The Rise of the English Regions?

Irene Hardill, Paul Benneworth, Mark Baker, Leslie Budd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134306077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This book analyzes devolution as it affects the English Regions, working from the perspective of uneven development, and drawing on the rich tradition of regional geography. Currently, London is the power centre ruling over the other English regions. The first part of the book looks at how this regional structure has arisen, and the theories that can be used to analyze it. The contributors discuss the nature of regional problems and governance, the institutions involved in regional governance and regional approaches to economic development.

The second part of the book devotes a chapter to each English region, examining each region's unique characteristics, and the opportunities created for it by devolution. By looking carefully at the regions, this part of the book sheds light on the question of whether Regional governance benefits the regions, or simply rescales governance to introduce another layer of bureaucracy.

Part I

The English regions are extremely complex entities, and attempting to explain the significance of the changes through which they progress is a complex process. Our argument in this book is that regions are systematically overlooked within England because of a preoccupation with a nationhood which has evolved with a peculiar myopia for its regions. However, both political and academic agendas have turned back towards the region as a unit of economic competitiveness, as a space of social inclusion, and scale for environmental protections. These pressures have manifested themselves in other countries through the increasing importance accorded to regional structures, both formally through devolution processes and through the capture of non-devolved institutions by regional interests. Regional devolution is not the only significant socio-economic change currently under way, and recent moves to regional devolution must be seen in the context of attempts to achieve gender equality, and the greater ease with which newer regional bodies have been able to implement such equality, binding those two issues tightly together. Our aspiration in this book is thus to take a fresh look at the English regions to understand the significance of these changes, in economic, social and political terms, and to try to find commonalities of process in the divergences of experiences across the English regions.

In doing so, Part I of this volume first establishes more clearly several different perspectives on the English regionalisation process. First, a contribution from Peter Roberts and Mark Baker (Chapter 2) begins from an organic, bottom-up conception of regional governance. In this chapter, the details of the English regional mobilisations are explored through a historical perspective of English regional identity. The starting point for this chapter is the concept of the existence of particular ‘problems’ which articulate at a regional scale, and to which ‘regional institutions’ emerge as the solution. This produces a very different conception of region, regional autonomy and regional actors to an efficiency (Chapter 3) or democracy (Chapter 4) perspective, and focuses much more on the necessities from which regions have emerged.

In Chapter 3 Paul Benneworth highlights an unresolved tension in the devolution process within England, namely between using regions as a tool to promote economic efficiency and using them as an appropriate political space for the democratic representation and resolution of conflicting interests. The key tension is that there are very different roles for institutions in each of these conceptions. From an economic efficiency perspective, institutions help to promote adaptation and renewal, or inhibit innovation through processes of lock-in. From a political perspective, institutions are much more amorphous and free-flowing entities, which evolve in response to the demands of the various interest groups seeking representation. Whilst much of what has been written to date about the English regions takes the first perspective, the neo-Lamarckian outlook implicit in our approach requires that the second is taken.

In the third theoretical contribution, Andy Wood et al. reflect in Chapter 4 on the notion of regional coherence. It is too easy to take regional institutions for granted, and to assume that particular sectional interests will engage with regional institutions if they wish to achieve regional ends. They observe that in the UK, business representation has been extremely slow – and indeed reluctant – to develop any kind of meaningful regional capacity, and has instead engaged collectively with the ‘regional agenda’. Peak interest organisations have therefore chosen to shape the business environment primarily through engagement with ministers rather than through the new regional arrangements. This is a consequence of the centralisation of Britain, and has been finessed to some extent by not requiring regional institutions to engage with regional business representatives.

One of the issues to emerge in the course of the other chapters in this volume is that the interplay of gender tensions has an important – if unappreciated – shaping effect on the form that particular places take. This is explored further by Hardill, Gray and Benneworth in Chapter 5.

These more conceptual contributions are intended to set the scene for Part II of the book, which, through a series of regional essays, subsequently develops a number of themes relating to the increasing significance of regions within England.

