Carlisle could stand as proud as any in an audition for the privilege of being the nation’s capital. It played a vital role in the health and wealth of the nation long before some of our more illustrious counterparts were any more than a glint in the Industrial Revolution’s eye. An ancient settlement that later became the largest Roman camp on the Wall, my home city is no stranger to prominence in the socio-political drama of these islands.

Indeed, Carlisle has due heritage: Parliament has been held here before, on at least two occasions. The Great Seal of state was held at Lanercost Priory while Edward I journeyed north to pick a fight with the Scots; alas he could not finish the job, perishing on the windy marshes to the west of Carlisle, giving the city the honour of hosting the coronation of Edward II.

Of course, Edward was here for the same reason as generations before him, and generations after: Carlisle played a key strategic role in the affairs of the entire North. William Rufus seized the city in 1092 to finally extend his father’s Conquest to the north-North. He built a castle on the ancient Roman fort, which was later to become the residence of King David I of the Scots (“Prince of the Cumbrians”), who chose Carlisle as his favoured residence, passing away in the private chapel of the Keep in 1153.

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Of course, if you’re Cumbrian, then you’re Cumbrian, and thus slightly different from just English, or Scottish, or even Welsh, but containing hearty dollops of all three (and Irish too – but more of that later). Geographically and historically, Carlisle was part of a Celtic kingdom locked in a tug of war between later Scottish and English overlords. Carlisle’s two dragons on its coat of arms references its Brythonic roots, and wander the Cumbrian countryside map in hand and you’ll soon find more than just the odd clue to its Welsh heritage in its place names and dialect.

Throw in William Wallace (‘wylisc’), a Strathclyder (so Welsh really), and the buried bones of Robert de Brus, father of… yes, you guessed it, and finish off with the centuries old tug of war over Carlisle – at one moment part of Scotland, at another part of England – and Carlisle begins to show itself as a particularly lively theatre of British cosmopolitanism.

It doesn’t stop there. We’re also claiming St Patrick, Old King Cole (Coel Hen – enriching childhoods with memorable ditties from time immemorial), as well as the setting to any firm history that does exist around King Arthur (this is not even controversial), all of whom if not directly from Carlisle are certainly from its hinterland. St Cuthbert visited Carlisle regularly – it had been granted to the diocese of Lindisfarne by Ecgfrith – and St Ninian set out from Carlisle to convert the Picts, while St Mungo – whose legend still shapes the arms of the city of Glasgow – was a Stratchclyder who more than left his mark on field and marsh around Carlisle.

Indeed, one might even make a case that the first steps of the inexorable journey toward a unified Isles took place not far from Carlisle, as Athelstan sought to bring to heel the Northumbrians, the Welsh, the Scots and the Vikings in a little village of henge and earthwork, called Eamont, just outside Penrith.

Carlisle has earned its place at the top table in the gathering places of these lands. Of course, the historical may not convince everyone, so for the doubters let us turn to the practical. Geographically, Carlisle sits at the very nexus of the Isles – it is more or less equidistant between our northernmost reaches and the south coast, a gateway city straddling the old roads north to Glasgow, north-east to Edinburgh, the Wall road east to Newcastle, West to the coalfields and old ports (and nuclear plant) of Maryport and Workington and Whitehaven, and of course south down the ancient A6 to what we might call Down There.

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And remember that Carlisle is the biggest city in England – though admittedly 98% of its land use is rural (most certainly an upgrade from the cramped living of central London). Add to that Carlisle’s long and historic status as a nationally important hub for rail and freight – at one point with a seven rail companies serving its station, second only to London – as well as its long established cultural and historical links with Ireland through constant waves of immigration and trade (Cleator Moor, on the west coast of the county, is affectionately known as “Little Ireland”), and you come to realise that Cumbria has been a lynchpin of UK culture and cohesion for centuries.

Ah, I hear you cry, but could you accommodate the refined tastes of the metropolitan classes that would no doubt descend on Carlisle should we be raised to just prominence? Well, we had the first ever pillar box, we are the home of McVities and make more custard creams than you thought imaginable (that’s the meetings sorted).

