To British eyes, however, the robots are not the most striking thing about the piece. (Stories about how autonomous technologies could change the world, if only the world stopped being so damned complicated, are ten a penny these days.) The striking thing is the identity of the place that San Francisco’s Starship Technologies has identified as offering “ideal conditions… perfectly suited to rolling robots”. The city of the future is Milton Keynes.

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Can Manchester unite the country?

By Jonn Elledge

To anyone who grew up in Britain, this feels a bit like seeing the grey lady describe Michael Portillo as a “popular public intellectual”: you can see how they got there, but no. Futuristic tech dystopias should be exciting and alluring, the sort of places you’re fascinated by even as you find them repulsive. Milton Keynes is none of those things: it’s desolate and suburban, an overgrown housing estate whose search for an identity that didn’t involve roundabouts led it to steal Wimbledon’s football team and convince itself that some cows made of concrete are in some way good. Silicon Valley may be on course to wipe out civilisation, but it is, at least, cool. Milton Keynes is absolutely not cool. Milton Keynes is a joke. (Q: What’s the difference between Milton Keynes and a yoghurt? A: A yoghurt has culture.)

The odd thing about MK — as, with the upsetting air of a 15-year-old boy trying to invent his own nickname, it likes to call itself — is that, from any perspective other than public esteem, it’s been a huge success. The area of north Buckinghamshire that the city now occupies was designated as the site of a new settlement in 1967, as part of the government’s third and final wave of planned “new towns”. The site, roughly halfway between London and Birmingham, was expected to take some of the overspill population from both. It would incorporate three existing towns (Bletchley, Wolverton, and Stony Stratford) and over a dozen villages, turning each into the focal point of one of its districts. The goal was a whole new city, with a target population of 250,000.

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, in its quest to make this plan a reality, the Milton Keynes Development Corporation took the unusual approach of advertising its city on television. One 1984 ad follows a boy on a day out around the town — fishing, cycling, and so forth — with only a red balloon for company, all the while accompanied by the sort of music that would better suit the heroic climax of a film; at the end it asks, as if the question were in some way justified by the two minutes of film we’ve just watched, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all cities were like Milton Keynes?” In another, a different boy (Milton Keynes: no girls allowed) catalogues some of the uglier aspects of London life from a car window, discovers that Milton Keynes has fields, cows and so forth, and concludes, breathlessly, “I wish I lived here!”

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Many people agreed with him. The ads made Milton Keynes a target for mockery in a way no other new town managed — there was a Jasper Carrott parody version of the latter — but in the three decades after 1981, the city’s population doubled, and it passed its target sometime around 2013. The Government is now talking of doubling it again. That’d make it bigger than Edinburgh.

Its success is not merely demographic, but economic, too. Some British cities have well-paid residents; some have relatively affordable housing. Milton Keynes is almost unique in having both. Its enthusiastic expansion means prices have stayed relatively low — there are still three bed houses to be had for £250,000 — yet residents can be at their desks in London or Birmingham, Oxford or Cambridge, in little more than an hour. Its architectural styles are varied; its streets green and parks spacious; it’s even an unexpectedly great place to be a cyclist in, thanks to the network of segregated “red routes” cycleways. Little wonder it’s a boom town.

If it’s so easy to argue that Milton Keynes has worked, why do we hate it so? In Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman credit this to straightforward perversity (“It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.”) That’s no doubt a factor, but at least part of the problem lies with Milton Keynes itself: to visit it is to visit the uncanny valley, where nothing seems quite right. The shopping centre is a mile from the railway station, via a vast, empty plaza that somehow bypasses grand and hits windswept instead. To get to the commercial district on foot means using a system of meandering pedestrian routes that frequently vanish into subways, and are perfect if you’re, say, a wheeled delivery robot, but less so if you’re a human being who likes to see where they’re going.

Along the way, you’ll spot what appears to be the town hall but turns out to be a church; the actual town hall looks more like a light industrial park. You’ll pass umpteen hotels and low-rise office blocks, set back from their dual carriageway behind a sea of cars, a form of urbanism familiar from any American city you could name but strange and alien here in England. (This, perhaps, is why the NYT likes it.) And you will struggle to spot a cafe or a pub, an independent shop or a cultural venue — anything, really, that one might actually think of as one of the benefits of urban life.

And Milton Keynes, remember, was planned. Many cities are ugly or unfriendly by accident. Few are so ugly or unfriendly by design.

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Most attempts to use autonomous delivery robots in the wild have stuck to university or corporate campuses: carefully designed, closed environments that lack the unpredictability of normal urban street life. The reason Starship Technologies chose Milton Keynes for the first commercial deployment is in large part because of its resemblance to one of those campuses.

But it’s in the density and messiness of urban living that you’ll find most of its joys: the serendipitous meeting, the new restaurant you find while you were looking for something else. Milton Keynes is too spread out to offer any of that. The wide, open spaces built into its street plan may make it perfectly suited for social distancing. But the very characteristics that make it perfect for robots prevent it from feeling like a real city. A city is more than a lot of houses and offices in one place.