1 The rise of the English regions
An introduction

Paul Benneworth, Irene Hardill, Mark Baker and Leslie Budd

Setting the scene

To be a student of English regions is to live on something of an intellectual rollercoaster. Despite, or perhaps because of, the pre-eminence of London in the political, economic and cultural life of the United Kingdom, the status of regional studies has never really progressed past a precarious and transitory existence. The creation of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the 1960s and Regional Economic Planning Councils in the 1970s, and the post-1997 moves towards regional forms of governance, might suggest that the English regions are a fashion that rise and fall like hem lines. But the Ministry and the Planning Councils were never successful under their promoting governments, and the ease with which the 1979 Conservative administration destroyed regional frameworks for a decade tells quite another story. Until recently, to study regions in England was to be deliberately positioning oneself on the ‘alternative’ wing of a range of disciplines (with the possible exception of planning). After decades of this samizdat existence, the first Blair government, coming to power with a commitment to devolution, seemed to herald a new dawn for regional thinking in the UK. But now, only eight years after that bright May morning, the pendulum seems to have swung back once again, and devolution is being spoken of as being dead for a generation. It therefore hardly seems to be the time to be celebrating the ‘rise of the English regions’ in anything other than ironic tones.

However, the last seven years have revealed that there are considerable complementary strengths housed in the regions beyond London. Although British and English policy-making has remained heavily centralised, producing national solutions to problems of national importance, the regions have continued to thrive in their own ways. Despite the barriers to political devolution, to ignore the capacities and potentials lying idle in the English regions seems wilfully to neglect a huge array of talent and dynamism which could contribute to a transformation and modernisation of the UK. Likewise, focusing purely on national roles, on London as a world city, or the South East and East of England as London’s hinterland, is to forget the proud heritage of Wessex, the long history of the East End of London as a haven for assimilating refugees and the continued importance of agriculture and regional produce to East Anglia. It seems the English debate somewhere lost sight of – or never really grasped – the value of regional diversity and difference. The abortive English devolution process of the last eight years appears to have revealed that these differences and diversity really do matter.

The Regional Studies Association has tried to be at the forefront of these debates and to provide a forum for discussions of regional devolution and development in England. However, it is an international organisation, and it has proved impossible to reflect in recent years the diversity we mention above. In earlier times, the Regional Studies Association published two studies of the British regions, but these were under quite different conditions. In the early 1980s, as regionalism really disappeared from the national policy agenda, Professor Peter Roberts (1983) led a team of branch members who provided an overview of each region, to try to keep some kind of spotlight on regional differences in economic development debates. A more ambitious programme of activity was undertaken by Professors Townroe and Martin in 1992. Alongside a selection of regional chapters, they presented a set of thematic chapters, highlighting the importance of regional variations in innovation, education and inward investment. In this book, we attempt to revive some of the spirit of those days, and to disentangle our own avowed enthusiasm for regions as sites of economic development and social wellbeing from its connection to any one particular form of political decentralisation.

Our response in this book has therefore been to try to make sense, in the light of the failure of this latest political experiment, of the other dimensions of regional uniqueness and diversity which contribute to broader processes of national change. The UK still suffers from its excessive and implicit centralism, and the theme of this book is that there are huge latent powers within the regions that have the potential to be tapped for the benefit and growth of the nation as a whole. In this chapter, we are setting the scene for conceptualising why regions matter, to lead into a more detailed theoretical discussion of the importance of regions, regional institutions and regional culture. There then follows a set of regional chapters, which are explored through the theoretical lens already developed, to gauge the significance of the regional evolutionary process, and whether what has taken place can be regarded as a ‘rise’. The book has two main elements. In the first part, we provide some theoretical and background context for the re-emergence of regions as significant actors in economic development. In the second part, we then present a portrait of how each region has been shaped by, and responded to, these challenges, which offers some interesting insights for how a more general process of ‘regional rising’ is taking place in England. In the final concluding chapter, we turn to reconsider how England can be theorised as a coherent and vibrant nation, recognising the strengths and opportunities that lie within the diversity and dynamism of its constituent regions. In this chapter, we set the context for these discussions by setting out why regions have become more important, what can be learned from elsewhere, and how the current regional rise differs from previous incarnations of regional change.

