It's a London thing

An 'empire-sized city attached to a medium-sized country'

The Wests, as far as the family tree goes back, originally came from Northamptonshire in the English midlands. They lived not far from the village of Watford, viewed as the linguistic fault line, or ‘isogloss,’ between the soft and hard vowels of barrth and baaath, a point often seen as marking the dividing line between the south of England and the rest of the country. (Hence ‘north of Watford’ or ‘north of Watford Gap’, the nearby service station).

For whatever reason, in the early 19^th century the Wests headed north, to Lancashire, and the flourishing port of Liverpool, by now the country’s second largest city. They were among millions making the same journey, especially to the belt between the Mersey and Humber rivers; Manchester’s population grew 25 fold that century, during a time when the city and the surrounding region produced 60 per cent of the world’s manufactured cotton.

This created an anomaly in which most of England’s major urban centuries were much further north than has historically been the case. In the 17^th century, before the industrial revolution, eight of England’s ten biggest towns were in the South; Lancashire in particular was a relative backwater, yet would soon be home to two of the most important cities in the world. By the mid-19^th century, six of England’s 10 largest cities were now in the North, while only four of the top 20 were in the south. The biggest loser from this population shift was East Anglia, the most densely populated part of the country in the later Middle Ages, and which now saw an exodus of people and wealth. Norwich, for centuries England’s second city, became the epitome of provincialism.

Britain’s first mover advantage in creating the industrial revolution was both a blessing and a curse, and by the early 20th century many of those industries were in relative decline. The economic gap between north and south began to open dramatically with the Great Depression, which led to the first attempt at regional subsidies, although without much success. Indeed, industrial policy aimed at helping the north only helped to wreck Birmingham’s chances.

Data on European regional wealth in 1900 and 2015 shows the extent to which the north of England has fallen, from one of the continent’s richest regions to one of its poorest. That somewhere like Bradford could have been one of the wealthiest places in Europe now seems inconceivable. The region also suffers from the curse of coal problem, whereby former coal-mining regions are left permanently poorer, often inhabited by an industrial proletariat who lacks the skills to function in a post-industrial economy; Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins have also suggested that decades of brain drain make it harder for the region to recover.