Carlisle is also the home of Linton Tweeds, suppliers to Chanel, thus satiating the sartorital demands of the sophisticariat, while we also have the two oldest prizes in horse racing, dating to the 16th century, horses being a key export and cultural signifier of these lands for nigh on 2,000 years. Walter Scott was married here while William Paley – scourge of every A-level philosophy student, and Richard Dawkins – was archdeacon and is buried here, at our cathedral.

One struggles to imagine what more any soul could need.

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There is a serious point to be made too. If there is any case to be made for moving the capital, however temporarily, then it is to break the monopolistic dominance of London on the political and cultural capital of the UK, to renew the democratic covenant with those beyond the M25. Illustrious rivals – Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool – might all have a strong claim for a relocated Parliament, though the politically disruptive pulses flowing through society now are more parochial than that. It is the steely cries of our neglected towns, our isolated regions, our down-at-heel coastal areas, our struggling countryside that is ripping up the status quo. Decamping to another metropolis, particularly a place with a broadly similar sociocultural outlook, would do little more than replicate the problem.

In this sense, Cumbria provides a unique microcosm for those who would seek it out – the post-industrial decline, the struggling coastal areas, the decimation of rural services, the creaking infrastructure. What better place to stand as proxy for a debate we really need to have?

There will be significant downsides of course, and it would take great sacrifice on our part, though I’m sure we would be willing to do so, for the national interest. The increased traffic, the extra noise, the pollution, the jump in house prices, the gentrification, the hipster cereal shops…

On second thoughts, maybe Jon Elledge had a point. Maybe keep it down south after all. Why not try Manchester instead?

Today, Liverpool is in the papers for the right reasons. Liverpool FC’s long awaited victory in the Champions League doesn’t just feel like a triumph on the pitch – it’s a validation of Jürgen Klopp’s inclusive, hard-working and always-improving culture; it’s a celebration of a football team that reflects the best parts of the city that (give or take a few Everton fans) loves them.

This victory and the efforts leading up to it reinforce my belief in Liverpool. It makes me all the more convinced that it’s where the future of the nation could and should lie. But I’m also aware that, in spite of today’s headlines, if you want to understand Liverpool’s appeal, you have to slough off a long history of bad press. As long ago as 1849, Herman Melville was complaining: “Of all sea-ports in the world, Liverpool, perhaps, most abounds in all the variety of land-sharks, land-rats, and other vermin, which make the hapless mariner their prey.”

And then, towards the end of the twentieth century, people really began to stick the boot in. The city endured long stagnation and then a sharp descent into the mass unemployment and deprivation of the 1980s, the Toxteth riots and the infamous Derek Hatton years – when the Militant tendency took control of Liverpool City Council.

Liverpool became a byword for urban decline, bad planning, and hatefully ugly modern architecture. It was the butt of endless bad jokes about moustaches, tracksuits, accents and thieving. A few good jokes too. Bill Bryson took a train to Liverpool in Notes from a Small Island. “They were having a litter festival when I arrived,” he wrote:

“Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes, and carrier bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape.”

You get the gist. I’m as guilty as anyone for making people think ill of Liverpool. The city made the top 10 of Crap Towns, a book about the worst places to live in the UK, which I edited in 2003. Back then, when I was canvassing opinion, hundreds wrote in to complain about the city and the rut it was in. They were especially frustrated because the city had fallen so far.

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My correspondents pointed out how fantastic Liverpool could still be, with its rich culture, with its history of innovation and rebellion, with its astonishing architecture (to give just one illustration: it has more Georgian buildings than any other UK city except Bath). “I think it has the potential to be a visionary city,” said one contributor – if only someone would come along to help it fulfil its potential.

Fortunately, the people of Liverpool did just that. There was its triumphant year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 – when it was proved that Liverpool could not only compete with the best of them when it came to inspiration and artistic flair, but that hundreds of thousands of people would flock to its world-beating museums, galleries and music venues.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of pounds began to pour into Liverpool from the EU. Buildings around the historic waterfront and throughout the city have been brushed up, restored and saved for future generations, public spaces have been fitted out with fountains, trees and seating, the public transport infrastructure has been radically improved, there are new cruise liner terminals, and thousands of skill-building projects have been initiated around the city. Its magnificent centre looks cleaner and brighter than at any point in its history.

