The Changing Geography of the UK

Hugh Matthews, Vince Gardiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134682188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias físicas
• Subtopic: Geografía

First published in 2000. Within the last decade the UK has undergone major shifts in terms of its land, economy, society, polity and environment, all of which have had a profound effect on the geographical landscape. This fully revised edition of a widely-appreciated book presents a full description and interpretation of the changes that have occurred during the 1990s. It includes a great deal of new material from a revised team of contributors.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Ron Johnston

The east side of Sheffield offers one of the most stark and dramatic industrial vistas in Britain. Heavy industry and steelworks pack the valley of the Don as it flows not so quietly towards Rotherham.

Robert Waller, The Almanac of British Politics (1983)

The east side of Sheffield still offers one of the most stark and dramatic industrial vistas in Britain. Whereas a few years ago heavy industry and steelworks packed the valley of the Don…now a scene of industrial—or rather post-industrial —desolation strikes the observer. The furnaces are extinguished, most of the great buildings demolished…[to be replaced in part by] the giant (and highly successful) Meadowhall out-of-town hyper-shopping centre…just as large a source of employment…as the old British Steel works at Tinsley on the Rotherham border.

Robert Waller and Byron Criddle, The Almanac of British Politics (1996)

These two brief descriptions of Sheffield Attercliffe, one of the United Kingdom’s innercity Parliamentary constituencies in what was formerly a great centre of the country’s steel industry, encapsulate many of the changes wrought on Britain’s urban landscape during the last two decades. Economic restructuring has meant the death of numerous traditional heavy industrial complexes—in coal-mining, iron and steel manufacture, shipbuilding, and so forth —and widespread dereliction of their former landscapes which were already ecologically dead, or virtually so. In their place, if anything, have come the new centres of the post-modern consumption society. Elsewhere—usually a long way from the industrial wastelands —other urban scenes have been transformed by construction of the temples of the finance industries that have powered the restructuring, and where Britain’s new wealth is now being created. None of that can be found in Sheffield Attercliffe, however.

The rapid elimination of the manufacturing industries on which most of urban Britain’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prosperity was based, especially urban Britain north of the Watford Gap, was short and sharp, ending a long period of slow decline. In some cases, it was presaged by troubled times within industries that were struggling to survive and in almost continual conflict with workforces represented by militant trade unions. The precipitous run-down of the coal-mining industry, for example, followed a year-long strike which paralysed most of the coalfields during 1984–5 and was characterised by violent clashes between police and pickets: unlike most employer-union confrontations, the strike was not over wages and conditions but rather the future of the industry and job security, and it started only a few miles from Sheffield Attercliffe when British Coal proposed to close a pit (Cortonwood) in Rotherham for ‘economic reasons’. Soon after the strike was ended, and the union was emasculated, the rate of pit closures gathered pace, and mining is now such a small residual of its former size that its main union, the National Union of Mineworkers, no longer qualifies for a guaranteed place on the inner councils of the Trades Union Council, which is increasingly dominated by unions representing workers in ‘white-collar industries’. In somewhat similar fashion only a few years previously, the decimation of the British steel industry also followed a major strike, in which the steelworks that occupied part of the site now filled by the Meadowhall shopping centre were an important focus.

One aspect of economic change in the UK over recent decades has been the virtual disappearance of what were long considered the country’s main manufacturing industries —not only the heavy trades but also other major staples, such as textiles. These were the economic cores of the country’s industrial conurbations, and most of their major cities— Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool, Leeds and Bradford, Sheffield, Belfast and Birmingham, and Cardiff and Swansea—were founded on those industries. Several million jobs, most of them filled by men, disappeared: unemployment grew exponentially and replacement jobs were extremely hard to find—certainly jobs offering the same security and incomes. This was not a temporary slump from which recovery was expected, with the factories only remaining idle until demand was rekindled and staff could be re-employed: the jobs would never return and the plant, even very new plant in which there had been substantial recent investment, was redundant. The asset-strippers and demolition firms soon moved in, and many thousands of hectares of derelict industrial wastelands were created in what were once the hearts of the British manufacturing economy.

Some new jobs appeared after a few years, resulting from efforts to regenerate the impacted areas but, as Meadowhall shows, they were in very different types of industry. Most were very different types of jobs, too: they demanded fewer well-honed skills— certainly not those involving years of apprenticeship and on-the-job training which characterised the industries they replaced; many were part-time and relatively poorly paid, with little security or career prospects; and many more than was the case with those that they replaced were taken by women. For those made redundant in the declining industries, opportunities were few, and many settled for early retirement, perhaps linked with various forms of part-time ‘grey economy’ employment; the new jobs catered for new entrants to the labour force.

