Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
countryside, which was in any case depressed by low grain prices after the repeal
of the Corn Laws in 1849. Many farm labourers were displaced over the first
half of the nineteenth century by the Enclosure Acts, which forced a restructuring
of agriculture and the elimination of many smallholdings. There was thus a
general shift of prosperity from rural to urban. The first-wave industries and their
regions maintained themselves with further growth: in Lancashire, cottons; in
South Wales, iron and other metals. In Lanarkshire, the new iron and steel
industry tended to replace the older textiles industry based on linen and cotton.
Industrial change meant changes in regional fortune. Income levels in the
north, which had been comparatively low in the eighteenth century, rose to near
those of the south over the nineteenth century. Smout (1986) summarized the
evidence for these changes at the level of the national differences in income
levels per capita for England and Scotland. In 1798, Scotland earned about 68
per cent of the level in England; by 1867, Scotland's figure was 75 per cent; and
in 1911, about 95 per cent. The rise of the first modern industries in the north,
followed by the heavy industries in the second wave, reduced the north-south gap
to a very low level.
While the first two Kondratiev waves favoured the coalfields, especially
coastal ones, the second pair of Kondratievs moved the regional focus away to
new regions with different backgrounds. Because of electrical power being
increasingly available, new locations were possible in the countryside and in new
urban sites. The third wave, from 1895 to 1940, saw as growth industries many
that were services or linked to services rather than manufacturing.
Entertainments, road transport, hotel and restaurant services, printing and
publishing all grew (Prestwich & Taylor 1990:28-9). Their optimal location was
in and around London, where the highest income levels were already found, and
where information links to the world were best. At the same time, the old
industries, particularly in the second, downswing part of the cycle, created
problems of unemployment as production declined. Regions strong in textiles, in
iron and steel manufacture, in heavy engineering such as shipbuilding and
railway rolling stock, and coalmining, became concentrations of low purchasing
power, where the whole economy and not just the main industry moved into
recession, sparking the first powerful regional policies (see below).
Growth industries in this period included chemicals, the car industry, and
some new consumer industries such as processed food manufacturing, but these
tended to favour the new regions in the Midlands (car manufacture and light
engineering) and outer London.
A fourth wave is identified from 1940 to the present. It involves a further
cluster of innovations, in this case significantly not British ones but often coming
from abroad, again changing regional orientation. Continuing decline in the old
heavy industries, iron and steel plus heavy engineering, and in textiles, means a
continuing problem in the older industrial areas. Agricultural decline, in terms of
employment, puts a further strain on rural areas, counterbalanced by new
migration into the countryside, called counter-urbanization.