And it doesn’t just look better, it feels better. When I was growing up in Lancashire in the 1990s, I was frightened of Liverpool. It was the big bad neighbouring city. The place where my 80-year-old relative got mugged, where people were scared to leave their cars in case their radios got stolen, of wailing sirens and a low constant throb of trouble. When I visited, I barely noticed how impressive so many of its buildings were, because I was too busy keeping my head down, concentrating on getting to where I was going unscathed.

Now it feels like one of the most walkable and welcoming cities on earth. The change has been psychological as much as architectural, a British version of the renaissance in New York after it cleaned up its act. Which feels right. The cities have always been closely tied – and look so similar that Liverpool often doubles as the Big Apple in Hollywood films. When you visit Liverpool nowadays, you also get that same stiff neck from staring up at so many imposing buildings as you do in Manhattan. The same realisation that you’ve just been walking around saying “wow” when you probably should be getting somewhere.

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It’s been quite the turnaround – so just imagine how much more Liverpool could achieve if it were made into the UK capital. That feels like justification enough for making the move. There’s a strong moral case for continuing to undo the years of neglect that have still left large parts of the city poverty-stricken and underpopulated. There’s a similar case to be made for having a capital in the North, bringing improved transport infrastructure, investment and political awareness to a region so criminally neglected by Westminster.

But there’s an even stronger practical case for shifting the political centre of the UK to Liverpool. Liverpool still has thousands of empty houses – not to mention countless commercial properties and vast acres of office space. They could comfortably and stylishly accommodate Parliament and all its attendant personnel. Those people would find themselves in a city that already looks like an international capital, that has top class universities, excellent schools, and world-class art galleries and museums.

They’d also be somewhere fun. Somewhere that now has a thriving cultural scene, exemplary food and drink, and that has always had the kind of nightlife that inspires local kids to form bands and conquer the world.

Somewhere that is putting the problems of the past behind it and has earned a better future. If you don’t believe me, go there.

“New York, New York (so good they named it twice).” But what about old York – so good they named it over and over again across the millennia? It was Everwic to the Normans, Jorvik to the Vikings, Eoforwic to the Angles, Eboracum to the Romans. But the Celts named it first: Eburakon, which means ‘the place of the yews’. Those long-lived, melancholy trees are ancient markers of the sacred – so perhaps York’s name hints at an even older, undocumented history.

One thing is for sure: the roots of York are sunk deep into English soil – deeper, indeed, than the idea of England itself. But perhaps such considerations don’t matter to you. Perhaps you’re a thorough-going rationalist who’d pick an alternative capital on the basis of population size or economic productivity or some other bean-counting consideration. But if that’s your game, why move the capital at all? On just about any conventional measure, London beats our other cities by an insurmountable margin.

Other nominations in this series are based on familiarity not rationality – a town or city where the author was born or has come to love. That’s admirable, but a capital city has to stand not just for one person but for everyone; not just for one lifetime but many lifetimes.

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In this regard, York has experience. It already is, or used to be, a capital city. Most obviously, it’s the capital of Yorkshire – England’s biggest county and God’s Own Country. In medieval and early modern times, it was the seat of the Council of the North. Earlier, it was the greatest city of the Danelaw and the capital of the Jorvik kingdom. Earlier still, it was one of the Roman capitals of Britain – ‘Britannia’ being divided into two (or, at times, more) provinces. To this day, the Church of England is divided into two ecclesiastical provinces – Canterbury and York. Hence the grandeur of York Minister and the existence of England’s other Anglican Archbishop.

It has to be said that this history also exemplifies the long subordination of the North to the South. The Archbishop of York is junior to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Council of the North represented the King in London. The independence of the Danelaw was eventually extinguished, and the North harried by William the Conqueror. The Roman province that Eboracum was the capital of was called Britannia Inferior (and, later Britannia Secunda). Even in the 20th century, it was Whitehall practice to refer to the country beyond the South as “outer Britain”.

There can no better reason for choosing a new capital than to re-empower the North. Here are three scenarios in which it could happen:

1. To stop the UK from being completely dominated by London (assuming London doesn’t force the issue by breaking-away, Singapore style).

2. To establish an English parliament and an English national government equivalent to the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales.

3. To establish a modern-day version of the Council of the North so that strategic decisions affecting the whole of the North of England can be made in and by the North of England.

