It is a consensus many Londoners may struggle to comprehend, reliably deluded when it comes to outside perceptions of their beloved city. The children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, spent the last year travelling across the north interviewing young people about their hopes and fears for a report called Growing Up North. From Liverpool to Hull, and everywhere in between, she asked children where they saw their future. They agreed on one thing: not London.

There were girls in Manchester who fancied living in New York, boys in Bradford who dreamed of one day moving 10 miles up the road to Leeds. But London? No ta. Too expensive, they told her: “Not just in terms of housing but in terms of maintaining your lifestyle.”

The more I travel in the north, the more unforgivable it is to me that the capital gobbles up ever more investment

Longfield senses a cultural shift. When she was growing up in Yorkshire in the 1970s, like so many ambitious northern girls she was set on escaping to the bright lights of the big city. “I went from near Leeds to Newcastle University, straight down the A1 to London,” she told me. I was the same, only in the noughties: Morecambe, Edinburgh, London. Boom. I wanted to be a journalist and all the best media jobs were in the capital. All my favourite northern bands had already moved down. I wanted to be there, propping up the bar at the Good Mixer and all the other mythical venues I’d been reading about in the NME.

Now, when I give careers talks to students, the question I get asked most is: “Do you think I’ll have to move to London?” Not: “I really want to”, but: “Do I have to?” I see very few Dick Whittingtons and a lot more London refuseniks, unwilling to leave their nice lives in York/Sunderland/Lancaster for a slightly bigger salary. After all, who cares if you’re on an extra £10k if you still can’t afford your own place and it can take an hour and a half to visit someone in the same city?

There’s an arrogance to Londoners that turns the rest of the country right off. On the bank holiday weekend I was in the capital and did a parkrun in Croydon. Afterwards, I got chatting to a local who boasted that it was the hardest and hilliest such event in the country. I expressed scepticism, pointing out that there were courses in the Lake District that would make Croydon look like Holland. “That doesn’t count,” he said.

Last week the trade secretary, Greg Hands, Tory MP for Chelsea, said Reading had been chosen as the new home for the Trade Remedies Authority because it was “well connected to whole of UK”. Tell that to businesses in Liverpool or Leeds, who will face a seven-hour round trip to get there.

‘There is no doubt that many of the top jobs remain in the capital. But for how long?’ BBC buildings in Salford. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

I moved from London to Greater Manchester five years ago, despite many warnings that I was heading straight into a career cul-de-sac. But what price a garden? Stairs? A spare room? I also thought the media had become unforgivably London-centric and I wanted to play a tiny part in challenging the capital’s dominance. Sometimes that just means pointing out that sun is forecast for Manchester when our lead story suggests the nation is about to be laid waste by a snow storm; other times it has meant reporting from what we now see as the Brexit heartlands, warning that leaving the EU was a very real prospect, however fanciful it looked from London.

There is no doubt that many of the top jobs remain in the capital. But for how long? In the media alone, 3,200 BBC employees are now based in Salford, and Channel 4 recently announced plans for a “second home” outside London. The year 2016 marked a pivotal moment, when more graduate jobs were created in Manchester than in the City of London: 3,790 compared with 3,545 in the Square Mile, according to Charlie Ball of graduate career-monitoring service Prospects. Ball expects Leeds and Glasgow to overtake the City in terms of graduate jobs in the next few years.

Should we thank the former chancellor George Osborne and his “northern powerhouse”? His successor may be too busy with Brexit to put much money or energy into the project – but some Whitehall functions are already devolved. Cities like Manchester are able to make their case stronger than ever before, luring incomers with Tony Wilson’s old adage that “this is Manchester. We do things differently here.”

Recruiters in London are getting jittery about their ability to attract top talent. A CBI survey last month found that 66% of businesses in the capital believed London’s ludicrous housing market was having a negative impact on the recruitment of entry-level staff. Hardly a shock when the average first-time buyer now needs a salary of £100,000 to buy a two- or three-bedroom home, against £32,000 in Newcastle or £28,000 in Liverpool, according to research by Hometrack.

Some 44% of companies told the CBI they offered premium wages or retention payments to attract staff, noticing how many of their employees were packing their bags and moving out of London when they hit 30. No wonder many are increasing their regional presence. Consultancy firm Deloitte told me it now offers 43% of graduate opportunities outside London, a 12-point increase year on year.

‘The capital gobbles up ever more investment while town centres everywhere else suffer.’ Rotherham high street, South Yorkshire. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Of course London has never been cheap: “Nothing is certain in London except expense,” wrote the 18th-century poet, William Shenstone. But a one-bedroom flat where I used to live in Clapton, east London, nowhere near a tube stop, now sells for almost half a million pounds.

Is it any a surprise that so few artists now live in the capital? Lubaina Himid, last year’s Turner prizewinner, works happily from a Georgian terrace in Preston. IAMDDB, one of the most hotly tipped musicians on the BBC’s Sound of 2018 list, is so in love with her native Manchester that she quotes its dialling code like a rhapsody: “0161, that’s home, and will be home for ever.” Blossoms, one of the most successful indie bands on the circuit, are named after their favourite pub in their native Stockport.

As it happens, I am equally fond of Manchester and London. I just don’t want to live in the latter. The more I travel around the north of England the more unforgivable it is to me that the capital gobbles up ever more investment while town centres everywhere else are reduced to pound and charity shops, and pawnbroker’s. Four years ago, the Centre for Cities polled people all over the UK in Not-London and found only 24% of Britons outside the capital thought it had a positive effect on their local economy – the figures fall to less than 10% in Liverpool, Hull and Sheffield.

Meanwhile, in Chris Grayling we have a transport secretary who cancelled key electrification projects to northern rail lines last year while supporting Crossrail 2 – yet another rail line across London, expected to cost £31.2bn, which just happened to start in his own Surrey constituency. And is it not a bit rum that the transport minister, Jo Johnson, is also minister for London?

I know many Londoners blame the north for Brexit, even though Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds voted remain. One sent me a petition to sign in the aftermath, calling for London’s independence. But is it that much of a surprise that, after so many decades of underinvestment from Westminster, the rest of the country saw the EU referendum as a chance to give London a kicking? We might not want to live in London, but we can still see what you’re doing.

• Helen Pidd is North of England editor of the Guardian