"BUT, what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, the metropolis of the empire?” So asked William Cobbett, a radical journalist in the 1820s. Two centuries later his term for London, the “Great Wen”, has stuck with us. The view that London, far from being a glittering metropolis, is in fact the source of provincial Britain’s woes, is as fashionable as ever. This morning, Aditya Chakrabortty, a writer on The Guardian, argues that London does not have a housing crisis after all. Rather, he argues, Britain has a London crisis—the capital city is growing too much and the rest of the country not enough. His view echoes that of the business secretary, Vince Cable, who commented last year that London is “becoming a giant suction machine draining the life out of the rest of the country”. Though Mr Chakrabortty is a Londoner, he speaks for millions of people living outside the capital who believe that the existence of a global megacity in the south-eastern corner of England is on the whole a bad thing.

And in one sense, they are right: London does grow ever faster than the rest of the country. Between 1997 and 2012, London’s share of Britain’s economic output grew from around 19% to around 22%. The capital’s economy sucks in workers from all over Britain—indeed, from all over the world. That explains why there so much pressure on housing. So many people want to live here that they are driving up the price. That applies to grotty rented flats over shops in Hackney almost as much as it does to mansion blocks in Kensington and Chelsea.

Yet is too London too big? Surely not. What London-bashers such as Mr Chakrabortty seem to suggest is that London’s dominance is wholly the result of government. Things like Crossrail, and the existence of government departments in the centre, is why the growth is in London. There is a little truth to this—transport and cultural spending is disproportionately high in the capital—but it misses a broader point. London gets much of its investment because it is already growing so strongly. And it is growing so strongly because it is already so big.

Like other big cities across the world, “the Great Wen” gets its strength from agglomeration—the benefits that come from being squashed together. In London and the greater south east, these are clear. At least 10 million people live within an hour’s commute of The Economist’s office in St James’s. Within a few miles of where I sit, I can find management consultancies, banks, internet start ups, hedge funds, car-dealerships, estate agents, newspapers, radio stations, countless restaurants, television companies, even a couple of gin distilleries. Why do these companies choose to base themselves in London, paying as much as £100 per square foot for space, when they could fill up “lovely cheap buildings north of the Watford Gap”? Simple: they want to be close to their customers, their competitors, and their workforce. (This, incidentally, is surely one of the reasons why the then Manchester Guardian made the decision in 1964 to move to the capital, despite the city’s much higher costs.)

By contrast, when you look at the most depressed places in Britain, they have in common two things: isolation, and the disappearance of industries which thrived despite it. Middlesbrough succeeded as a steel town because it was near to coal deposits and ship-building towns, not other people. Barrow-in-Furness, in Cumbria, is so difficult to get to that BAE Systems, who build nuclear submarines there, flies in well-paid workers from elsewhere each morning. Without coal and steel, what draws new businesses to such places? A few hundred thousand people makes for a limited pool of recruits. Small town life makes it hard to bring people in from outside: the lack of restaurants, shopping and theatre matters more when the nearest big city is two hours away. The only attraction for firms is cheap land and cheaper labour. That is why such towns still depend so heavily on badly-paid jobs: food manufacturing or call centres.

The best way to increase the prosperity of such places—and indeed the rest of the country at large—is to connect them to London. One story that has been quietly missed over the past decade is that tens of thousands of service-sector jobs have disappeared from towns in the south east. Visit Bracknell, a 1960s new town, or Reading or Swindon, and you will find scores of empty office blocks and quietly rotting business parks. Yet unlike when steel mills and shipyards in Barrow and Middlesbrough closed in the 1970s, this has not caused a collapse of the local economy. People still have jobs—often, in many cases, the same jobs. They just now work in central London.

Cutting back the capital will not help the rest of the country grow. It did not in the 1960s, when central government effectively banned the building of new office space in London and Birmingham. Firms mostly moved no farther than Croydon, and even then resentfully. Nor will it now. Technology start-ups which cannot afford London office space (or to pay salaries high enough for their workers to pay London rents) are more likely to move to Berlin than to Manchester. There is a reason why whenever I travel to other cities in Britain, council leaders and local business make a point of asking how the trip was. They care how easily people can get to and from the capital.

And most of all, why does it matter if London gets bigger? London is not a “Great Wen”—a scar on the landscape. It is a brilliant, dynamic, exciting city which covers what would otherwise mostly be bland fields and marshes. The variety of life in this city, from the restaurants of the West End to the warehouse raves in Hackney to the pretty riverfront pubs in Kingston-upon-Thames, is what makes it excellent. It is why so many young people desperately want to live here. The city has plenty of space for them, or would do, if we built more houses.

Green belt land could host pleasant suburbs, helping families who otherwise would be forced to move tens of miles out of the city. Regeneration of crumbling housing estates in the inner-city and the middle-suburbs can add more homes to London's inner-city, making more space for ambitious young people. Yet for the sake of “rebalancing the economy” we would apparently prefer them to stay in boring small towns where there are never really going to be any decent job prospects. What an utterly depressing vision of Britain’s future.