In each scenario, York is the historically legitimate choice.

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But the case for the city does not end in the past. Geographically, it is situated not only in the North, but at a strategic location linking the area’s two great urban clusters: the Trans-Pennine conurbation which runs from Liverpool to Leeds; and the Tyneside, Wearside and Teesside cities of the North East. Oh and don’t forget Hull and Humberside, directly to the East. The capacity for convection stretches further afield – down to the Midlands and East Anglia in one direction and up to Scotland in the other. York therefore has the potential to serve as a new and non-Londoncentric focal point for the United Kingdom.

York itself is not the biggest of cities. Though it has a history of manufacturing (most famously, chocolate), it was not one of the main centres of the industrial revolution. But that should be seen as an advantage. For a start, choosing York would mean not having to choose between England’s so-called core cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. The choice of York would avoid elevating one of these eight rivals over the others.

York also has room to grow. Not part of a wider conurbation, it’s a city with a proven record of success in overcoming deindustrialisation and building a prosperous modern economy. However, any expansion is artificially restricted by a greenbelt.

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Understandably, residents want to avoid ugly, unsustainable, traffic-choked development. As unfashionable as greenbelts are today, they are what stopped the cities of the North from merging into a poorly-planned megacity (or London from swallowing up the whole of the South East). However, large scale development doesn’t have to be unsustainable. It doesn’t have to be wasteful of land or dependent on the car. It can be respectful of a city’s heritage and inspired by the character and materials of the local built environment. Development, if it draws upon the wisdom of tradition and the wonders of modern technology, can make places better not worse.

In the past we’ve been able to turn small cities into great cities – and it would be a terrible indictment of our own times if we felt we could no longer do so.

One way or another this country needs to house its growing population. It also needs to rebalance its economy – unlocking the full potential of the North instead of putting all our eggs into one basket (London). I’m not suggesting that it’s northern cities like York that should should build all the new houses. As a southerner (so southern I’m half-French), I wouldn’t dare.

There’s nothing wrong with York as it is now – it’s a lovely place. I fully support the right of its people to shape their own future, to be and become whatever they want to be – not least having control over a fair share of the country’s infrastructure investment funds.

York was built to be a great city, a home to leaders, a capital.

It should have the opportunity to choose greatness again.

Like a badly loaded barge, national life is made lopsided by London’s dominance. It affects the way others see us and the way we see ourselves; everything that matters seems to happen in London, an illusion fostered by the overwhelming concentration of the national and international media in the city. Despite the well-meaning attempts of that same media sometimes to include ‘the provinces’ in their output (how often, for instance, in the current Brexit debate have you heard a ‘vox pop’ illustrating Leave sentiment from some neglected quarter?), the end result often reeks of metropolitan condescension.

Britain has, to coin a new meaning for the word, a very severe case of ‘Capitalism’: a complaint which magnifies London’s importance whilst diminishing everywhere else. It would be a salutary corrective if some other city were given the chance to shine, and I have just the place in mind.

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An Oxford-educated Scotsman I once knew sneeringly dubbed Bristol ‘the Birmingham of the West’ after I had confided my affection for the place. Unwittingly perhaps, he had doubly offended me, for I have lived in both Bristol and Birmingham and found much to admire in each of them. But I do think that in one sense at least, he spoke a truth. For Bristol is – like Brum – a hard-working, feet-on-the-ground sort of place which goes about its business without too much fuss. But which, as a result, consistently punches below its weight.

Unlike say Liverpool or Newcastle, Bristol lacks definition in the national imagination. This is partly to do, I think, with the national obsession with football. Though Bristol has in Rovers and City two well-established sides, they both haunt the lower divisions and have never thrived in the modern era. And this matters in terms of national visibility. Imagine Liverpool or Manchester without their football clubs: each would be much-reduced and would count for less on the national stage. And yet Bristol is, by many other measures, a much more successful city than any of its northern sisters. Economically, at least, Bristol puts its rivals in the shade.

The Bristol city-region (which includes three other councils – North Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Bath, and North East Somerset) has, by far, the highest productivity of any big conurbation outside London. Household incomes are correspondingly the highest outside the capital. On a measure commonly used by economists – gross value added – Bristol comes top of the so-called ‘core cities’ league. What all this adds up to is a thriving regional economy based on an enviable mix of  industries.

