KEY POINTS:
"I don't want to stay here for the rest of my life," says 17-year-old Jenny Sharp in the quiet heart of British Midlands market town Melton Mowbray.
"I want to go to university and stay there, wherever I am."
She is not alone. Thousands of young Britons are deserting rural towns such as Melton in search of opportunity in bigger cities such as London and Manchester.
With manufacturing and farming economies struggling, the brain-drain from the countryside is accelerating the onset of a two-speed Britain.
"The north-south divide is more pronounced than ever, with growth increasingly concentrated in the greater south-east," said Andrew Burrell, at economic researchers Experian Business Strategies.
"In the past, the global cycle was heavily associated with manufacturing and the northern industrial heartlands.
"But as successive recessions shrank this sector, international finance and the City of London have become more and more essential to the UK's economic growth."
The shift does not seem to be running out of steam, especially given continuing strong demand for business space and housing in the south-east and the construction of a fifth terminal at Heathrow Airport near London.
"The whole of the UK rides on the strength of London and the south-east," said Tim Wheeler, CEO of industrial property firm Brixton at a Reuters Summit last week. "There are two economies running."
That is best reflected in workers' pay. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show average weekly wages for a full-time worker in Melton were £400 ($1030) last year.
That is more than 10 per cent less than the national average and £172 below a full-time employee in London.
Little appears possible to protect British industry from globalisation and halt the shift to cheaper regions such as China and eastern Europe, but Melton is determined not to get stung.
Bang in the centre of what was once England's industrial and agricultural furnace, the town is trying to protect a local treasure - the pork pie - and the hundreds of jobs that rely on it.
"We want to do for Melton Mowbray pork pies what France has done for champagne and the Italians have done for parma ham," said Stephen Hallam, managing director of Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe in Melton.
Hallam and a group of other pie producers in the Melton Mowbray region hope to win protected status for their pork-stuffed pastry from the EU.
"It protects the product for evermore but it also protects the economy around which the product is made," said Hallam.
Stilton cheese, distinguished by its nostril-clearing smell and blue lines, is already protected by the EU and producers can't make enough to meet demand.
Hallam hopes that by protecting the brands of local produce, the region can prosper even as young talent goes.
However, the pork pie is unlikely to win enough popularity to entice young talent away from the attractions of high wages and opportunity in cities.
Especially given news last week that the profitability of Britain's manufacturing sector has sunk to its lowest level in 15 years, while the rate of return in the services sector - on which cities thrive - leaped to record peaks.
- REUTERS