The new shopping centres such as Meadowhall at the centre of many redevelopment and regeneration strategies are not only places for buying consumption goods but also consumption centres themselves. They are destinations for day outings, by car or by coach, leisure experiences of a sort that never characterised Saturday visits to traditional city-centre shopping areas. To cater for them, the new malls open late in the evenings and, increasingly, all through the weekends—as do the ‘theme parks’ which are at the centre of so many tourist visits. Meanwhile, the old city-centre shopping areas languished, as Sheffield illustrates: many of their most profitable outlets moved to the suburban malls while those that remained slowly declined, servicing a more restricted clientele based on local employees plus innercity residents who lacked the mobility to visit the consumption cornucopia of the motorway exits and whose purchasing power was low. Many High Streets today, even those in thriving market towns such as Salisbury, seem to have more charity shops and estate agents than any other types of commercial enterprise, as the trend to the suburban and out-of-town shopping centres has accelerated. Urban authorities have tried to make their traditional centres more attractive to counter such trends—as with Eldon Square in central Newcastle and the rebuilding of Manchester’s Arndale Centre after its near destruction by an IRA bomb in 1994, and many smaller ‘environmental enhancement’ schemes, most of which involve closing main streets to private vehicles—but their long-term prospects look at best uncertain and at worst bleak.

Countering the decline of manufacturing industry nationally was a major expansion of service industries, many involved in some aspect of finance. London was the predominant focus of activity, as one of three major ‘world cities’, and office development there proceeded apace—both in the City itself and in satellite districts, such as Docklands and Croydon. A wide new range of jobs was on offer, especially during the late 1980s, many of them paying very high salaries (with even higher bonuses) and attracting a new type of labour force, the so-called ‘yuppies’, who contributed to the life of the eating and drinking places and patronised the shops in the surrounding areas—but only from Monday to Friday! Those workers took their large salaries back to their suburban and exurban homes, and their weekend cottages, where they contributed both to a boom in housing values within London’s ever-expanding commuter hinterland and to the success of a wide range of service industries, not only the traditional suppliers of food, drink, clothing, furniture and ‘white goods’ but also those retailing an increasing range of electronic gadgets and ‘specialist interest commodities’ such as antiques.

Other manufacturing industries have been established, many associated with information technology in some form or another and financed (perhaps with government subsidies and sweeteners in the case of the largest) by foreign investors. But they differ from their predecessors: most are in small plants not locationally tied to major urban agglomerations, while their workforces tend not to be unionised and are much more flexible. They are to be found throughout urban England, especially urban southern England, in small towns and large, where the attractive environments drew the initial investors and from whose successes further new firms are then ‘spun off’. Competition to attract them is intense. The old industrial areas rarely succeed, their desolate landscapes, their labour histories, and their distances from London’s ‘bright lights’ act strongly against them when competing with rapidly expanding towns such as Swindon, the focus of large recent investments by the Japanese car giant Honda.

Many of the late twentieth century’s new jobs are not associated with making things, however, but rather with consumption associated with leisure. Such are the contemporary levels of labour productivity that relatively few people are needed to manufacture goods, and many of our needs can be met more cheaply by overseas producers (though such is the depression in some UK industrial areas that their prevailing wage rates were low enough to attract investment in assembly plants for corporations based in the successful ‘tiger economies’ of Asia seeking access to the large European Union markets, before their problems in 1997–8; parts of Britain were able to compete with the ‘third world’ for cheap labour!). A substantial proportion of those in work were earning incomes far in excess of what was needed for their basic daily and weekly needs purchasable from the shopping malls —despite the high levels of unemployment in some places and the low wages associated with part-time temporary, low-skilled jobs in other sectors of the economy—and their recreation and leisure demands have stimulated major growth sectors of the economy: the UK became divided between work-rich and work-poor households.

Large-scale leisure and entertainment developments are exemplified in Sheffield Attercliffe by the Don Valley Stadium and Don Valley Arena, both built for the World Student Games in 1991 and justified to the major ‘investors’ —Sheffield city ratepayers who face decades paying off the interest on loans of over £150 million—on the grounds that they would form major foci for redevelopment and regeneration (of which there is as yet little sign). A range of national and international events is held there, including the Labour Party’s premature celebration rally before the 1992 General Election. Other cities have similar strategies for generating economic growth: Birmingham, for example, has a major node at the National Exhibition Centre on the city’s eastern edge, close to its international airport; Edinburgh boasts that its ‘Hogmanay street party’ is the biggest New Year’s Eve celebration in the world; Manchester bid twice for the Olympic Games as a focus for its regeneration strategy, and will host the 2002 Commonwealth Games; and the Millennium Exhibition at Greenwich in 2000 has been presented not only as a centrepoint of the country’s celebrations then but also as a permanent exhibition site on what was a wasteland following the decline of the Thames-side industries.

These major developments, and the host of smaller ones throughout the country, are the centrepieces of local redevelopment strategies, catering not only for the leisure interests of local residents but also for large projected numbers of tourists, both home and overseas. Sheffield’s Lower Don Valley is just one of many; it includes a redevelopment of the canal that runs through the area, with conversions of the warehouses at the terminus close to the city centre. Almost every town has been developing what it identifies as its unique attractions, with an ever-wider range of facilities presented to the would-be visitor: Britain’s traditional manufacturing industries are now heritage, not producers of wealth, with industrial museums and districts ‘selling’ the ‘industrial experience’ in a wide variety of ways—as at Sheffield’s Kelham Island and County Durham’s Beamish Outdoor Museum. (Local government financial problems are impacting on these facilities, however: Sheffield’s long-established Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, in the west of the city and based on a pre-Industrial Revolution settlement, was ‘mothballed’ in 1997.)

This discussion of economic restructuring and associated cultural changes has focused on urban Britain, using one of the country’s archetypal industrial cities, Sheffield, to illustrate much of what has been happening. But change is also occurring elsewhere—just as fast and just as obviously to the observer—in the countryside and small towns. New agricultural practices produce major landscape changes: crops such as oilseed rape and linseed, for example, mean that parts of England’s green and pleasant land are at certain times of the year England’s yellow and pale blue land. Crises of over-production, associated with removal of subsidies and occasional health scares about food products (eggs and beef, for example), have led to some marginal farms being abandoned, while many more farmers (or their successors, the agri-business managers) take advantage of subsidies to create set-aside land or to move into potentially more profitable activities such as golf courses and horse-riding; and the pressures to diversify sources of income have stimulated the conversion of many agricultural buildings to either permanent or visitor occupation whereas others are transformed into ‘business units’.

The villages and small towns serving agricultural areas have experienced the consequences of these changes. As farm employment has declined, job opportunities have been reduced and the traditional rural communities eroded. In their place have come the commuters, the retirees, and the visitors, many of whom form their own communities separate from their long-established neighbours’. They gentrify the villages and small towns with their barn conversions and bijou upgraded cottages, but conduct their consumer behaviour in the larger towns: village and small-town post offices and shops are no longer viable, and many pubs are unable to survive—especially those which fail to diversify successfully into ‘rural restaurants’: in 1998, the monthly journal Wiltshire Life was so concerned about these trends that it launched a ‘Save Our Villages’ campaign a few months after the well-supported ‘Countryside March’ to London in October 1997 which gained massive media coverage of a range of concerns about threats to the ‘rural way of life’.

These economic changes are linked to parallel cultural and social changes. Culturally, as we have seen, economic restructuring is partly founded on new forms of consumption catering for rapidly altering niche markets, based on ‘position goods’ which adorn the home and the body until they fall out of fashion, along with commercially produced entertainment of an ever-multiplying diversity of forms. New lifestyles are being created and encouraged by the media and other trendsetters.

These new lifestyles are enjoyed by only a proportion of the population, however — mainly those with marketable skills (most, but not all, based on many years of education and life-long learning, hence the expansion not only of the traditional universities but also a range of public and private sector further and higher education institutions, not least the business schools and their ubiquitous MBAs—full-time and part-time, executive and distance learning, modular and prior-learning accredited). These bring high incomes and relative job security, on which the ever-available credit for ‘good risks’ can be based. For the remainder of the population life is a continual struggle, with always-impending threats of redundancy consequent on restructuring, possibly following a take-over, downsizing and/or de-layering, while pressures for greater productivity lead to people working longer and more unsociable hours, with consequent stresses for family lives and social relationships. Thus alongside the wealth of ‘booming Britain’ we find the hardship and poverty of ‘struggling Britain’ and an increasing proportion of the population so marginalised from the country’s mainstream that there are increasing concerns about social exclusion of whole sections of society, with some alienated from it and others unable to find a niche within it.

