After his recent BBC2 show examined the widening gulf between London and the rest of the UK, Evan Davis tells Damian Wild he’s never had a reaction like it.
The man who has added business ballast to the political pirate ship of the Today programme for the past five years is beaming. When Dragons’ Den isn’t airing, Evan Davis is not on TV too often these days, but his latest foray has proved provocative. In the BBC2 two-parter Mind The Gap, which concluded during MIPIM week, Davis explored the economic forces that are dividing Britain. That he attracted complaints both for being too London-centric and for talking down the capital must be some mark of success. For a broadcaster, reaction is all.
“Oh, I’ve had so much response,” says Davis. “I don’t think I’ve ever had such a reaction – good and bad – to anything I’ve done.”
If you didn’t see the programme – in part a sequel to his 2012 series Built in Britain looking at better ways to invest in infrastructure – it addressed many of the questions challenging UK plc and its property industry.
What would it take to create a second world city? Is London’s ascent a benefit or a cost to the rest of the country? And where should scarce infrastructure investment be prioritised? You get a good feel for the tone of the two episodes from the interviews – more debates in fact – conducted by Davis in each.
In the first, more London-orientated programme, Davis and London mayor Boris Johnson trade analogies: Does London suck? asks Davis. No, says Boris unsurprisingly, it’s more like a living, undersea organism ingesting and expelling talent and wealth.
In episode two, Davis meets poet Ian McMillan, the bard of Barnsley. Davis suggests that a national future might lie in “hub” cities served by “spoke” towns where workers live. McMillan warns Davis that this Holiday Inn view of the future would “leave a lot of the country just sitting waiting for the telly to come on”.
Of course, both programmes are more nuanced and more insightful than that. But you get the picture.
Reaction
Overall, says Davis with some modesty, “The BBC has been very pleased with the reaction, because it has provoked quite a big debate.”
That debate reached the pages of EG last weekend when British Land head of offices Tim Roberts wrote in reaction: “London’s only sin is outperformance.”
I ask Davis whether he shares that view. He chooses his words carefully. “Well, the truth is, London is a very successful city, and that’s the problem for the rest of the country. International investors, basically, make one stop in the UK and that is going to be London.
“If you talk to businesses, a lot of them say ‘we want to be where everybody else is’, and that’s an unstable model because the more people move into London, the more that makes London attractive. And the more attractive it is, the more people want to come in.
“I’ve likened it to nightclubs and restaurants. If you have a street of restaurants, and everybody passing down that street says, ‘I want to eat at the full restaurant rather than the empty ones’, you end up with one that’s too full and four that are too empty. And that’s the economics here, which I think is exciting. And it is the kind of economics which I think characterises this kind of London-versus-the-rest economy.”
It’s always questionable to ask a TV “face” to solve a problem that has vexed politicians, businesses and countless think tanks for decades, but Davis spares me the trouble.
“What would I like to do, if I was a benevolent deity who could reshape the geography of Britain?” he asks rhetorically. “I would really, really like to make sure that other parts of the country are very, very attractive, so that people from Britain and overseas have a choice. There isn’t only one show in town. That would be awful, wouldn’t it?”
Given that he is more than a TV face – before joining the BBC in 1993, he was an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and at the London Business School – I press. Assuming his deification isn’t imminent, what mortal solutions can he offer?
“There is a logic that says, being a compact country, we can become a one-city nation. You have high-speed rail everywhere; you make everything within an hour of London and, basically, Britain is a country called London.
“That is a model. And it’s a model that, in some respects, would fit the global economy at the moment, which does seem to attach some importance to these big centres. But it does carry disadvantages. It doesn’t give great choices and it does mean big commuting times, and it does mean rejigging a lot of the country into secondary roles. And I think we can be better than that.
“I think we can make one or two other really great hubs of some global standing. And they will give choice to people in Britain about where to live, and a slightly more diverse and balanced ecosystem of cities, and that would probably be for the best.”
