Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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firms such as ICI in or at a more modest scale of operations, Marley tiles,
and the adoption of Fordist attitudes and work practices also loosened local ties
as corporate structures, targets and attitudes infiltrated British board rooms. In
the competition for shrinking markets in the depressed s national advertis-
ing campaigns necessarily had to be homogenised and could no longer appeal to
local loyalties. When local firms ceased to be independent businesses but just one
of many production units in a national or international combine, they tended to
be run by on-site managers who were subject to decisions taken from a distance.
The movement of company headquarters to London further accelerated this
tendency. In addition, it is possible to discern a partial movement towards the
internalisation of suppliers, and of such functions as industrial training and
research amongst the larger and more integrated companies.
70
But the extent to which these trends resulted in what has been called the
decomposition of local capital is more arguable. Take, for example, the following
description of the movements of company headquarters by a financial historian:
By out of the top companies by capital and by out of the top
companies by employment had London offices and they were responsible for
per cent of capital and per cent of the total labour force. There had been a
noticeable increase over the previous thirty years both in the importance of large
scale companies in manufacturing and in control from London. ICI in chemicals,
Vickers in engineering, Richard Thomas in coal-mining . . . were some of the
best known examples. Yet despite this shift to London of head offices, this still left
the majority of manufacturing companies being run from other British cities, with
Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham being noticeable industrial centres. At the
same time, there were numerous other industrial companies, many of which
remained privately owned, that continued to be run from the location of their pro-
duction, whether this was in the older northern towns or the new urban centres
growing up around London.
71
At a smaller scale of operations the adaptation of small businesses, with their
dynastic ability to survive and grow, frequently provided a degree of continuity
and leadership within towns and cities all over Britain and was an especially
influential factor in towns in which family-run firms still set the tone of social
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
70
Gospel, Markets, p. and Part , argues that in the course of the twentieth century there has
been a growing tendency on the part of British firms to internalise labour activities and to develop
stronger internal arrangements. However, he is at pains to point out that this development of
strategies of internalisation has been slow and uneven. According to D. M. Ross, ‘For many large
firms, sub-contracting has replaced internalisation as the most efficient and attractive way of con-
ducting aspects of the business.’ See D. M. Ross, ‘The unsatisfied fringe in Britain, s–s’,
Business History, (), –, making reference to the work of G. Bannock on small firms
in modern economic history. More generally, see L. Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy
(London, ), and L. Hannah, ‘Visible and invisible hands in Great Britain’, in A. D. Chandler
and H. Daems, eds., Managerial Hierarchies (Cambridge, Mass., ).
71
R. C. Michie, ‘London and the process of economic growth since ’, LJ, (), –.
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life during the interwar years and possibly into the s. This was the case, for
example, in Leicester and Northampton where durable business interests were
reformulated through successive generations and business dynasties remained
prominent as political and social leaders. In Leicester, a town of many small for-
tunes, leading businessmen continued to act as senior aldermen during the inter-
war years and contributed to charitable activities and civic bequests.
72
In
Northampton, business families continued to demonstrate a form of town patri-
otism in which promotion of the town became an aspect of business strategy and
a response to the increasingly cut-throat competition in the footwear industry.
73
(vi)
If, in some cities, civic culture was still viable during the interwar years, in others
it was an ideology under siege. In the larger cities, one force amongst several
weakening the older ideals of social citizenship was associated with the devel-
opment of corporate forms of organisation where the consequent changes in
managerial structures were associated with a renewed surge of suburbanisation,
ever more distant from the city centre.
74
At the same time, the extension of
central government powers and financing during the interwar years tended to
reinforce the trend towards metropolitan centralisation. It lay behind the view,
expressed by Herbert Read and J. B. Priestley amongst others, that the inde-
pendent civic culture of the north was in danger of being eclipsed with the
erosion of provincial autonomy.
75
It was also the case that the old allegiances were especially hard to maintain in
those industrialised towns and cities faced with difficult economic circumstances.