Theorising the region

It is necessary at the outset to explain what is meant by a region. Despite its rather abstract idiom, in this book we use a version of the concept that is imbued with a particular set of meanings; as an academic concept, it came back into vogue in the 1970s and 1980s. The recent rising academic interest in concepts of regions has been heavily motivated by its increasing importance to understanding economic development. However, ‘English regions’ are somewhat sui generis; and in the particular language of English governance the phrase refers to a particular division of England into nine parts for the purposes of central administration. It is much easier to conceptualise both the UK government’s understanding of regions and why they have in reality become increasingly important through explaining the curious way in which ‘regions’ and regional institutions have become seen almost exclusively in some circles as a mechanism for promoting innovation, and hence pursuing a particular kind of neo-liberal agenda.

The notion that particular locations, such as cities or regions, can become centres of specialisation is not new. Marshall wrote in 1890 that differential spatial distribution of raw materials led to an ‘elementary localisation of industry’ (p.), but with industrialisation the localisation of industry arose from the ‘groups of skilled workers who are gathered within the narrow boundaries of a manufacturing town or a thickly peopled industrial district’ (p.). Much reference is made to the existence of ‘something in the air’ in such places, unique advantages which cannot be repeated elsewhere. It is undeniably true that industrialisation never repeated its history precisely in different places (Wennekes, 1993). The successive rise of textiles in Manchester, Flanders, Twente and Münsterland followed very different trajectories shaped by the dominant technological-organisational forms prevalent in each region at each time of take-off. However, in the case of textiles, it is true to say that the poverty associated with industrialisation provoked very regionally specific forms of collective response; however, these responses were shaped by other local factors, and ranged from anti-technology vandalism, garden cities, trade unions and cooperative movements (see Engels, 1851; Howard, 1890). Such early experiences demonstrate the complex interrelation and evolution between economy, place and people, which gave similar arrangements very place-specific features. Understanding the form of those places requires understanding the regional specificities, the general trends, and the outcomes of the interplay of those two factors.

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, interest in ‘regional studies’ in a variety of forms grew. A significant element of this was the work of German economists, notably von Thünen, Weber and Christaller, who developed their theories of systematic place organisation in specific reaction to the universalist ontologies of British classical economists, notably Ricardo and Smith (Hospers, 2004). The French school, and in particular de la Blache, had a strong interest in understanding the causes of regional geographical particularities. The concept of territoire was articulated as a way to explain the complex relationship between physical environment, patterns of land use, agricultural practices and social formations. Associated with the study of these concepts came an increasing recognition of their potential value, although de la Blache could arguably be said to have been reflecting, rather than reimagining, traditional localist values which Jacobinist and republican France had strained to eliminate. Similarly, in the UK, Mandrell (2003) highlights the linkages between de la Blache’s work on pays and the researches of Herbertson and Fleure linking climate, vegetation and society in the UK. She cites Archer’s (1993) rather apposite description of these relationships as being Lamarckian – that is, probabilistic and continually evolving – rather than deterministic and complete.

Despite this proliferation of regional studies in the first half of the twentieth century, from the 1930s onwards there was a steady decline in the importance of ‘the region’ as a unit of economic organisation (Lawton, 1983). Hartshorne (1939) noted that regional geographies made sense only when the region was contextualised in terms of its linkages with the outside world. In the 1950s and 1960s, advances in science in general and computing power in particular seemed to offer the prospect for mapping, describing, analysing and ultimately understanding geographical phenomena, and, more contentiously, producing a more ‘scientific’ version of geography (Berry and Marble, 1968). This in turn raised hopes that it might be possible to generate a scientific ‘grand theory’ of activity location by simply putting enough of the right kinds of data into increasingly complex calculative frameworks. Consequently, academic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part I
• Part II