London is the place that costs don't work. It is full of things that don't need to be there, driving up the real estate prices. The port closed decades ago, so let's move the insurance and FX markets somewhere cheaper? Let's move out the government departments too.

Modern London is all about MPs who are physically tethered to Westminster by in person voting, being surrounded by the kind of people who want direct access to MPs...

All of the companies who specialise in creaming money off real companies gravitate towards that pig trough. Today they need data centres as close as possible, so they can cream money off faster. And we now have to feed those parasites with extra power lines.

Don't lecture me on costs, while London continues to try so hard to inflate the price of the tidal mud it resides on, by sucking in the rest of the UKs wealth.

1) the amount of wealth claimed to be generated in London, that was actually just financial services sucking in money from the rest of the UK

2) The cost of all the pensioners that left London when they retired, claiming their pension and health care in a different part of the country

London is effectively kept going by these infrastructure projects and so many UK government agencies and businesses being headquartered there. Even the monarchy plays a role, as a massive gravy train mostly based there. All that money keeps other businesses in London going. Every time someone pays UK taxes in any form they are supporting jobs and physical facilities based there. The BBC is another one. People throughout the UK are forced to pay a licence fee that is mostly used to produce content in and about London.

This is part of a repeating pattern. London took massive amounts of resources such as coal, metals and manufactured goods from other parts of the UK which are now in poverty. The North Sea Oil boom of the 1980s, was used to prop up the London stock market, and only a fraction of that money stayed within Scotland which was suffering industrial decline at the time. (Aberdeen has surprisingly little to show for the oil boom and is now a city in heavy decline.)

Then a small bit of what is leached is paid back in taxes and you pretend that means the leeches are subsidising the actual workers.

Not to mention that over ground wires are manifestly better in every dimension except for aesthetics.

This is a great example:

https://youtu.be/z-wQnWUhX5Y?si=qdqrpJ-zS7lh2J8Z

The odd thing is that it makes fun of all those coal mining and oil producing areas whose wealth it has been only too happy to steal. A sort of internal colonialism.

London has centuries worth of investment from everywhere else based on that. That money has stayed there, and money is spent constantly on infrastructure which helps it make more money. Contrast this with Liverpool, Cardiff or Belfast which suffered decades of decline for various reasons and a fraction of the investment.

If the capital had been moved to Liverpool back at some point in the Middle Ages, then that would have remained a wealthy city instead of becoming a basket case in the eighties. The presence of the civil service and government alone would have kept Merseyside wealthy, and would have made it a huge tourist centre. Bigger than now, and even that was mostly to do with the Beatles.

By the way, the state funded Wembley refit cost more than the construction of the Scottish Parliament. Guess which one got all the negative press?

And if mass media continued to promote my area continually then the value of my home would also go up. I would get given higher wages to cope with the increased cost of living there. We would get more tourists visiting my area, and firms and non-doms would set up there because of the positive image.

Much like London.