Remaking these cities politically carried an agenda that threatened to impose
extra financial burdens on local industry. In any case, the costs and burdens of
unemployment on populous urban areas during the s were made consider-
ably worse by the nature of poor law funding. Rates levied on local industries
and residential interests took little account of the ability to pay and so towns and
cities with high unemployment often suffered punitive local taxation which
resulted in increased burdens for those industries remaining in the locality,
Industrialisation and the city economy
72
Leicester was characteristically a city of small family firms: see Nash and Reeder, Leicester, pp. ,
–.
73
The argument about Northampton is drawn from M. Dickie, ‘Town patriotism and the rise of
labour in Northampton’ (PhD thesis, University of Warwick, ). See also C. Brown,
Northampton, – (Chichester, ), pp. , –, .
74
H. E. Meller, ‘Urban renewal and citizenship: the quality of life in British cities, –’, UH,
(), –, and Towns, Plans and Societies in Modern Britain (Cambridge, ). For the argu-
ment that the centrifugal force in urbanisation has weakened the concepts of public service and
citizenship in Scotland, see R. Rodger, ‘Urbanisation in twentieth-century Scotland’, in T. M.
Devine and R. J. Finlay, eds., Scotland in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh, ), pp. –.
75
M. Slater, ‘Making it new: visual modernism and the “myth of the north” in inter-war England’,
Journal of British Studies, (), .
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paradoxically encouraging them to move elsewhere or increasing the likelihood
of their bankruptcy. Consequently, the rating system further ratcheted up the
local taxes payable by firms who could not move to other urban or green-field
areas. This vicious circle was not tackled until when the de-rating propos-
als of the Local Government Act relieved local industry of rates. In turn, this
arrangement undermined the buoyancy of local government finance, even in the
more prosperous industrial regions, and adversely affected the capacity of local
government to maintain and add to the services and institutional support crucial
to the survival of small-producer capitalism and to flexible production. Indeed,
increasing rigidities were introduced into existing local infrastructures, for
example, in transport systems limited to existing administrative boundaries and
in a deficiency of housing provisions in thriving industrial towns such as Slough.
Such trends, and their implications for the externalities offered to local busi-
nesses, can be exemplified with a summary account of the changes affecting that
complex of formal and informal institutions which carried scientific and tech-
nological information in the industrial cities. A vigorous wave of educational
foundations in the later nineteenth century diversified and extended the infor-
mal and philanthropic societies and institutions already in being. In the s
and s, individual and mostly well-established local businessmen, acting in
conjunction with Mechanics Institutes, had provided substantial personal dona-
tions to organise and finance new technical institutes and higher level colleges –
the embryonic civic universities – in an effort to expand the skills and research
base available to them, and this process gained a renewed momentum in the
s when towns and cities reformed or built new institutions with finance
from government and municipal rates. By then, a number of cities had higher
technical institutions and some had university departments geared to local indus-
tries. As the principal of Huddersfield Technical School commented in his
annual report for : ‘The right policy for Huddersfield . . . like Bradford, [is]
to concentrate on developing those technical departments which could help the
trade and add to the wealth of the community.’
76
Although the demand for full-time degree courses and graduates in scientific
and technological subjects was slow to develop in the later nineteenth century,
links were forged between professional scientists, mainly chemists, prominent
members of local scientific elites and leading businessmen in the major indus-
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
76
Cited by J. O’Connell, ‘From Mechanics’ Institute to Polytechnic: further and higher education
–’, in E. A. Haigh, ed., Huddersfield (Huddersfield, ), pp. –. The Technical
Instruction Acts and empowered municipalities to levy a rate in aid of technical instruc-
tion, and the Local Taxation Act made a fund available (the so-called whisky money) on which
municipalities could draw to cross-subsidise technical education. For one assessment of the impact
of these measures, see G. W. Roderick and M. D. Stephens, Education and Industry in the Nineteenth
Century (London, ), pp. –. For a more upbeat assessment see E. P. Hennock, ‘Technical
education in England –: the uses of a German model’, History of Education, (),
pp. –.
