the recession because all the main projects got hit with the crunch, it's like i got told if the lumiere project got off to a start only 1 year before it would be standing in Leeds today, which i find a huge loss to Leeds, and an even bigger loss with criterion place axed in the crunch too, they were two major quality projects that would of added some top class quality to the skyline of Leeds.

I'm going to agree with them both, but i think Leeds does have some nice new builds but its very little compared to most major UK cities, i blame the recession because all the main projects got hit with the crunch, it's like i got told if the lumiere project got off to a start only 1 year before it would be standing in Leeds today, which i find a huge loss to Leeds, and an even bigger loss with criterion place axed in the crunch too, they were two major quality projects that would of added some top class quality to the skyline of Leeds.

Agreed Leeds Troll.

Those two buildings would have taken the eye and would have been a match for any skraper in the world.

The cycle will come full circle again. Fingers crossed.

I'm going to agree with them both, but i think Leeds does have some nice new builds but its very little compared to most major UK cities, i blame the recession because all the main projects got hit with the crunch, it's like i got told if the lumiere project got off to a start only 1 year before it would be standing in Leeds today, which i find a huge loss to Leeds, and an even bigger loss with criterion place axed in the crunch too, they were two major quality projects that would of added some top class quality to the skyline of Leeds.

South Bank should do the job of offering some skyscrapers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leeds/2010/sep/22/leeds-south-bank-city-centre-park-consultation

Agreed Leeds Troll.

Those two buildings would have taken the eye and would have been a match for any skraper in the world.

The cycle will come full circle again. Fingers crossed.



I sure hope it does :cheers: