Gardiner V., Matthews H. The changing geography of the United Kingdom

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CONTRIBUTORS

David Sadler is Reader in Geography at the University of Durham. His research interests

are centred on questions of uneven regional development in Europe. He is managing

editor of European Urban and Regional Studies, co-author of A Place Called Teesside:

a Locality in a Global Economy (1994) and Approaching Human Geography: an

Introduction to Contemporary Theoretical Debates (1991), author of The Global Region:

Production, State Policies and Uneven Development (1992), and co-editor of Europe at

the Margins: New Mosaics of Inequality (1995).

Mary Shaw has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Queensland in Australia. She is

currently a Research Fellow in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of

Bristol. Her research interests include social inequalities in health, housing and

homelessness. She has previously conducted research in the universities of Kent, California

and the Central European University (Prague).

Adam Tickell is Professor of Geography at the University of Southampton. He has published

widely in economic geography on the geography of finance, regulation theory, local

governance and regional development. He has held appointments at the universities of

Leeds and Manchester, and fellowships from the Economic and Social Research Council

and the Canadian High Commission. He has also acted as adviser and consultant to

policy-making bodies, including the European Parliament and national and local

government departments within the UK.

Brian Turton is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Keele. He has contributed

chapters to Modern Transport Geography (1992 and 1998) and is co-author of Transport

Systems, Policy and Planning: a Geographical Approach.

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Preface

The first edition of this book was published in 1982, the second in 1991. The first edition

was stimulated by a wish to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Institute

of British Geographers, and it summarised what geographers had learned about the changing

geography of the United Kingdom during those fifty years. The second edition brought the

story up to date, with authors in that edition concentrating on changes during the 1980s.

Both editions were very favourably received by fellow geographers, reviewers, and students,

and were purchased in substantial numbers. Copies are still in use, but there is clearly a

need for updating, for two reasons.

First, the geography of the United Kingdom continues to change, reflecting changes

in both global social, economic and political conditions, and conditions in the United

Kingdom itself. Both previous editions of this book were written during the long period of

political domination of the United Kingdom by Conservative governments, from 1979 to

1997, and reflected the impacts of the policies of those governments on the country’s

geography. Thus chapters describing spatial patterns of industrial and other economic activity,

land use, resource exploitation and the interrelationships between people and the physical

environment all variously explored the outcomes resulting from the impacts of government

policies.

The present book brings the story begun in the previous editions to an end, and

potentially heralds the beginning of a new one, following the election of a New Labour

government in 1997. Authors were asked to concentrate on changes during the 1990s, but,

as in the previous editions, were given considerable freedom to organise and develop their

material as they wished, after editorial co-ordination to ensure a minimum of overlap and a

maximum of appropriate cross-referencing. Authors have developed their chapters in a variety

of ways, but each is characterised by a scholarly approach, founded on a detailed and intimate

knowledge of their subject areas; many chapters incorporate the results of the authors’ own

researches into the topics concerned. Chapters were begun in 1997 and completed in spring

and early summer of 1998, and the data used in them reflects this time-scale. One major

PREFACE

xxii

change from previous editions is that many authors have been able to refer readers to Internet

web pages which contain the most up-to-date data available.

A second reason for updating this book is that geography itself has changed.

Concepts such as gender and sexuality, lifestyle, commodification, consumption and

globalisation now play a much more central role in the study of human geography, and

within physical geography issues such as environmental risk, climatic change and

sustainable development have assumed greater significance. These changes in the nature

of geography are reflected within the book in both the content of the chapters, and by

the addition of new ones. Whereas the second edition of this book had essentially the

same authors as the first, on this occasion there are several new names in the list of

authors, and some changes to the topics authors elected to cover. Many changes resulted

from the inevitable progression of authors through academic life. Some volunteered to

stand down as they felt that they had moved on academically away from the topics that

they had covered—into new academic areas, into university administration or

management, into retirement, or because they felt that they wished to make way for

younger colleagues to bring in fresh perspectives. One change was sadly enforced

because of the death of the author. Other changes were made in order to reflect the

changing nature of the subject, with new chapters on some of the topics mentioned

above. Not all authors would necessarily describe themselves as geographers, but they

have in common informed perspectives on geographical issues. Continuing the tradition

established by the first two editions, one editor has remained for this edition, and one

has changed. However we are grateful to Ron Johnston, who co-edited both of the

previous editions, for contributing to some initial discussions on the book, and for

providing such a thought-provoking and stimulating introduction.

The structure of the book broadly proceeds as a progression through consideration of

the resources provided by the physical environment of the UK; their development in terms

of primary, secondary and tertiary activities, as tempered by social considerations; the political

framework determining the activities of people; and the environmental implications of these

activities within various physical, social, economic and political frameworks. Although we

have largely avoided the obvious temptation to labour the ‘end of the millennium/dawn of

a new millennium’ perspectives, the final two chapters do postulate on aspects of citizenship

in Britain today and tomorrow.

Because of the changes mentioned above, this third edition is at the same time both

a new book and a new edition of an old book. It does however stand alone in elucidating

the changing geography of the UK during the 1990s. We hope that anyone who is interested

in how and why the United Kingdom varies from place to place will gain from reading it.

The target readership is students of the UK’s geography, mainly at undergraduate level—

although we do know that previous editions of the book have been referred to by reading

lists ranging from advanced school level to postgraduate level, and across a wide range of

disciplines.

We owe a major debt to all of the authors, who produced such excellent chapters,

mainly on time! Thanks are also due to the anonymous secretaries and cartographers

throughout the country who provided text and maps and figures for authors, and specifically

cartographers Mary MacKenzie at Roehampton Institute London, and Paul Stroud at

University College Northampton; our publishers at Routledge (Sarah Lloyd and Sarah Carty)

for their support and assistance; the many universities which have provided support in so

PREFACE

xxiii

many ways, and over many years, for the research reported; and finally, but by no means

least, those geographers and others who have contributed by their academic endeavours to

the present understanding of the richly complex geography of the UK. The book is a testament

to them, and to their work, without which the book would not have been possible.

Vince Gardiner, Liverpool

Hugh Matthews, Northampton

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 inner-

city 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

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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

INTRODUCTION

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

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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;

INTRODUCTION

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