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trial cities such as Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. In some instances, the
initiative came from businessmen, as in the case of Henry Simon, an ex-German
émigré who marked a successful business career in his adopted city with financial
support to several cultural institutions and the endowment of a physics labora-
tory at Manchester Owens College in to be orientated towards local indus-
try on the European Polytechnic model.
77
Elsewhere, the initiative was
dependent on the efforts of individual scientists who built up alliances with local
business and provided consultancy and other research services, as in the case of
Henry Roscoe, chemist, and Hans Reynold, engineer, at Manchester.
78
The
institutional cement binding the representatives of these groups was provided by
the local branches of professional societies such as the Society of the Chemical
Industry and the Society of Engineers and Metallurgists. The formation of a
Department of Industrial Chemistry at Liverpool in was a late manifesta-
tion of this local conjunction of scientists and industrialists.
79
However, trends
in corporate organisation previously mentioned, along with the growth in
central funding for industrial and scientific research and the status ambitions of
the provincial universities, all contributed to weakening these alliances.
Individual business endowments still continued as in the case of the Leicester
businessmen who founded the University College in , or of Jesse Boot, who
refounded University College in Nottingham in .
80
Otherwise, the general
trend was for the local connections between business and higher education, espe-
cially scientific education, to become less significant both to the larger compa-
nies and to university scientists themselves.
By contrast, the importance of technical education in the local economy
was enhanced as the former dominance of Britain’s major industrial interests
came under ever greater foreign competition after , and as wartime casual-
ties and post-war labour shortages encouraged mechanisation and the further
Industrialisation and the city economy
77
B. Simon, Henry Simon of Manchester: In Search of a Grandfather, Henry Simon (–) (Leicester,
).
78
For critical assessments of the impact of these local initiatives on the supply of scientific man-
power, See Roderick and Stephens, Education and Industry, pp. –, and, more recently,
A. Guagnini, ‘The fashioning of higher technical education in Britain: the case of Manchester,
–’, in Gospel, ed., Industrial Training, pp. –. See also M. Sanderson, The Universities
and British Industry – (London, ); M. Sanderson, ‘The professor as industrial consul-
tant: Oliver Arnold and the British steel industry, –’, Ec.HR, nd series, (),
–; G. Tweedale, ‘Science, innovation and the “rule of thumb”: the development of British
metallurgy to ’, in J. Liebenau, ed., The Challenge of New Technology (Aldershot, ), pp.
–; J. Butt, John Anderson’s Legacy:The University of Strathclyde and its Antecedents – (East
Linton, ), shows the wide-ranging interconnections between science, industry, and aca-
demic research. See also D. Edgerton, Science,Technology and British Industrial ‘Decline’, –
(Cambridge, ), for an overview.
79
S. M. Horrocks, ‘Academic and scientific elites in Liverpool in the late th and th centuries’
(paper presented to the Centre for Urban History seminar, ). We are grateful to Sally
Horrocks for this information and other references.
80
B. Burch, The University of Leicester:A History – (Leicester, ).
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substitution of unskilled and semi-skilled labour for former skilled workers, so
bringing the apprenticeship system under further pressure.
81
At the national
level, the question of industry’s relations with technical education was a recur-
ring theme of government reports in the s, and by the s there was some
evidence that new demands were being made on the colleges. A continuing
shortage of skilled labour together with the need for new skills lay behind the
growth of day release studies from the s to the s, and, in some locali-
ties, the growing involvement of local industrialists as members of boards of gov-
ernors. More by default than intent, perhaps, city technical colleges with feeder
technical schools began to assume a more central position in the local economy
during the s. The expansion of City and Guilds of London Institute
qualifications, the inception in – of National Certificates and Diplomas
(precursors of HNC and HND qualifications) and the development of local
courses concerned with accounting, typing and secretarial practice provided an
opportunity for the colleges to take a more prominent role in the development
of traditional skills, albeit still largely supplementary to practical training, as well
as introducing more systematic training in design, office and technical skills. The
work of the technical colleges was especially important to local economies with
skill shortages. But again, constraints on local government finances and the vari-
ability in municipal responses meant that improvements in the supply of techni-
cal education were very patchy over the country as a whole and the colleges
continued to cater mainly for part-time students. These deficiencies should not
lead us to underplay the potential which the city had from the s for
reconfiguring the nature of the labour supply, of reinventing a role which it had
in the earliest stages of industrialisation.