When the American humourist Bill Bryson toured Britain for his 1995 book Notes From A Small Island, he visited Milton Keynes and struggled to find it. A quarter of a century later, it’s the fastest growing city in England, but in some ways it’s still barely there at all.

There’s an old joke about England’s cities. Ask a Brummie which is the second city of England and they’ll say, without hesitation: Birmingham. Ask a Mancunian, and just as quickly, they’ll say: London. Whatever other problems it may have had down the years, Manchester has never been short of civic pride.

I am not a Mancunian. I’ve never lived there and have no connection with the place beyond admiration and a vague sense of excitement, every time I visit, that it has trams. Nonetheless, I have no hesitation in arguing that if Britain were ever to move its capital, Manchester is where it should go.

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Where's our ambition for the North?

By Phillip Blond

The arguments for moving the capital have become more familiar, as the idea has moved from unthinkable to merely very unlikely; but they’re worth laying out again, if only to show how Manchester might help us address them.

At the moment, the vast majority of power in Britain – political, cultural, financial – resides within a couple miles of Nelson’s Column. The result has been a sharp divide between London and the rest, with the Westminster bubble treating much of the country as a strange foreign land. It’s meant a lop-sided economy, in which wages, productivity and house prices in the over-heated south east have soared into the stratosphere, while those in the rest of the country have fallen behind: average wages are more than a third higher in the south east of England than they are in the north west, and while the area around London ranks as one of the wealthiest in Europe, productivity in much of the north is now on a par with the former communist parts of eastern Germany.

And it has fuelled policy choices that have made this divergence worse: witness the way London always seems to have two or three major new transport schemes on the go, even as the North awaits electrification or new trains that are not, quite literally, buses on rails.

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Luckily, there’s one thing the government can do to break up London’s stranglehold on British life: move itself. Shifting the government to another city wouldn’t just mean shifting 650 MPs and their staffs, but vast numbers of civil servants, journalists, lobbyists and other groups that cluster near political power. That’s the sort of GDP that could offer a major boost to a regional city – but which London, with its finance and film and tech industries, could lose without skipping a beat.

So why Manchester? One of the most compelling arguments in favour of shifting the government there isn’t about Manchester per se, but about the region around it. The city is slap bang in the middle of the urban North, with Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and umpteen smaller cities all lying within a radius of about 40 miles (roughly the length, as it happens, of London’s Central line). Backed up by the right infrastructure investment, an intervention in Manchester – unlike any other city – could boost the economy right across this region.

Such infrastructure investment has not, of late, been forthcoming. But this is the second argument for moving the capital to Manchester. Historically, the government and its civil service have found it rather easier to grasp the case for, say, London’s £15bn Crossrail service than it has for improved regional bus services or a functioning Trans Pennine Express. Once they found themselves commuting from Stockport or Huddersfield, though, their investment priorities are likely to magically shift.

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Westminster's broken: To rescue our British parliament, establish an English parliament

By Peter Franklin

All this was the central insight of George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse policy: that there are 10m people in the overlapping conurbations of the M62 corridor, and that if you can fix the economy of those cities, you’ve gone a long way to solving Britain’s productivity puzzle. The policy never worked, because it never really happened – but the theory remains sound, and moving the government to Manchester would finally make it a reality.

There’s another, more philosophical argument for making Manchester the capital. The history we’re taught at school, and through the choices of TV commissioners, is that of the kings and queens and prime ministers. The fact our politics is conducted in the Palace of Westminster, with all the pomp and ritual that comes with it, reinforces the sense of continuity with all that: it suggests that government is something that other people do to you.

But there are other histories, which aren’t as widely taught, yet which cast our national story in a very different light. The radical history of the fight for democracy. The economic history of the industrial revolution, and the social history of those whose lives were transformed by it. Manchester was not only the site of these histories, but was created by them. The first city of the industrial revolution, its physical form was created by the needs of the cotton trade; its politics by the fight for parliamentary reform and the backlash in the form of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.

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Has the Left weaponised Peterloo?

By Allan Mallinson

If London is the home of the British establishment, then Manchester is the heart of Britain’s radical history. It’s the perfect place to reconnect our politics with those other stories – the ones that say government is about us, not them.

Moving the capital would not magically erase the economic and social divides that run down this country like a canyon (you’d think, if things were that simple, we would have at least talked about it). But it could separate the political establishment from the financial one, making the latter less likely to influence the former merely by virtue of being at the same dinner parties.

Manchester, as its self-image suggests, already has all the ingredients to be major global city. It wouldn’t be one of those “…what?” capitals like Brasilia, Canberra or Bonn. It has one of the finest cultural offerings this country can offer – an abundance of fine Victorian architecture and top-ranked universities; places such as the Whitworth Gallery and Royal Exchange Theatre – and its music scene and football teams are world famous. It could be Washington to London’s New York, spreading the wealth and the power, and giving this country two major world cities rather than one so over-heated it’s in danger of spontaneous combustion. And it’s right in the middle of the country, next to a major international airport.

The old joke is right: England’s second city really should be London.