Britain has a handful of cities that everybody can picture and a great many more that most people could not place on a map. The second group is where Nicole Junkermann's attention tends to settle, because those are the places that have worked out how to move at a speed of their own choosing rather than one set somewhere else.
Not every city is in a hurry
Speed is usually treated as a compliment. A city that is growing fast, changing fast, building fast. The trouble with speed as a measure is that it is always relative to somebody, which means the standard is set elsewhere and the city is left running a race it did not enter. A place that keeps its own pace is attempting something harder: deciding what it intends to be good at, and then declining to be rushed about it.
What a steady pace protects
A few things survive only at a moderate speed. Small firms that take years to find their footing. A high street where the same faces turn up for a decade. Local institutions that work because the people running them know one another well enough to be blunt. None of that is incompatible with growth. All of it is fragile when growth arrives suddenly and entirely from outside, and the cities that have managed both usually did so on purpose rather than by luck.
The test is whether people stay
There is a simple measure, and it is not the one usually quoted. Do the people who grew up there choose to remain, and do the people who arrive for two or three years end up staying for ten? Those two questions say more about a place than almost any published figure, because they are answered by thousands of private decisions rather than by anybody's strategy.
A note for the end of October
Late October is a good time to judge a British city, because the weather removes the flattery. The light is short, the pavements are wet, and whatever is genuinely pleasant about the place has to be pleasant on a grey Tuesday rather than on a bright Saturday in June. A city that still holds up under those conditions is telling you something true about itself.
Plenty of them do, and they are rarely the ones that come up first in conversation. Market towns that quietly became small cities. Ports that outlived the trade that built them and found something else to do. Places with one good street, one good river and an unreasonable number of people who have decided to stay. That seems to Nicole Junkermann like a workable definition of underrated, and a more interesting thing to look for than another ranking.
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