I used to think Manchester was big. When I was growing up in a sleepy little Cheshire town, I used to think of Manchester as a vast urban metropolis to the north. After all, it even has an international airport. It amuses me how much that perception has changed. Now, after thirteen years living in London, my mind’s eye rather pompously casts Manchester as a sleepy little place up north, hardly deserving to be called a city. After all, London is where all the cool stuff happens; it is where all the arenas, museums and tube lines are.

I know I shouldn’t feel like this. It’s probably just an inevitable result of having lived here for so long and now having so many awesome memories and emotions to associate with the city. Trips like the one I took yesterday serve to remind me how vast and labrynthine London is, intriguing me even more. It has now reached the point where I can’t help finding it funny when people refer to Manchester as “Manchattan”, as if having four or five medium-sized skyscrapers mean that it ranks alongside one of the world’s great metropolises. Such people should come and see what’s happening in Canary Wharf, or even Lewisham!

Yet I don’t think this London-centrism is just confined to me, and that makes it a much bigger problem. It seems to be a cultural issue: people in London tend to look down on everywhere else, as if all other UK towns and cities are just tiny places which don’t really matter. We see it reflected in the investment being ploughed into London compared with everywhere else. I’ve become used to trundling around the capital on especially adapted busses and trains, forgetting that the infrastructure everywhere else is nowhere near the standard it is here. It’s easy enough to joke and dismiss places like Manchester as quiet villages, but the fact remains that the imbalance between London and the rest of the country is getting worrying.