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Manchester is one of the worlds centres for the music industry! It is also home to the BBC, it has world class restaurants and universities, it has a fabulous nightlife and is a haven for shoppers, like a previous poster I suggest you don't actually know what you are talking about.
This reads like a tourist pamphlet that the local tourism board would churn out. Every city with a mall is a "haven for shoppers" these days. And what are these world class restaurants? Where's Manchester's Michelin Guide?
I'm not saying the UK doesn't have fantastic cities, but Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester are some of the worst. Liverpool's been on a downward slide since 1964. Probably one of the reasons this area of England voted overwhelmingly with the racist, xenophobic Brexiteers
Why would you treat SF differently than any other metro on earth? Is London now a small town, because we're only allowed to use the technical limits of the City of London? The City only has 8,000 residents, going by your argument.
Is the Strip not in Las Vegas? Is Disney World not in Orlando? Is Paris DeGaulle not in Paris? Is Miami Beach not in Miami? Is the Vatican not in Rome? This is seriously your argument?
I have no idea what this means. Both UC's are in the Bay Area, and therefore SF-area schools.
What we call Greater London forms the administrative borders of all 33 boroughs, a contiguous area which includes what is known as The City of London and is governed by the Greater London Authority led by our Mayor. The Bay Area consists of a number of small/mid-sized, self-governing cities spread out across a vast area with some of these connected by bridges and roads. As someone who lives in the London Borough of Enfield, I always refer to myself as a Londoner. My brother-in-law lives in Oakland and never refers to himself as living in San Francisco. That's the difference.
This reads like a tourist pamphlet that the local tourism board would churn out. Every city with a mall is a "haven for shoppers" these days. And what are these world class restaurants? Where's Manchester's Michelin Guide?
I'm not saying the UK doesn't have fantastic cities, but Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester are some of the worst. Liverpool's been on a downward slide since 1964. Probably one of the reasons this area of England voted overwhelmingly with the racist, xenophobic Brexiteers
Listen people that assume that all British cities are some kind of cultural vacuums are talking out of their a*ses, that's all, its xenophobic claptrap usually spouted by people that have never even been anywhere near the UK! Manchester is the birthplace of the industrial revolution for gods sake! It has a history that nowhere in the US can match, it has culture as rich as anywhere on the planet, it is diverse, it is lively, it is full of culture, it is home to probably the worlds most famous sporting venues. Personally I am not going to start mouthing off about how it is 'better' than San Diego or Copenhagen or Berlin because I am intelligent enough to realise its IMPOSSIBLE to tell because all cities have their good and bad points, people sitting in some town in California or Bavaria slagging off British cities know nothing.
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Originally Posted by Pueblofuerte
What are you talking about? It never ceases to amaze me how ignorant a lot of Americans are.
Edinburgh is a very desirable city, so are Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol. Manchester and Liverpool are also resurging into excellent cities.
British Cities have seen a lot of inward investment over the last few decades, including the industrial cities of the North, and many have superb Georgian and Victorian architecture.
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Originally Posted by manitopiaaa
This reads like a tourist pamphlet that the local tourism board would churn out. Every city with a mall is a "haven for shoppers" these days. And what are these world class restaurants? Where's Manchester's Michelin Guide?
Finally people are starting speak the truth about the Michelin Guide, which has always been a load of pretentious twaddle, and if anything is more of a guide to places to avoid less you get charged the earth for an over rated meal and be surrounded by equally pretentious and shallow diners.
The self-regarding, hermetic world of gastronomy has produced few constructions more likely to promote teeth-gnashing, mockery and despairing contempt than “fine dining”, which should be pronounced in a refained accent – think Lynda Snell or Sir Elf Remsey or Morningsaide. It is a branch of restauration characterised by smarmily sycophantic service, grotesquely over-elaborate cooking, fussiness, pretension, absurdly high prices and moron chefs who appear to think they are philosophers: one of the smug oafs who presents MasterChef recently observed that if a contestant was to scale the heights of “fine dining” he had to remove the outer shell of each individual pea.
One construction which outdoes even “fine dining” in its capacity to make the sentient contort themselves wincing is “Michelin-starred fine dining”. Where does one start? With, I guess, the sweeping generalisation that the red Michelin guide just about always gets it wrong. Its first British edition, published in 1974, was risible, and so it remains. Nothing has improved in the intervening years. Indeed, it has got worse. Once it was all symbols: its judgments might have been predictably stupid, but the means of their expression was satisfying. It possessed the same appeal as an OS map.
A few years ago it added prose, though that is to dignify the trite mix of excitable journalese and Clinton Cards tweeness. Further, it belatedly cottoned on to the fact that the French model on which the British edition was based was irrelevant in a nation which is a culinary magpie. Britain is bereft of a gastronomic consensus. Its restauration is heterogeneous.
Michelin’s response has been cautiously tokenistic. It lists Chinese restaurants, Indian restaurants, Japanese restaurants – provided they aren’t too scruffy. It even awards them stars. Whatever claims it may make to the contrary, these awards are based on Michelin’s idea of probity, which has less to do with an establishment’s standard of cooking than with its cutlery, glassware and the dimensions of the vats of starch in which its napkins have been steeped.
