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Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London feels different to anywhere outside
In Bradford on a winter's night 25 years ago, I stood in front of an estate agent's window and made a calculation. For the price of our terrace house in north London – two up and two down and a bit of garden at the back – I could buy 10 similar houses in Bradford. This month I read that Burnley has the lowest property prices in England, and made another calculation. For the price of our London house I could buy 40 houses in Burnley that were averagely cheap and 80 of the very cheapest. This doesn't mean that the differential in house prices between London and northern England has grown by more than 400% since 1986. I live in a bigger house now, and Burnley isn't Bradford. But the gap is certainly widening: according to Halifax figures, houses in Newcastle-on-Tyne cost on average 28.8% less than they did in 2007, while in Islington they've risen 9.7% in the past year after changing very little – up or down – in the previous two.
I look at pictures of the cheap houses in Burnley. They're Victorian terraces. Their doors open straight on to the street, but they look solidly built from Pennine stone, no frills, but handsome. I imagine workers came home to them from cotton mills. Our house is certainly more imposing, three floors rather than two, with bow windows and ornamental red brick. But it has shallow foundations in London clay, so whether it's sturdier is doubtful. I imagine someone who earned money in a suit, a senior clerk or a shopkeeper, first moved in when the terrace was completed in 1890. Without substantial inherited wealth, not even two-income families in the modern equivalent of those jobs could move in now. Newspapers sometimes write that the coalition cabinet contains "18 millionaires" as though it were a peculiar outrage, but everybody who's paid off their mortgage in my street is a millionaire, if property is counted among their assets. And I stress that this is an ordinary street; until 30 or 40 years ago, a schoolteacher or a Fleet Street sub-editor could have afforded a house here.
What explains my good fortune? To some extent many of my generation share it, especially if they worked in a trade or profession that blossomed in the 1980s (better, on the whole, to have been a national-newspaper journalist than a mechanical engineer). Most people I know have grander homes than their parents, no matter where they live in the United Kingdom. If they live in favoured parts of cities such as Edinburgh and Leeds, their homes are often enviable for their architecture and space. Only the very grandest of them, however, could be swapped for 40 cheap houses in Burnley. Above every other consideration – career, age – the combination of judgement and happenstance that made me a London house-owner is what explains my relative wealth.
To a certain degree, this is an old story, and common to every metropolis. Moving to London four decades ago, I discovered one-bedroom flats were double the price of those I'd left behind in Glasgow. But then the 1980s arrived and the British economy's centre of gravity shifted sharply (and to date, permanently) south. Between 1979 and 1986, jobs in manufacturing industry declined by almost two million; 94% of jobs lost in every sector in those years were north of a line drawn between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. The traditional idea of Britain – one taught in school geography books – was a country that made its money in the midlands and the north (including Scotland, and not forgetting Wales) and spent the profits mainly in the south. But now both the generation and consumption of wealth grew concentrated in the same place, and the north-south divide suddenly marked something more fundamental than dialects and traditions.
It was during this time, soon after the miners' strike, that I stood with a notebook in a Bradford street and worked out the house price ratio. I wondered then if it could last. It didn't seem possible that it could get worse – and for several years around the turn of the century it didn't. Public spending financed by European grants and taxes raised in the City of London secured for many northern towns at least the suggestion of a viable future, if viability is measured in warehouse conversions, art galleries, warm cappuccino and rising property costs. The crash has since jeopardised all these simulacra of metropolitan living. The odd thing – the unfair thing, considering where the crash originated – is that the metropolis itself is immune. Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London now feels different to anywhere outside, as though you leave through city gates at turn-offs on the M25. Never has its atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme.
"Revenues have bounced back and we are again seeing strong sales growth. The outlook for the UK as a whole may be gloomy but I think the long-term prospects for London, especially with the Olympics, are very good." These are the words of Des Gunewardena, who runs a chain of expensive restaurants (Le Pont de la Tour, Quaglino's) and I read them last week in the Evening Standard, underneath the headline, "Surge in dining out feeds a flurry of restaurant launches", next to a picture of Sienna Miller arriving at Sheekey's. Each in the list of a dozen new restaurants still to open has the name of a chef attached. One of those already opened, the Pollen Street Social in Mayfair, took 5,000 calls looking for reservations in its first day.
Beyond the hope that manufacturing industry can rebalance the economy, and the faraway prospect of a high-speed rail line to Birmingham, no government strategy exists to spread this wealth further north. The political tone is southern – look at the party leaders, or many of the Labour candidates parachuted to northern seats. It has been left to the BBC to do a little social engineering by – bravely or foolishly – relocating departments to Salford, Cardiff and Glasgow, so that half of its output will be produced outside London by 2016. Will better programmes result? Very few BBC staff seem to think so; on the evidence of BBC2's Review Show, now made in Glasgow, extra expense in travel and hotel costs looks the likeliest difference. But three formerly great industrial cities will have BBC budgets and salaries added to their troubled economies; there will be job opportunities; the middle class in each place should grow a little larger.
The staff who refuse to go are easily mocked. Haven't they heard about the better quality of life, the Lowry, the easily accessed countryside, the "creative buzz" that's now reported along the banks of the Clyde and the Manchester ship canal? Their reluctance to move is usually expressed in personal and professional terms: of not wanting to interrupt their children's education, or being too far away from their show's guests. But perhaps among their worries there's something less easy to define; that by quitting London they're removing themselves from its cultural, political and economic heft, which has grown so remorselessly and, whether or not BBC Breakfast gets done in Salford, will carry on regardless. The country's centrifuge: both awful and interesting.