Prime Time 7, Coursebook plus Semester Self-checks

of the Watford Gap”? Simple: they want to be close to their customers, their competitors and their workforce. By contrast, when you look at the most depressed places in Britain, they have in common two things: isolation, and the disappearance of industries which thrived despite it. Middlesbrough succeeded as a steel town because it was near to coal deposits and ship-building towns, not other people. Barrow-in- Furness, in Cumbria, is so difficult to get to that BAE Systems, who build nuclear submarines there, flies in well-paid workers from elsewhere each morning. Without coal and steel, what draws new businesses to such places? A few hundred thousand people makes for a limited pool of recruits. Small town life makes it hard to bring people in from outside: the lack of restaurants, shopping and theatre matters more when the nearest big city is two hours away. The only attraction for firms is cheap land and cheaper labour. That is why such towns still depend so heavily on badly-paid jobs: food manufacturing or call centres. The best way to increase the prosperity of such places – and indeed the rest of the country at large – is to connect them to London. One story that has been quietly missed over the past decade is that tens of thousands of service-sector jobs have disappeared from towns in the south east. Visit Bracknell, a 1960s new town, or Reading or Swindon, and you will find scores of empty office blocks and quietly rotting business parks. Yet unlike when steel mills and shipyards in Barrow and Middlesbrough closed in the 1970s, this has not caused a collapse of the local economy. People still have jobs – often, in many cases, the same jobs. They just now work in central London. London is not a “Great Wen”—a scar on the landscape. It is a brilliant, dynamic, exciting city which covers what would otherwise mostly be bland fields and marshes. The variety of life in this city, from the restaurants of the West End to the warehouse raves in Hackney to the pretty riverfront pubs in Kingston-upon-Thames, is what makes it excellent. It is why so many young people desperately want to live here. The city has plenty of space for them, or would do, if we built more houses. Green belt land could host pleasant suburbs, helping families who otherwise would be forced to move tens of miles out of the city. Regeneration of crumbling housing estates in the inner-city and the middle-suburbs can add more homes to London’s inner-city, making more space for ambitious young people. Yet for the sake of “rebalancing the economy” we would apparently prefer them to stay in boring small towns where there are never really going to be any decent job prospects. What an utterly depressing vision of Britain’s future. (www.economist.com, June 2014; adapted) 60 65 70 75 80 85 90 95 100 105 110 Metaphors a) Why do you think the author has adopted the metaphor of the Great Wen from 18 th century writer William Cobbett? b) Come up with your own metaphor for London. Your turn: A presentation In small groups research one of the topics below. Give a presentation on the topic and include its relevance for London. The London Eye The London Docklands Notting Hill Carnival The Royal Family Cockney English Guy Fawkes’ Day Trooping the Colour Big Ben The River Thames Chelsea FC Arsenal Tottenham Hotspur FC West Ham United Wimbledon 3  Tip A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is represented by a word that normally describes something different e. g. “Your eyes are shining jewels.” T 4  45 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv