The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20160722150914/http://www.citymetric.com:80/skylines/liverpool-manchester-leeds-sheffield-corridor-single-urban-region-1070

Is the Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds-Sheffield corridor a single urban region?

By CityMetric staff
The Northern Powerhouse region, Britain's answer to the Ruhr? Image: Google Maps.

On Tuesday, we ran an article on Alasdair Rae's maps of English urban areas, in which we examined the different levels of coherence visible in different metropolitan regions.

What we ignored, though, is that the four northern areas are actually adjacent to one another. In some ways they make up a single urban region, stretching across the Pennines from Liverpool to Wakefield: the multi-centred urban belt that George Osborne is hoping to turn into his "northern powerhouse".

Rae's data was in distinct metropolitan chunks so we've combined them ourselves. The results are no doubt imperfect (and if you spot any major clunkers we're happy to amend), but you get the idea:

This complicates the idea of city regions even further. That blue blob is the town of Hebden Bridge which, officially, is part of West Yorkshire. Look at the region as a whole, though, and it's not obvious it “belongs” to Leeds any more than it belongs to Manchester (thanks to a direct train line, residents commute to both). Once again you can see quite how hard it is to draw a line around an area and say “this is an English city”.

UPDATE: Dr Rae has since been in touch on Twitter to point that he, er, had already done this properly. We're leaving our version in place, if only because it took ages, but his is very obviously better, not least because it includes local authority boundaries, enabling you to see the shape of the region much more clearly. Here it is:

There’s one other thing to notice about this map. The combined population of this northern belt is around 7.6m, and their combined area is 5502km2: that gives the region a population density of around 1381 people per km2.

Greater London fits around 8.6m people into less than a third of the area (1569km2): a population density of 5481 people per km2.

This is probably pretty much what you'd expect, but nonetheless, it's worth hammering home. To emphasise quite how much more densely populated London is than the trans-pennine belt, we've shoved the four northern metropolitan counties together into a single lump, and placed them next to the capital:

We often say we could easily accommodate more people in London if we felt the need. That's true. But it's even more true of the north.

 

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11 times Heatherwick Studio declined to comment

By Jonn Elledge
Oh good, it's that bloody bridge again. Image: Heatherwick Studio.

The time it was rumoured to be at work on Google's new headquarters in California.

 

“I can confirm Heatherwick Studio and BIG are working on a joint design project for Google in Mountain View, California. We can't give any further comment at this point," Heatherwick Studio's Tom Coupe told Dezeen.

 

And the time it was set to repeat the trick in London.

 

Heatherwick Studios declined to comment when contacted by City A.M.

 

The time in 2008 when people started worrying about the spiky sculpture it wanted to send to Shanghai, sparking panic about safety and possibly also Anglo-Sino relations.

 

Consultants on the Shanghai project are understood to be worried following the design problems that surrounded Heatherwick's B of the Bang sculpture, according to Building magazine. A week before the 184ft steel work – commissioned to mark the Commonwealth Games – was unveiled in 2005, the tip of one of its many giant spikes fell off.

Lai Pak Hung, managing director at Davis Langdon & Seah, which is working on the Shanghai scheme, reportedly said: "We can't say we don't have any worries. Given it's the Expo, it's not just about safety – it's political. It could affect the UK's relationship with the Chinese government."

Heatherwick's studio declined to comment yesterday.

 

The time when Thomas Heatherwick offended four other architecture practices by publicly slating their plans for the redevelopment of the Royal Mail Mount Pleasant sorting office.

 

Heatherwick declined to comment.

 

The time when opponents of the Garden Bridge launched their “folly for London” competition, to highlight their contention that it was a total waste of public money.

 

The competition budget is £60 million - the amount of public money earmarked for the bridge by by TfL and the Treasury.

The satirical competition has been designed to poke fun at the real Garden Bridge and was timed to co-incide with a fundraising event for the Garden Bridge at Harrods.

Heatherwick Studios declined to comment.

 

The time it looked like then London mayor Boris Johnson may have broken public procurement rules, by taking Heatherwick to meetings with sponsors before inviting any other practice to apply for the job.

 

LBC's Political Editor Theo Usherwood reports: "When you want to fix your roof, you don't just ring up one builder and say how much. You ring up three or four builders to get a quote, compare the prices and make sure you get the best value for money.

"Boris Johnson should be doing the same at City Hall with the Garden Bridge - which is relying on millions of pounds of tax-payers' money.

Heatherwick Studios told LBC they do not comment on private business meetings. 

 

The time it emerged that Heatherwick met Boris or one of his deputies at least five times before the formal launch of the competitive procurement process for the Garden Bridge.

TfL has also been contacted for comment. Heatherwick Studio declined to comment.

(Heatherwick won the bid, by the way.)

 

The time the London Assembly said that all this was a bit rum, really.

A committee of elected London Assembly members criticised the mayor over the tender process for the 60,000-pound design contract for the new bridge, a pedestrian river crossing which would create a new green space in the middle of the city.

The committee said Johnson met five times with the winning designer before the procurement process began. One meeting was during a taxpayer-funded trip to San Francisco to seek funding for the 175-million pound project.

"The mayor's actions undermined the integrity of the process in terms of the contact he had. No other bidders had that contact with him," Len Duvall, chair of the committee that produced the report, told Reuters.

The contract was won by Thomas Heatherwick, who previously designed an "Olympic Cauldron" for the London 2012 games and a new model of double-decker bus for the capital. A spokeswoman for Heatherwick's studio declined to comment.

 

The time it looked suspiciously like Boris Johnson had wanted Heatherwick to win all along.

From the Architects’ Journal:

Transport for London was instructed that its chairman, mayor Boris Johnson, wanted the organisation to support Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge proposal eight weeks before it held the bridge design contest the designer went on to win, it has emerged.

A December 2012 TfL briefing note released following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request made by the AJ makes clear the mayor’s support for their scheme in its opening paragraph. This and accompanying material released under the FOI response has sparked renewed calls for the National Audit Office to investigate.

Thomas Heatherwick declined to comment.

 

The time Boris’ successor as mayor threw a spanner in the works.

The AJ again:

London’s new mayor has effectively suspended work on the Garden Bridge because of concerns that an enabling project at Temple Tube station will lead to more public money being spent on the £175 million project.

Heatherwick Studio declined to comment.

 

This time.

At time of writing, Heatherwick Studio has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @jonnelledge.

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