This contrast between affluence and poverty is producing a polarised society of haves and have-nots, not only in one generation but for a sequence of generations. They tend to be spatially segregated, at a variety of scales, regional and local. Market researchers and others use a range of data on the characteristics and buying habits of these different communities to segregate them into distinct market sectors—such as ‘Clever capitalists’, ‘Rising materialists’, ‘Corporate careerists’, ‘Co-op club and colliery’, ‘Smokestack shiftwork’, ‘Bijou homemakers’ and ‘Sweatshop sharers’: some are the targets of aggressive marketing strategies; others are ignored. Geographical polarisation is exacerbated.

With relative poverty come other symptoms of a divided society. Health differentials are widening—between groups and between places: certain types of crime are increasing and more people (though not only the excluded) are seeking relief through addictive drugs (another source of economic enterprise—albeit illegal, except in the cases of nicotine and alcohol). Poverty, unemployment, addiction and crime interact and generate spirals of decay. They cause stresses within households and initiate the break-up of many partnerships and families. Sheffield illustrates this for us through the film The Full Monty, whose underlying theme is not just of men made unemployed by the collapse of the steel industry but also of men without prospects, even hope; their roles in life are increasingly taken over by women who succeed in the new service economy and who make men feel not only redundant but also obsolescent. In some places, it is not just individual households that have fractured under such strains (with consequent implications for housing and child-rearing) but entire communities. The pit villages of South Yorkshire illustrate this, and another film —Brassed Off—delivers the message superbly. The miners’ strike empowered women there for the first time, both economically and politically, and when the strike was over many were unwilling to return to their former domestic roles as expected by the men.

Social and cultural changes have been manifold within the culture of contentment in the more affluent sectors of the economy too. Changing attitudes to childbearing and child-rearing accompanied the increased participation of women in the labour force throughout their lives, with a consequent expansion in the number of dual-career families dependent on a range of formal and informal ways of providing childcare. Many of those families, especially in the professions, involve one or both of the partners in long-distance commuting: substantial numbers operate two homes during the working week. Commuting patterns are increasingly complex and cross-cutting: many depend on private transport and contribute to the build-up of traffic and its associated problems in rush-hours which begin on Sunday evenings and end on Saturday mornings.

Social, cultural and economic changes are intertwined and inscribed in the country’s landscapes. They interact with the political processes, and these too have been very substantially modified in recent years. The post-war settlement which lasted from 1945 until the late 1970s was based on the goals of full employment and the reduction of inequalities, enshrined in the five pillars of the welfare state—combating want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. This came under increasing attack from economists and right-wing politicians as both unsustainable and a major constraint on the individual and corporate enterprise necessary for successful economic restructuring in a globalising world: the corporate-welfare state’s high and spiralling costs meant that taxation rates were too high to encourage risk-taking while the necessary government borrowing both led to high interest rates (another brake on investment and enterprise) and stimulated inflation. By the mid-1990s, the case for reforming the welfare state was accepted by all political parties.

The critique of the welfare state was part of a broader attack on the state’s role in contemporary society, accompanied by a rhetoric that it encouraged dependency and discouraged self-help. The state was implicated in too many aspects of people’s lives, it was argued, and its role should be reduced: people should take more control of their present and future, and more of their necessities should be provided through much more efficient and effective market mechanisms. At the same time, those services which remained with the state—such as health-care and education—should be subject to the rigours of the marketplace: many others, such as the public utilities, should be returned to that marketplace, with the state, if necessary, acting only as a regulator to safeguard society’s interests.

Much of this rhetoric was implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, creating a new political map of the United Kingdom. One of the main mechanisms chosen was to place a wide range of public services—such as health-care trusts and many educational institutions —under the management of non-elected boards of directors and governors which were accountable to central government for their expenditure and the achievement of specified targets, but not subject to direct democratic control. These quangos, as they became known, we...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Boxes
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Water resources
• Chapter 3: Energy
• Chapter 4: Earth resources
• Chapter 5: Agriculture
• Chapter 6: Transport
• Chapter 7: Manufacturing industry
• Chapter 8: Labour markets
• Chapter 9: Demography
• Chapter 10: Towns and cities
• Chapter 11: Rural change and development
• Chapter 12: Life chances and lifestyles
• Chapter 13: Leisure and consumption
• Chapter 14: Cultures of difference
• Chapter 15: Local government and governance
• Chapter 16: A (dis)United Kingdom
• Chapter 17: Human occupance and the physical environment
• Chapter 18: Atmospheric, terrestrial and aquatic pollution
• Chapter 19: Climate change
• Chapter 20: Conservation and preservation
• Chapter 21: Growing into the twenty-first century: Social futures
• Chapter 22: Growing into the twenty-first century: Environmental futures