He anticipates the question this begs. “But I really don’t want to be the one who says let’s close London down. I’m not in the business of saying we should constrain London, nor am I in the business of saying we should give up on the rest of the nation. I think there is a lot more we could do to take the London effect and build it elsewhere.”
Delivery would require better commuter lines from outlying cities and towns. Those non-London hubs would need themselves to be better connected, and each would require better connections with London. The obvious starting point, says Davis, would be Manchester.
“It has a lot going for it, apart from its global exposure. It happens to be in the middle of a very large population area that extends across the Pennines from Leeds to Liverpool and Hull, so you do have the makings of a very large second city.
“The critique of our regional policy is that we have spread it too thin, so Manchester doesn’t have as much buzz about it as it could have if you’d put lots more into Manchester and less into the other [outlying] places.”
Even in this scenario Davis fears for the secondary cities, “struggling for a role because they are not getting hub attention”. “Hub action isn’t happening there and they’re not quaint market towns or lovely places for residential commuting. So they’re somewhat stuck in the middle, and they don’t have the quality schools that you’d expect in suburbia. In some senses, I think some of those are the places that you need to work on.
“There are places that are great places to live and you can give stylish accommodation, great local cultural amenities and good retail, good connection. These are all things that you might think secondary towns and very small cities would want to think about. It’s an interesting one.”
Davis has no immediate plans to return to the subject. But his enthusiasm is such that he may find it hard to keep away – other projects are on the cards. But after Built in Britain and Mind the Gap, we should perhaps hope for Britain’s Global Cities in a few years’ time.
Months in the making – getting the timing right
“Here’s a secret,” confides Davis, “television programmes can be too ahead of their time. If we’d done this two years ago when no one else was talking about it, I don’t think it would have had much impact. If you do it too late then everyone just says ‘that’s old hat’.”
Davis and BBC Belfast, responsible for much of the Beeb’s current affairs output, began talking about a programme in late 2012.
Last year saw countless meetings, working up of the argument that would underpin the programme, and planning.
Davis was brought back in for 30 or so days of filming, spread over two to three months, and another two months of editing and scripting followed. Despite the extended gestation, says Davis, “I think this was perfectly timed because it was television addressing an issue that was already very obvious.
“We were not ahead of the curve in any remote way, but we were just getting in there when there was beginning to be quite a lot of discussion about it. And then people latched on to the programme as they found a stimulus for the conversation. So I feel we, perhaps fortuitously, timed it rather well. And I think it has had an impact.”
How Croydon became a cutting room casualty
With any television programme the lion’s share ends up on the cutting room floor. In the case of Made in Britain, Croydon was among the casualties.
“We had a scene, about seven minutes long, in Croydon, and the first film was just too long. You salami slice things and you try to tighten it all, and then you realise something’s got to go. You’re just trying to get too much in. And Croydon bit the dust in that process,” says Davis.
It was an especially tough decision. “I think there would have been less of that reaction of ‘it’s all London arrogance’ if we’d kept Croydon in, because Croydon was an illustration of how you get hot spots and cold spots, and the hot spots become ever hotter as everyone wants to be in them, and the cold spots become colder because everyone wants to desert them.”
Davis grew up not far away in Ashtead in Surrey and so was a regular visitor to Croydon. “It looked great in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but it’s just a little less so now,” he says.
He sees a future that is more spoke than hub. “It’s very interesting how you get this kind of self-reinforcing process. Once a lot of people go, the place becomes a bit tatty and then no one wants to be there. Croydon to me now feels like the sort of place that would have great life as a residential place for London.
“The Nestlé Tower was one we filmed in after dark with torches, just going around. You could make a lot of that residential. It’s very well located. It’s very quick to the station; the station’s very quick to London. Crossrail 2 will come along and you’ll be connected via Clapham.
“That would tell you that what Croydon should be trying to do is to focus on the life of the people who would be settling there.
“I think there’s a lot of hope but these processes can be quite painful before they happen, really. They can sink quite a long way before someone spots the opportunity.”
damian.wild@estatesgazette.com