82
It can be argued that this was a factor
in helping to reinvigorate the industrial sector in the s, as in Northampton,
where businessmen and councillors together sought to improve the quality of
technical education courses with a new Technical College and Junior Technical
School opened in .
83
National policy initiatives which fostered light indus-
try on new industrial estates, New Towns and Special Development Areas were
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
81
For the importance of human investment to British manufacturing performance see Broadberry,
The Productivity Race.
82
D. Reeder, ‘A recurring debate. Education and industry’, in G. Bernbaum, ed., Schooling in Decline
(London, ), esp. pp. –. For the growth in demand for technical education in the s,
see the work of D. W. Thoms, ‘Technical education and the labour supply in England between
the wars’, The Vocational Aspect of Education, (), –, and ‘Market forces and recruitment
to technical education: the example of the junior technical schools’, History of Education,
(), –. The most recent study of technical schools is M. Sanderson, The Missing Stratum:
Technical School Education in England –s (London, ). For deficiencies in the number
and condition of the Technical Colleges and the ‘drive’to improve these, see B. Bailey, ‘The devel-
opment of technical education, –’, History of Education, (), –.
83
Dickie, ‘Town patriotism’; Brown, Northampton, pp. , –, .
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also dependent upon the availability of transferable skills, and in some measure
the city colleges and technical institutes contributed to this.
More ‘dirigiste’ central government policies towards industrial location devel-
oped from the late s. They took a variety of forms: fiscal measures as in the
altered basis of rating in the Local Government Act of designed to encour-
age relocation in depressed regions, limited public works projects, schemes
encouraged by the Treasury which aimed to retire excess productive capacity in
the staple industries in the s, and incentives to labour to relocate in areas
with employment growth prospects. The Special Areas (Development and
Improvement) Act of carried further the regional approach to industrial
relocation reinforced after the Second World War by controls on industrial build-
ing in towns and cities with relatively full employment, and by the s the
earlier strategy of promoting new industrial estates was overtaken by overspill
policies and the formation of New Towns.
84
The growth of state intervention has to be regarded as a factor in weakening
local autonomy, but towns and cities were not themselves neutral in this process
of industrial relocation, often participating in promotional activities and con-
sciously building an image to attract and retain industry. This was easier to do in
the more prosperous cities of the interwar years which could capitalise on a rep-
utation for prosperity and exploit images of inventiveness and modernity. Yet it
was also attempted in places that had to overcome more negative images. In
periods of economic decline, promotional activity tended to reach a peak, albeit
with a shift in emphasis towards more practical issues such as the provision of
information on sites and infrastructure. The problem in the declining economic
regions, however, was that civic leaders lacked the vision to work towards pro-
moting a regional approach. Local rivalries and petty wrangling inhibited
regional collaboration as in the North-East where the difficulties experienced in
forming the North-East Development Board were put down to a lack of the
spirit of cooperation among the thirteen Tyneside authorities. Such negative
parochial attitudes have to be set against the positive initiatives that were taken.
85
Towns seeking to diversify were to the fore in forming municipal committees,
as in Northampton; elsewhere in the Midlands, growing concern in Derby about
its overreliance on railway engineering led to the formation of an economic
regeneration committee. More imaginatively, perhaps, the energetic secretary of
Industrialisation and the city economy
84
M. Keating, The City That Refused to Die (Aberdeen, ), pp. –, –, ; J. B.
Cullingworth, Problems of an Urban Society (London, ), vol. , pp. , –. For a review of
the issues, see R. H. Best, Land for New Towns (London, ). P. Dunleavy, The Politics of Mass
Housing in Britain –:A Study of Corporate Power and Professional Influence in the Welfare State
(Oxford, ), esp. chs. –, provides a contrasting view of how high rise housing underpinned
existing industrial and commercial interests.
