Disruption, destruction and the creation of ‘the inner cities’: the impact of urban renewal on industry, 1945–1980

Alistair Kefford

doi:10.1017/s0963926816000730

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This article examines the impact of post-war urban renewal on industry and economic activity in Manchester and Leeds. It demonstrates that local redevelopment plans contained important economic underpinnings which have been largely overlooked in the literature, and particularly highlights expansive plans for industrial reorganization and relocation. The article also shows that, in practice, urban renewal had a destabilizing and destructive impact on established industrial activities and exacerbated the inner-city problems of unemployment and disinvestment which preoccupied policy-makers by the 1970s. The article argues that post-war planning practices need to be integrated into wider histories of deindustrialization in British cities.

Highlights

While conventional economic histories often lack an urban dimension, the expanding literature on the post-war governance and planning of British cities has had little to say about deindustrialisation, or about urban economies more generally
The relative absence of an economic dimension from post-war urban historiography is all the more striking given how far deindustrialisation came to define the urban experience in the second half of the twentieth century
That deindustrialisation transformed British cities materially and culturally, and produced a set of conditions which continue to provoke political anxiety and successive waves of state intervention, and yet we know very little about how the state managed urban economies in the period between 1945 and the 1970s

Summary

Introduction

While conventional economic histories often lack an urban dimension, the expanding literature on the post-war governance and planning of British cities has had little to say about deindustrialisation, or about urban economies more generally.

Results

Conclusion