I thought I would share with you an angry email that dropped into my email box last week:
"Manchester Marketing,
Can you PLEASE stop falsely claiming that manchester is the UK's second city...
The facts are below so i'd be interested to know what criteria you use:
- Bham has a population of circa 1 million - manchester circa 400 000
- the City of Birmingham is bigger geographically than the City of Manchester
- We have a stronger economy
- There are more companies with HQ's in Birmingham than in manchester
- We are a city of a million people with the largest professional services sector outside London.
- In October, the Cushman and Wakefield UK Cities Monitor ranked Birmingham as the best place in the UK to site a business after the capital, above Manchester.
- We were recently named as the European City of the Future, and the international Mercer report, which gauges quality of life, out Birmingham as the 54th best city to live in the world, and the only English city in the UK outside the capital in the top 100.
- Substantiating the Mercer accolade is the recent announcement that Birmingham is the safest Core City in the United Kingdom, recognising that cities are not just bricks and mortar and iconic buildings.
Admittedly, your football teams are better than Blues and Aston Villa...but not better than LFC...
So, perception is not everything... i'm curious, do men in manchester walk around telling everyone they have 9 inch you know what's??? Manchester must be full of ALOT of disappointed women!
Sorry, above said in jest...but PLEASE acknowledge the facts. I visited Manchester for the first time this year for a conference and was impressed with the city centre and the architecture...but just stop ignoring the facts.
thanks!
A brummie"
the response below was swiftly returned . . . and I've heard nothing since.
"Dear A Brummie,
As far as we are aware there is not dataset published by the Office for National Statistics on penile length but if there were, we are of course confident that the men of Manchester would score well above the average. We like to measure up. But as they say, size isn’t everything.
The local authority area covered by the fine people at Birmingham City Council does indeed have more residents than the local authority area covered by Manchester City Council and you’re quite right, according to official figures you did nudge over a million last year in terms of population.
Congratulations on that, by the way.
You’re also correct that Birmingham is a good physical size too. Admittedly 37.5 per cent of it is congested motorway but you can’t have everything, can you? No wonder we had to build that toll road to get around you.
As for Greater Manchester, which for international business, local residents, government and just about everybody else is what springs to mind when they think of Manchester, well we’ve got just over 2.5 million residents (2.56 million to be exact) across the ten local authority areas that cover our ‘city region’ to use a bit of geographer jargon.
Your city region, which Advantage West Midlands cites as Birmingham, Coventry, Solihull and The Black Country, has a population of 2.55 million. So to be honest, unless you want to steal the headcount from Shropshire, which I doubt would go down too well in Shrewsbury or Oswestry, there’s not a lot in it. We’re ahead by a whisker but who’s counting?
Now to business.
If we start with regions (that way we can compare like with like), we’ve got an economy in the Northwest worth £98 billion. Yours (in the West Midlands) is worth £84 billion.
The lion’s share of that Northwest economic activity is centred around the Manchester city region. We’ve got 40 per cent of the region’s FTSE 500 companies for example. We’ve also got a stronger growth rate, economically, than the UK average at 2.5 per cent per annum versus 2.2 per cent nationally. That stronger growth rate is forecast to continue for the next ten years, at least, which is one reason why we sometimes talk about Manchester being the UK’s second centre for growth.
Comparing Birmingham’s economic performance to national figures, between the ends of 2000 and 2006 the economy expanded by 15.6 per cent in the UK and by an estimated 12 per cent in Birmingham, with much of that lag in growth due to a loss in manufacturing capacity, through closures such as that of MG Rover.
But as you say, there has been strong growth to counter that decline, particularly in the services sector where you’re economic contribution has increased by over 20 per cent.
So in short, you’ve had a bumpy ride but are now turning your economy around. Like Manchester, you offer a real alternative to the London and the South East where growth is becoming a real challenge, particularly in terms of housing and infrastructure.
So once we both recognise that when you talk about Birmingham, you mean the city region and that when we talk about Manchester, we mean our city region, then the statistics show that you haven’t got more jobs or more HQs or bigger willies than us. You’re basically a little behind us in terms of economic recovery and you’re a little different but hey, that’s okay. The UK is the world’s fifth largest economy, so there is rather a lot to play for and there’s more than room for two new global players on this little patch of green.
And ask any Mancunian and they’ll be perfectly straight with you: we don’t want to be the UK’s second city, we want to be its best.
So in short, best of luck and sorry about your football teams.
..."
