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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

Aaron Andrews
Aaron Andrews*
Affiliation:
Leeds Beckett University, City Campus, Leeds, LS1 3HE, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: andrewsaaron@outlook.com
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 47 , Special Issue 2: The de-industrializing city in the UK and Germany: conceptual approaches and empirical findings in comparative perspective , May 2020 , pp. 236 - 256
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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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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52 Police encounters were fraught, on both sides, in part reflecting poor relations between the local multi-ethnic population and the authorities. As such, when the ‘nice young copper’ had ‘identified his enemy’, it was, in his words, ‘some half-castes [who] were on a rampage’; Ibid.

53 Ibid.; for several nights in July 1981, Upper Parliament Street was the locus of significant urban disorder, known as the Toxteth ‘riots’.

54 Ibid.

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68 MDHC, Annual Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31st December 1972 (Liverpool, 1973), 7.

69 MDHC, Annual Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31st December 1974 (Liverpool, 1975), 3.

70 MDHC, Annual Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31st December 1979 (Liverpool, 1980), 3.

71 MDHC, Annual Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31st December 1973 (Liverpool, 1974), 4–5.

72 ‘Statement of the advisory committee in respect of 1975’, MDHC, Annual Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31st December 1975 (Liverpool, 1976), n.p.

73 MDHC, Annual report 1975, 3.

74 The sale of the Albert Dock to Liverpool City Council to provide additional accommodation for the polytechnic was officially dropped in October 1975; see Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool: 352 MIN/FIN II/23/1, minutes of a meeting of the Performance Review and Financial Control sub-committee, 29 Oct. 1975, 86.

75 ‘Statement of advisory committee in respect of 1977’, MDHC, Annual Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31st December 1977 (Liverpool, 1978), n.p.

76 MDHC, Annual Report 1975, 3.

77 MDHC, Annual Report and Accounts for the Year Ended 31st December 1976 (Liverpool, 1977), 4.

78 Ibid.

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84 TNA: EW 7/292, Douglas Jay to Richard Crossman, 27 Oct. 1965; emphasis in original MS.

85 TNA: EW 7/294, Philip Chantler to Aaron Emanuel, 15 Mar. 1968.

86 TNA: EW 7/1250, results of derelict land survey, 3 Oct. 1968; the acreage of derelict land for the years preceding and succeeding 31 Dec. 1967 was simply given as ‘—’.

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96 H. Wilson and L. Womersley, Vacant Land: Report by Consultants, IAS/LI/11 (London, 1976), 1.

97 Ibid., 1–2.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid., 5–17 and 26; similarly, the IADS concluded that, were funding available, it would take between four and a half and eight years to redevelop all of Liverpool's vacant land, assuming the work was undertaken concurrently – see Evans, Inner Area District Statements, figure 2.

100 Wilson and Womersley, Vacant Land, 27.

101 Ibid.

102 Cf. Kefford, ‘Disruption, destruction and the creation of “the inner cities”’.

103 Wilson and Womersley, Vacant Land. The conclusions of the consultants’ survey of vacant land were supported by their environmental care project, which ran from 1973 to 1977, though this focused more on the social than the economic effects of urban decay and dereliction; see Wilson, H. and Womersley, L., Environmental Care Project: Report by Consultants, IAS/LI/19 (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

104 Wilson and Womersley, Vacant Land, 13, uses included housing, highways, education and open space. On the plans for each planning district, see Ibid., appendix 1.

105 Ibid., 1.

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110 Ibid., 6.

111 Ibid., 2.

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