85
H. Loebl, Government Factories and the Origins of British Regional Policy, – (London, ),
pp. –.
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the Tyneside Development Board, Stanley Holmes, travelled abroad to encour-
age industrialists threatened by the darkening political climate of continental
Europe in the s to relocate in or around Newcastle.
86
Most promotional
activity about a town or city took the form of publicity and information, or of
large scale events such as the great North-East Coast exhibition in Newcastle in
, or the provision of land and buildings.
87
The outstanding example of
municipal initiatives to diversify a declining manufacturing economy was pro-
vided by the Manchester corporation with the building of the Ship Canal in the
s and the promotion thereafter of the first and still the largest industrial
estate at Trafford Park, which at its peak was the locus of , jobs on its
square kilometre site ( ha) site.
88
On Merseyside, included in the Board of
Trade surveys of the depressed regions in but not designated as a Special
Area, Liverpool took powers under the Liverpool Corporation Act, , to
develop industrial estates at Speke, Aintree and Fazakerley, and at Kirkby after
the Second World War.
89
Municipal initiatives, supplemented by road and rail
links, were sufficient to encourage Dunlop’s to move from their cramped Walton
site to Speke rather than to relocate at Fort Dunlop, Birmingham, and it was
new factory units built on municipally acquired land for sale or lease on
favourable terms which attracted newcomers in pharmaceuticals and food pro-
cessing to Liverpool in preference to other locations.
In post- Britain, Keynesian macro-economic policy assumed that
demand management could provide a framework which would counter the
cyclical excesses experienced between the wars. New prospects for full employ-
ment and a comprehensive social welfare system were developed at a centralised
level, and nationalisation and regional planning initiatives appeared to sound the
death knell for the urban dimension. Yet, on economic as well as administrative
matters, the tension between local self-determination and national policy objec-
tives was nothing new. In addition to governmental attempts to influence the
location of industry, the Bank of England had directed interest rate policy and
influenced the parameters of money supply for almost a century before it
obtained central bank status in . During that period and beyond, local
finance and personal contacts, so evident in the instances noted earlier, remained
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
86
M. Barker, ‘Newcastle/Tyneside –’, in Gordon, ed., Regional Cities, pp. –.
87
For examples, see M. Barker and K. Harrop, ‘Selling the industrial town: identity, image and illu-
sion’, in J. R. Gold and S. V. Ward, eds., Place Promotion (Chichester, ) esp. pp. et seq.;
S. V. Ward, ‘Local industrial promotion and development policies’, Local Economy, (),
–; M. Bonsall, ‘Local government initiatives in urban regeneration –’, Planning
History, (), –.
88
For the development of Trafford Park, see D. A. Farnie, The Manchester Ship Canal and the Rise of
the Port of Manchester, – (Manchester, ), ch. .
89
R. H. Lister, ‘Regional policies and industrial development on Merseyside, –’, in B. L.
Anderson and P. J. Storey, eds., Commerce, Industry and Transport (Liverpool, ), pp. –;
R. Lawton and C. M. Cunningham, eds., Merseyside (Liverpool, ).
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critical to a multiplicity of small businesses: credit availability rather than cost was
a more pertinent business influence for such firms than marginal interest rate
adjustments. Localism remained powerful, too, even in the fashionable face of
post-war regional planning since it was the cities that were obliged under the
Town and Country Planning Act, , to draw up proposals for their own
futures. Pressures for central area redevelopment may have threatened some of
the old local economies, but as an icon of post-war redevelopment and mod-
ernism, regional planning yielded to locally determined solutions. Nor was the
Board of Trade in a sufficiently strong position to override local industrialists in
the administration of the Distribution of Industry Act. In the late s and early
s, new industrial building in the Development Areas fell to one third of that
in the immediate post-war years –, and in what has been described as only
a ‘nominally coercive regional policy’, local factors such as the existence of local
markets and available skilled labour remained uppermost in the choice of indus-
trial location by firms.