Bristol’s long and successful tradition in aerospace (Concorde first flew from the runway at Filton, in the North of the city) showcases its precision-engineering prowess, but the city also has a thriving financial services sector and a growing reputation in the creative industries: it is home to Aardman Animations – the creators of Wallace and Grommet – and that success has initiated a cluster-effect. There’s a real buzz down in the imaginatively restored city docklands, which have come back to life in recent decades and where many of these creatives work.

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But the case for Bristol does not rest on the grey substrate of economics alone. There is also its matchless topography – the sheer beauty of the place. If on a sunny day you walk from the centre of Clifton – along, say, Royal York Crescent (the longest symmetrical crescent in Europe) – up through Clifton village to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s suspension bridge, there is delight at every corner. The views across the city, the solid dignity of the buildings and the swooping grandeur of the Avon Gorge lift the heart.

The gorge is a natural wonder and very few cities can boast such a wild treasure in their midst. Amongst British cities only Edinburgh, with Arthur’s seat rising gaunt and untrammelled, can really compete. A few months ago I took that very walk, extending it down through the dense woods that cloak the steep sides of the gorge, and was reminded just how special a place this is.

Since 1952, the gorge has been designated as a site of special scientific interest and it enjoys a unique micro-climate, which makes it home to an unusual variety of plants and animals. In its sheltered crannies, botanical rarities with wonderful names like Spiked Speedwell, Autumn Squill, Honewort and Bristol Rock Cress thrive whilst Peregrine Falcons soar in the air above.

As you descend to the muddy waters of the Avon and approach the old heart of Bristol’s port, there are reminders everywhere of the city’s nautical heritage. For Bristol has played a central role in Britain’s long history of exploration and naval endeavour. It was from here in 1497 that the Italian navigator and adventurer John Cabot set sail under warrant from Henry VII and, in a remarkable feat of seamanship, sailed with 20 crew in the 50 ton Matthew right across the Atlantic, making landfall probably in Newfoundland.

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The sea and the trade it carried have long been at the heart of Bristol’s prosperity. In the mid-eighteenth century Bristol was the centre of the slave trade and grew rich on the profits of that cruel commerce. Correct modern sensibilities deplore the fact of the trade and in Bristol, as elsewhere, attempts are underway to expiate the sins of our fathers in a flurry of fatuous gestures. For instance The Colston Hall is being renamed, because the merchant Edward Colston was involved in the trade.

However, Colston’s case illustrates the absurdities of airbrushing history in this way: for he was also a great philanthropist who devoted part of his wealth towards – among other things – educating girls in the city. History tends to be more complicated than the protagonists in this debate allow. But as Louise Mitchell, the chief executive of the Colston Hall, so tellingly puts it:

“It’s very important to us as a progressive forward-looking arts organisation, that we include everybody and people felt uncomfortable entering the building because of the perception that it had in some way profited from the slave trade.”

As it happens the Colston Hall was actually named after the street in which it stands – Colston Street –  but mere facts count for little in such  overheated controversies.

Given that Bristol also profited greatly from tobacco (the Wills family – great benefactors to the university – made their money from the deadly weed) it might seem that its historic prosperity is mainly rooted in trades now deemed dubious. But that should not be allowed to cloud the issue. Bristol’s long and illustrious history as an entrepot is woven into the wider history of the nation.

Though fashionable opinion may now deplore some historic aspects of the city’s commercial vigour, there is no denying that it exemplifies a particular kind of English entrepreneurial-ism that makes it well-suited to be a new capital city. The phrase ‘ship-shape and Bristol fashion’ supposedly derives from the particular robustness that sailing ships needed to withstand the rise and fall of the Avon’s tide; I can think of no phrase that better sums up the qualities our new capital would need.

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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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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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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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.

There are lots of reasons a country might need a new capital. Perhaps the old one has been split in two and surrounded by someone else’s territory, as Berlin was, in the Cold War days when little Bonn was the chief city of West Germany. Perhaps you have to make an impossible choice between two rivals who will both be furious if you pick the other – which I believe was the reasoning behind making Canberra capital of Australia. Maybe you just don’t want your enemies to be able to find it, the plausible excuse for Canada’s choice of Ottawa and Burma’s relocation of its government to Naypyidaw.

