Centralised



I sympathise with Ariel's blog on the predictable nature of the centralised London events calendar. Several of the publishers I deal with very nicely send me invites to launches and parties or to visit them at a convention etc. Pity they are mostly in London. Similarly jobs I would love to do in publishing are all mostly located in London. And quite frankly I'm not prepared to move there. Too big, too smelly, too expensive and the pubs shut far too early :-). And it doesn't stop at AF events and launch parties. The bulk of major national galleries, stadiums etc are always placed in London. Why? It's remote from most of the other citizens of the UK and is expensive to get to and stay in. If it's a national institution why should it not be located somewhere more central? York, Manchester or Leeds would put a new attraction pretty much in t he geographic middle of the UK, making it more accessible. Why should folk from Dundee or Manchester or Penzance have to travel all the way to London for each game in the so-called national stadium?



There is also the benefits to consider - with this centralisation London gets jobs, investment and related service industries to the attraction - all from the public purse. I think when Ken Livingstone indulged a coupel of years back in his disugtingly racist jock-bashing, claiming London subsidised Scotland and indeed the rest of the UK (oh yeah, how many oil fields have you got, Ken?) he forgot that because everything automatically is given to London it pulls in others industries and coroporate headquarters, so effectively that means the UK tax payer, because of this centralisation, is subsisdising London. The kicker here is I'm sure someone in Lerwick is probably saying something similar about Edinburgh :-)



Oh well, at least we have the SF WorldCon in Glasgow next year.