90
Conversely, as a Board of Trade survey demonstrated,
the duplication of management structures associated with remote sites, excessive
transport costs and the distance from supply networks – the diseconomies of dis-
tance from established urban infrastructures – deterred businesses from moving
to Development Areas.
Most importantly, though, the political complexion of the urban areas
assumed an increasingly Labour hue in the twentieth century. Indeed, it has been
argued that one of the most important functions of the city was as a catalyst in
the transformation of national politics, providing launch pads for generations of
socialist and Labour politicians.
91
‘Red Clydeside’ presented such radical social-
ist ideas in the burghs of the west of Scotland in their most potent form in the
decades on either side of the First World War, but the emergence of a shop stew-
ards’movement between the wars and industrial tensions after , as captured,
for example, in the image of ‘Working for Ford’, indicate from the point of view
of labour the inseparable relationship between industry and city.
92
Bossism and
machine politics were less prevalent than in Kansas City or Mayor Daly’s Chicago,
but in Bessy Braddock’s Liverpool or political fiefdoms elsewhere in urban
Britain, the city provided an inescapable framework for local business, just as the
dominant employers and small-scale producers provided the context for the local
political climate. Relationships between central and local interests, like those
between business and civic interests, had undoubtedly changed in character over
Industrialisation and the city economy
90
S. Rosevear, ‘Balancing business and the regions: British distribution of industry policy and the
Board of Trade, –’, Business History, (), –; G. McCrone, Regional Policy in
Britain (London, ), p. .
91
Savage, The Dynamics; M. Savage, ‘Urban history and social class: two paradigms’, UH, (),
–.
92
H. Beynon, Working for Ford (Harmondsworth, ). See also T. Lane and K. Roberts, Strike at
Pilkingtons (London, ).
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the course of the century to 1961. In addition, the extended parameters of the
business environment may have diminished the central role of the city as an infor-
mation and networking system designed to cushion risk and promote business
opportunities. But this role had not been eclipsed, nor was it likely to be, given
the persistence of dualistic features in local economies, many of which still bris-
tled with many small local firms. What cannot be done, at this juncture, due to
a dearth of research, is to specify the precise ways in which this role was main-
tained in the declining years of the industrial city. There is no reason, however,
to doubt the capacity of the British industrial city to reinvent itself as it had
already once done during the first half of the twentieth century.
David Reeder and Richard Rodger
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·
·
The urban labour market
T
often presented as market centres, but mainly as places for
the buying and selling of goods, or for financial transactions. However,
the role of towns, and particularly of large towns, is closely connected
to the operation of markets for labour. In this chapter, labour is defined in a
specific way. Traditionally, the realm of labour has been defined both narrowly,
in that ‘labour’ has been equated with the working class, and often with male
manual workers, but also broadly, in that labour history concerns itself with
working life as a whole, and with associated leisure activities. Here the concern
is with markets for labour, which means a very specific aspect of people’s lives:
the processes through which individuals acquired an occupation, with its asso-
ciated status and skills, and acquired particular jobs; or looked at the other way,
how employers acquired a workforce and filled particular positions. These pro-
cesses had not only economic significance, influencing the development of civil
society in many towns. They shaped people’s lives, the communal life of indi-
vidual towns and the ways in which towns were connected into an urban system.
‘Labour’ is a particularly complex commodity: a labour supply is not manu-
factured but bred, and takes years to mature; a labour supply can only be hired,
never bought, and once hired must still be encouraged or coerced to undertake
useful work. It is incredibly differentiated, and this differentiation grows as an
economy develops. All these characteristics interact to create large externalities,
meaning non-price mechanisms through which one economic actor affects
another, and the economics of towns and cities are all about externalities. Many
externalities associated with towns are strongly negative, such as congestion,
pollution and epidemic disease, but labour markets also create large positive
We must thank Ian Gregory for assistance in preparing the maps, and the various researchers who
provided the data on which they are based; this work forms part of a major project to construct
a historical Geographical Information System for Britain to which many funding bodies have
contributed.
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