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Notes -
Britain is really lopsided in that London might as well be a different country economically speaking, with vastly higher wages, economic opportunity and so on, but by any reasonable definition London is only 3-4x larger than Manchester. It's just a boundaries definition, a bit like when Paris gets reported as having a population of 3m. Greater Manchester is ~3m people and Greater London is 9-12m depending on the source. There's a case to be made that the Liverpool-Manchester urban region is a Ruhr equivalent conurbation, with bad transport holding back the economic integration.
I take your point. I was going by https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/cities/united-kingdom which records London as 7.5m and Manchester as 400k but I accept that different boundaries can produce very different numbers.
That said, I was trying to get across that the UK isn't like, say, Germany, where AFAIK you can choose from a number of roughly equivalent top-tier cities depending on personal preference. You either make it to London and reap the rewards (and all the crap that goes with them) or you don't. And it's been that way since at least the reign of Elizabeth I. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_in_England_by_historical_population is the best I can do, I am assuming the link between population and prosperity).
Absolutely, the main point does stand. I'm unfamiliar with the French case, but London's role as a central capital of a single polity probably contributes to this phenomenon. London's been an immigrant city (internal migrants) for 600 years, the closest thing to "standard" English is based on the London prestige dialect, which itself was just a variety of that spoken in the East Midlands- the population churn was constant. Prior to 1750 there was basically London, a few market towns, the other national capitals (Dublin really) and that was it for cities. Places like Rome, Milan, Naples, Munich, Cologne etc. were all independent city states, or capitals of smaller polities which later unified, which must have encouraged the decentralised growth.
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