Their leader Charles Kennedy is on a whistle-stop tour of 11 British cities by Friday.
Even property prices have fallen by only half as much as in comparable British cities.
But they are also designed to grow, in a way few British cities are.
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Yet despite these problems, British cities are right to approach the future with confidence.
Now Zubrowka - bison grass vodka - and Zywiec beer are easy to find in British cities.
Afro-Caribbeans and Indians were less segregated, as they are in most British cities.
The government has just finished a fresh consultation and pilot projects are running in six British cities: Newcastle, Southampton, Huddersfield, Northampton, Cambridge and Bath.
British cities, and certainly London, are densely populated, meaning that they have a lot of mixed-use properties, such as offices and retail in one building.
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One reason why civic worthies are abandoning their parochial pumps is the realisation that British cities are no longer competing just with each other, but with other European cities.
In several areas of London and other major British cities, such as Birmingham and Gloucester in central England, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool and Nottingham further north and Bristol in the southwest.
The report argues that there is little reason why London and other British cities should not be given the same kind of decentralised power as Scotland and Wales, whose combined economies were half the size of the capital's.
Congestion in British cities has yet to reach the nightmarish gridlock of Mexico City, Cairo or Bangkok, but already the motorways around Birmingham and the main approach roads to London are jammed for many hours of the day.
It also means that Aberdeen benchmarks itself not against other British cities, but against other oil cities, such as Stavanger in Norway, and frets that its infrastructure is way behind these rivals in the race for oil industry investment.
But non-whites make up a mere 7.9% of the British population and tend to be concentrated in large cities, with 45% living in London.
British blacks are disproportionately young and tend to live in big cities, which are heavily policed.
It is the first time the British Museum has dedicated a show to the two ill-fated cities.
For the next few days, the front line of this battle appears to have been drawn in British pubs, around its dining tables and on the streets of its cities.
I'm not the only one who has fallen for Taipei's newfound appeal: Last year, British consulting firm ECA International ranked it sixth among Asia's most livable cities, ahead of Seoul and Kuala Lumpur.
More than 250 archaeological remains from the lives of people in the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum will feature in a new exhibition at the British Museum next year.
In 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron turned to Bratton for advice after a wave of violence hit cities in England.
But the onetime British trading post's ascent into the stratosphere of the world's ultra-wealthy cities in recent years reflects a momentous shift in the global economy, as wealth settles in Asia after more than a decade of booming emerging-market growth.
Sometimes they carry this to ridiculous lengths: I remember being addressed on the subject of the rigidity of the British class system by very rich men over lunch in a grandiose club in one of America's greatest cities.
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Street art, meanwhile, has been controversial around the world, though in some cities it is cautiously permitted with some street artists rising to prominence in recent years, notably the British artist known as "Banksy, " whose stencils and drawings, sometimes considered illegal, have flourished from London to Jerusalem.
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