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Dereliction, decay and the problem of de-industrialization in Britain, c. 1968–1977
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2019
Abstract
De-industrialization and the rise of the service sector have formed the basis of recent attempts to develop a new metanarrative of economic change in twentieth-century Britain. Their effects have been taken as writ through labour market statistics or aggregate measures of gross domestic product. However, by focusing on particular micro-economic spaces, a different story emerges. Using the inner areas of Liverpool as a case-study, this article shows how the city's social and economic problems were underwritten by the decline of the service sector, located around the port. By reading the effects of social and economic change through accounts of the physical environment, it demonstrates how urban decay and dereliction provided material resonance to Liverpool's economic decline. The city's landscape of urban decay and dereliction encompassed the infrastructure of everyday life – housing, roads and even trees – as well as that of economic activity, including the docks and warehouses. Taken together, this article shows how this landscape of urban decay and dereliction came to be constituted as an agent within Liverpool's continued economic decline in the 1970s rather than simply being a reflection of it.
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Footnotes
†
I would like to thank Jörg Arnold, Tobias Becker and Otto Saumarez Smith for their comments on earlier drafts of this article; Jim Tomlinson and Henrietta O'Connor for their thoughtful interrogation of the ideas as they appeared in my thesis; and Simon Gunn for his continued support throughout. I am also grateful to Shane Ewen and the anonymous reviewer.
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