I have been thinking about the North-West quite a bit recently. While I wouldn’t say I was homesick, I’m becoming more and more concerned about the economic disparity between London and the rest of the country. From what I can see, the north west of England still doesn’t have anything resembling the infrastructure, in terms of public transport etc, which I’m now used to in the capital. To my knowledge bus wheelchair ramps are still manual there, so drivers have to grudgingly get out of their cabs to unfold them whenever someone like me wants to get on a bus.

Out on my trundle earlier, however, I had another of my crazy ideas: what if the north west of England started functioning as one big metropolis, akin to Greater London? It’s a massive area of course, encompassing five or six large, fairly rural counties. I’m not taking about concreting over all the countryside between the towns of course, even if that was possible. Rather, perhaps the region should act under a single authority and develop things like a comprehensive transport network. If a rail system like the DLR or even the tube was created, linking towns and cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Stoke and Crewe with a fast, efficient, accessible network, surely it would help to integrate the entire region in one big economy. Such a region could possibly be on a par with London as resources could more easily be focussed where they are needed, and much more help could be given to rejuvenate notoriously deprived cities like Stoke-on-Trent.

Of course I could be taking nonsense here. I know full well that the north west has a perfectly functional rail system. Yet one of the things I relish most about life in London is my ability to travel from area to area so easily; and one of the things I remember hindering me the most when I was living in Cheshire was the slow, unreliable bus service. The only way any area can improve things like public transport is by working as one, so it seems to me that if the entire north west united into one political entity, forming a sort of rural metropolis, then it could begin to punch with far more weight.