WHAT’S in a name? Millions in investment perhaps?

This week saw the fragrant city of Hull snatch the title of UK City of Culture for the year 2017.

You may recall that this was the title Southampton was bidding for in a joint application with our near neighbours, Portsmouth.

We didn’t make it past the first round. Hull went on to beat Leicester, Dundee and Swansea Bay to be crowned with the title and the millions of pounds of investment that go with it.

When Southampton lost out there was much talk surrounding the fact our city was, well, not to put too fine a point on it, not down on its luck enough.

Compared to other cities like, one presumes, Hull and the other finalists, Southampton is doing sufficiently well not to need the Culture City title as a fillip.

That’s nice to know, but somehow not comforting enough.

Since the announcement on Wednesday of Hull’s victory at being chosen as the worst of the applicants, if you get my drift, radio and TV have been awash with famous names who hail from that neck of the woods coming out of the social closet, so to speak, to not only reveal their origins but sing the praises of the city on the Humber.

Comedienne Maureen Lipman, for instance, announced she was delighted now so many others would come to recognise what she had already known, that her home city was a wonderful, undiscovered gem. Fair enough.

I wish Hull well.

This week I was in Manchester, well actually I was in Salford, attending a conference at the recently opened and extremely impressive Media City development.

Home to the BBC in the north, as well as the War Museum of the North, Salford University and a rash of other impressive buildings, the venue is quite astonishing. The cost ran into several billions.

Why, I mused, as my tram from Manchester city centre delivered me to the waterside location, had they not named the place Media City Manchester?

Surely the name would have been far better for worldwide recognition if it was associated with one of the UK’s most trendy regional metropolises?

The answer is obvious.

Apart from the fact Media City is actually in Salford – a small, picky point I grant you – and the fact the BBC who stumped up most of the (our) cash to fund the development are obsessed with political correctness, labelling the place after a rather shabby – I know, write to me – suburb of Manchester was much more likely to bring in support from other investors than proposing yet another glittering array of glass towers in the city itself.

We live then in strange times when it pays to dress down and put away your glad rags if you are seeking the big bucks.

What this does to Southampton’s recent attempts to play up its image as a successful city I can only speculate. But if we go on shouting about what we have got – universities, cruise capital of Europe, birthplace of the Internet, etc – we are likely to talk ourselves out of a whole mess of goodies somewhere along the line.