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Compare this to the immense speed with which London has exploded in the last two decades
I think that is a bad example. London’s growth in the last 20 years is just a reversal of the decline over the preceding 40-50.
https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2015/01/london-1939-2015.html?m=1
Which if anything says that what we tried last time (ie move people and jobs out of the city) wasn’t really in step with what people wanted, so they moved back.
NickCJ-
I think that is a bad example. London’s growth in the last 20 years is just a reversal of the decline over the preceding 40-50.
Yes, but, well, not quite. London's (the LCC area's, which was much smaller than the GLC/GLA area's) pre-war was about 8.5 million. Much of this was slums and living conditions for many were truly appalling. Slum conditions have, of course, never quite gone away, but it is certainly better today. I've read reams on London's population statistics and I have always come away with the impression that its population must be much higher than 9 million today, or whatever figure is current. A GLA planner I know told me a few years ago (pre-'Brexit') that the rate at which London's population was growing was greater than ever before, even in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Also, in those days London was still the capital of the 'Empire', growing much faster than other cities, and today it is merely one of many fast-growing cities, with its growth rate dwarfed by the real population (though not necessarily power) metropolises of the world, some of which are x times larger than London.
I don't think it's a bad example of how quickly growth can happen, though. Governments have all the power to direct economic investment, and most do. It tends to be in over-centralised states like the UK of France where this goes wrong. I'm most familiar with the example of Germany, where you have 'structurally weak' regions, too, but where there are constant efforts to strengthen them. And German economic policy is far from ideal, obviously, especially with the disastrous and corrupt sell-out of East Germany, but it's still better than over here, although it has been losing ground over the last couple of decades.
There is also a need for speed, as, for instance, former manufacturing regions have been losing skills for a long time now and there will come a point when those will be much harder to re-establish.
Oliver Schick
Not long at all. A couple of years at the most. Compare this to the immense speed with which London has exploded in the last two decades.
That's not a factor worth considering at all. If different people live somewhere, the culture will adapt. And I don't accept the very southern-centric idea that somehow the North is to looked down upon like that.
They are. There are hundreds of thousands of empty properties around the country. Thousands of buildings at risk. With a few exceptions (the biggest heritage cases) fixing up existing buildings is quicker and cheaper.
They talk just the same rubbish that everyone talks who accepts the false premise that there isn't enough housing. There's a conceptual sleight-of-hand here--of course, 'housing' must be that which is fit to live in, and many empty houses are not, so technically they don't count as 'housing'. That they can be fixed up means they are easily potential housing, though.
I'm very much afraid that I don't rate Shelter's 'expertise' in this at all. I could say more, but I won't.