The guide’s ill-paid inspectors, callow graduates of hotel schools, are at an even greater loss when faced with casual, informal restaurants which audaciously allow customers to pour their own wine and which serve excellent cooking without “fine dining’s” presentational fuss, where a dozen spotty sous-chefs have touched the multipartite components as they sought to create a Mondrian on the plate. This bemusement is not peculiar to the British guide. Yves Camdeborde’s Le Comptoir de l’Odéon has been the hottest ticket in Paris for several years. Marvellous cooking in rudimentary surrounds (and low tabs). It goes without saying that Camdeborde, the greatest chef of his generation, is unacknowledged by Michelin.
It was the Australian chef Skye Gyngell’s misfortune to attract a star from the British guide at her ad hoc café in, of all places, a south-west London garden centre. Why her, when there are countless other benignly eccentric outfits all over the capital?
The result of this unwanted award was that Gyngell’s café started to attract people who suffer the misfortune of being led by Michelin; people, that is, who are gastronomically clueless and who expect the “fine dining experience”; people who do not pay their own bill; deluded people preoccupied by the status that patronisation of a particular restaurant attaches to them. This army of fine diners drives cars that are boasts, drinks whatever is expensive and relishes the fact that it takes five flunkies to open the bottle: now there’s a way to bolster one’s amour propre. The therapeutic qualities of Michelin temples are not to be underestimated. Gyngell’s café failed to provide this social service.
Fine diners apart, two significant groups are taken in by Michelin. The first comprises chefs. Mark, not all chefs. Those who seek to please Michelin, who crave its laurels, tend to have learnt cooking as a trade just as they might have learnt hairdressing. They so believe in the guide’s definitive authority that they will risk bankruptcy to achieve its pinchbeck gongs.
The second group is composed of journalists. Not those journalists who write about cooking or restaurants, but eager reporters who are persuaded by Michelin’s publicity machine that the guide’s awards should be annually recorded, as though they matter. Hence the influence of this pernicious book stretches far beyond the few people who actually read it.
Its dubious authority is at least partly founded in its illusion of impersonality. It pretends to objective certainty when in fact it is merely composed of the opinions of box-ticking dullards. Given the extent and alertness of the gastronomic press, it is astonishing that Michelin is still heeded. It belongs to a different time, or anyway to a parallel milieu. The French they wear berets, the English they wear bowler hats.
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It's also worth noting that a lot of US Cities are also not in Michelins Guide, including Philadelphia, which is compared to Manchester in another thread, and the East Coast Early Industrialised Cities of the US usually have more in common with UK Cities than many Californian cities.
Cities such as East Coast cities such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia etc have far more in common with UK Cities than Californiam cities and as I have already explained UK Cities tend to be very close to each other in regional hubs, and although some cities in California may be near each other in general there are not the same amount of cities in close proximity to each other as in the UK where the talk is of the Midlands or the Northern Powerhouse etc.
OK, this is good to clarify. Fair enough. I'm not familiar enough with greater Manchester to know if it's comparable in the number of cities/towns and the square mileage to the Bay Area.
Well, let's see: Yale, Harvard, Oxford = top three, not necessarily in that order. What's next, Cambridge? Or the Sorbonne? Then after that, possibly MIT, then Stanford, Princeton, and I don't know if UC Berkeley would rank in there. I think there might be several tying for 6th or 7th place. Just thinking out loud.
historically yes, those could be considered among the top three but things have changed due to importance on STEM over law and literature. Yale has been falling behind in this sector which has caused the student body to push for more focus on programming classes and such, oxford is well behind Cambridge being more historically a liberal arts school. Harvard, while having an excellent engineering school still puts their main focus on law. If you look at listing of tops schools in america (and the world) made today you'll often see MIT, CALtech, and Stanford fighting in the top 3
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"“If a thing loves, it is infinite.”"
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Originally Posted by Winterfall8324
historically yes, those could be considered among the top three but things have changed due to importance on STEM over law and literature. Yale has been falling behind in this sector which has caused the student body to push for more focus on programming classes and such, oxford is well behind Cambridge being more historically a liberal arts school. Harvard, while having an excellent engineering school still puts their main focus on law. If you look at listing of tops schools in america (and the world) made today you'll often see MIT, CALtech, and Stanford fighting in the top 3
LOL - Oxford is a research intensive Russell Group University, the Oxford University Hospitals include the vast John Radcliffe Teaching Hospital where many of it's Medical Students train and the University has a history of post graduate Science as well as a vast number of Nobel Prize Winners, it can hardly be described as a Liberal Arts College indeed in latest The Times University Rankings Oxford is in First Place above Cambridge.
If the UK had an Ivy League it would include an array of London institutions University College London, Imperial College London, The London School of Economics and Political Science and Kings College London as well as Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Manchester University in the North and Edinburgh in Scotland. Others such as Glasgow, Warwick, Bristol, Durham, St Andrews, Sheffield etc would also be in the mix.
In terms of UK Universities the Russell Group tend to be the best Universities with the most intense and noted research and reputation.
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"“If a thing loves, it is infinite.”"
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Couple more links to North West Restaurants, as there are some very nice restaurants and lovely honest wholesome food in that region, as well as in Yorkshire and throughout the North and indeed in Scotland.
I'm more curious as to why you're so passionate about it.
Oh, it's a discussion forum and I saw a post that seemed clearly wrong so I corrected it. I used an electronic computing device to do so!
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