Going back to my odd interest in public transport and urban infrastructure, I just came across something I find really rather interesting. I’ve been living in London for fifteen years, but come from a town in Cheshire where the nearest large city was Manchester. I have always found the disparity between London and other UK cities rather unsettling, frankly: the capital seems to get all the money spent on it while other parts of the country get left behind. However, I just got wind of this intriguing bit of news: Manchester may finally be getting it’s own underground rail system. Of course Manchester already has it’s trams, but Mayor Andy Burnham is now talking about constructing a tube system.

I suppose what interests me most about this is the cultural side of things. London’s tube network is over 150 years old and is more or less part of the city’s very identity. The same could be said about Paris’s metro or New York’s subway. Both are integrally tied to the metropolis’s they serve – part of their very mise-en-scene. If you watch films about or set in any of these great world cities, sooner or later their underground rail systems appear. I thus wonder, in promising to give Manchester a tube system, might he be, albeit unconsciously, trying to put his city on a par with the likes of London or New York? If tube systems are synonymous with great, sprawling, global powerhouses, could Burnham be trying to garner the same acclaim for Manchester? Obviously, such a system will surely be a huge boost to the city and give rise to massive amounts of growth; yet I can’t help thinking there might be an element of metropolis-envy in this.