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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

There really isn't much past evidence for that. Many of UK's cities have been rotting away while London was booming.

Cancellation of parts of HS2 (after most of the money has been spent) are of course intended to worsen that.

Yup, and London specifically is famous for this relationship with the rest of England + Wales. It's pretty interesting (and depressing) how London has become an Ur-example of internal brain drain

I mean, that's the entire reason behind the global rural-to-urban migration that's been going on for well... centuries at this point.

It's just more pronounced in the UK (and I'd expect South Korea) because London is such a dominant city in the UK.

It's a shame that the exodus from London prompted by the Covid lockdowns didn't last. Perhaps we might have seen at least some equalisation across the country. Alas, anything outside of the M25 might as well be another country as far as Westminster is concerned.

Didn't last in what sense? Egress didn't continue(/ramp up) or significantly reversed?

In most places it happens to _more than one city_, though. London's a bit of an oddity (you see this in some smaller countries, but the UK's probably the biggest example).

What is an “Ur-example”?

https://blogs.transparent.com/german/the-german-prefix-ur/

Interesting. I assumed Ur came from the Sumerian city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur

It was one of the first cities in the world, and 30-ish years ago I was taught it was the first.

So it's not actually correctly used here? ('an Ur-anything' - e.g. 'an earliest example' as above - would never make sense for one thing?) I don't understand the intended meaning that's different from just 'example' here.

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