ABSTRACT
The UK space economy has long been notorious for its primate pattern of cities centred on London and the south east. For much of the 20th century, UK governments pursued regional policies specifically to counter ‘the drift to the south’ resulting from the decline of the industrial cities and towns of northern Britain from their 19th century economic prime. But such policies proved to have limited impact on the economic forces creating London’s primacy. With the rise of neoliberal globalization from the late 1970s, the prospects for the cities collectively known as ‘not-London’ seemed to have been further reduced: the demise of regional policy was followed by government policy that precipitated the City of London’s ‘Big Bang’. This opened up the City to foreign banks and other financial services to ensure London would become a key locale for on-going economic globalization, and Saskia Sassen (1991) announced that London, with New York and Tokyo, was an archetypal ‘Global City’.