Or perhaps you fear the mob, as the USA’s founding fathers were said to have done when they shifted their capital from Philadelphia to a swamp on the Potomac, and equipped Washington DC with wide and sweeping avenues which could easily be swept clean of trouble by a whiff of grapeshot. Similar allegations have been made about Astana, the spooky, very spacious and wind-scoured city on the plains of Kazakhstan, safely out of reach of any sort of People Power revolt, because the People would take so long to get there.

But the reason for moving our national capital to Portsmouth would be more subtle. There are plenty of great cities in the United Kingdom that would serve as fine capitals – picturesque and ancient York, full of history; majestic Liverpool with its two cathedrals and its face turned towards the Atlantic; graceful Dunfermline with its ruins, towers and spires and its plentiful memories of kings. It even crossed my mind to suggest Swindon, perhaps the place I know that is most typical of modern England, and where I once spent three very educational formative years.

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But after some thought I have settled on battered, warlike Portsmouth with its constant reminder of our seaborne heritage, and its harsh and unpretty edges. In Portsmouth you cannot ever forget, even in the supposedly soft south, that plenty of British people have lives that are far from being easy or affluent. I have settled on it because I love that old and often ugly city in spite of itself, and because I don’t think I know anywhere more concentratedly British, in the way that we used to use the word before devolution got a grip on us.

It is also because our legislators and civil servants would be bound to behave and think differently (and better) if they found themselves in those surroundings. Perhaps foreign diplomats, too, might learn a thing or two about Britain that modern London could never teach them.

And above all there is the sea, ever present, never resting, with its great double tides constantly sweeping round the Isle of Wight. For the sea is the foundation of our constitution. Without it we would be just another piece of the continent. With it, we have had a thousand years of peace and safety in which to develop our unique laws, from Habeas Corpus and Magna Carta to the common law and jury trial, which are the real safeguards of our liberty.

And it is not just the sea, but our readiness to defend our control of it, and to fight those who would seek to attack us across it, that has preserved our freedom. Every day in Portsmouth you do not just see, hear, feel and smell the sea – sometimes glittering, more often sullen or angry. You also see the things that have made it a safeguard rather than a threat – the lovely warships that, in a long historical procession going back centuries have slipped out of the narrow harbour entrance to maintain our naval power.

Hardly anyone can see these majestic shapes and be either unmoved or uneducated by them. And in Portsmouth Dockyard sits one of the greatest monuments of our country, HMS Victory, Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, one of the most concentrated sites of national history outside Westminster Abbey itself.

Further reading

Ditch the City, enrich the nation

By Maurice Glasman

Here too are fortifications, power solidified (or in some cases folly solidified): Henry VIII’s Round Tower, and Palmerston’s ring of Victorian forts, indestructible to this day, crouched on Portsdown Hill above the town, and dotted along the coastline and in the sea itself. They were built at colossal expense to preserve the city from an imaginary French invasion, the Trident of their day.

It is still hard to walk far in the old heart of the city without being reminded of the merciless German bombing of 75 years ago, which killed so many and destroyed so much, and ought not to be forgotten entirely, ever.

But Portsmouth is not just guns and history. It is literature and education too. It is the birthplace of Charles Dickens and of that very different author, Olivia Manning. Jane Austen and Henry James did not like it, which is perhaps why I do. It was the scene of Rudyard Kipling’s dreadful boyhood and of H.G. Wells’s hated years as a draper’s assistant, experiences which spurred both men to great things. It was also where Sherlock Holmes first sprang into the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle, a newly-qualified doctor who invented the great detective as he waited in vain for patients to appear at his Portsmouth door.

Well, let us be technical: the door was in Southsea, Portsmouth’s more elevated twin sister, with its esplanades and piers, only minutes away from the seaport’s raucous pubs and tattoo parlours. Of course it is in Southsea that the politicians, civil servants and diplomats would inevitably fetch up – but proper, grubby, hard-edged Portsmouth would never be far away.

And it was where that great man John Pounds pioneered schools for the children of the poor – a task that has gone into reverse a bit in recent years and needs some new impetus. More people should have heard of him.

Yes, let them go there.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for The Mail on Sunday