Lets Celebrate Our Provincal Cities

This weekend Frapp Mag was in London having a lovely time in one of the great capitals of the world, when flicking through the entertainment section of the London Lite, we had a sudden and surprising passionate defence for our home city of Manchester. This was because of a small article by a London base journo, who was actually praising northern clubbing, yet started the piece of by saying that in his youth he spent his time moving from one grim urban sprawl to the next, this was Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, so at least it was criticism across the board!, and that as soon as he visited London he never wanted to go back to those grim awful waste lands. Apart from being dreadfully out of date, its true that cities such as Manchester were on their knees in the early 90's, but since then have been rewarded by some of the best best urban regenerations in Europe, the piece was in the vain of the well trodden paths of being in two camps: London is great, everywhere else is shit! or Cities like Manchester or Leeds are the centre of the universe (which is clearly bollocks) and London is overrated and shit!

So i ask why can't we celebrate our great Capital without the need the slag of our other big cities and visa-a- versea. We can all at some point be accused off being in at least one of the camps. I, myself remember first living London thinking it was great, because it is! but at the same time in some strange way needed to justify this by making out that living in some other city was being on par as being sentence to living on death row. I had nightmares of moving back to Manchester! Then thanks to reasons out of my control it became a reality and its not so bad and not perfect either. Manchester has a few good restaurants, like London Journo admits, some good clubs, and some people (though not me) would argue without the expense and hassle of London. On top of this we can probably also at some point also be accused of non-London in-fighting, people from Manchester and Birmingham feel the need to slag each other off, 'Birmingham's a shithole', 'Manchester thinks it bigger and better than it is' whilst people in Leeds bang on about 'being the London of the north' which it ain't' purely because it had a Harvey Nicks first. People will always want to live in London and so they should it an amazing city one of the World's greatest, but it good enough to stand on its own, without the need for people who move there to big it up by slagging of the Britians other urban cities. Instead we should be grateful that we have a capital that is one of the worlds best but that we can also back it up with some great second and third cities. So from now on we're going to love London and appreciate the others too, although still think Leeds is overrated :-)