Small Towns in Europe in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Heritage and Development Strategies

Lud'a Klusáková

• Publisher: Karolinum Press, Charles University
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9788024642130
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Always in the shadow of their more famous urban neighbors, small towns are consistently overlooked in historical research, especially in Europe. This book investigates the ramifications of that tendency for development initiatives. Paying particular attention to the marketability of towns' cultural heritage and of the diverse ways local culture has been influenced by national and regional history, an international team of urban historians, sociologists, and historians of art and architecture present case studies of towns in England, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Russia to explore new methods for motivating development and renewal.

Performing the Past:
Identity, Civic Culture and Historical Pageants in Twentieth-Century English Small Towns

Angela Bartie, Linda Fleming, Mark Freeman, Tom Hulme and Paul Readman¹

Stephen Royle, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), defined a small town, in the period 1850–1950, as a place with fewer than 10,000 people, but with a greater “variety of functions” than villages.² More recently, in 2011, the association Small Towns for Tomorrow used a larger definition of urban areas with under 40,000 inhabitants.³ Regardless of the definition used, historians have mostly been in agreement in seeing the economic and cultural position of the small town in twentieth-century Britain as a precarious one – though it should be noted that this consensus has been reached despite the relative lack of work on small towns themselves, which have proved less popular than cities as subjects of study.⁴ As Britain urbanised from the mid-nineteenth century, and industrialised cities grew rapidly, the number of small towns in Britain, as defined by Royle, fell, from 923 in 1851 to 748 in 1951.⁵ Even using the larger definition, comprising towns with fewer than 40,000 people, it is still clear that small towns have gradually lost out in several ways to larger urban areas.⁶ A concentration of economic power in regional powerhouse cities and an improved transport network has diminished the role of local capital and market functions in the twentieth-century small-town economy.⁷ Such a process was compounded by the economic effect of two world wars and the interwar depression, the effects of which were particularly heavy in smaller places.⁸ In administrative terms the post-Second World War era also saw the further ascension of the central state, weakening local systems of government – or, following the Local Government Acts of 1972 and 1974, abolishing them altogether.⁹

It seems naturally to follow that, for the above reasons, local culture also declined. Certainly, this interpretation has predominated. Historians have identified powerful nationalising trends that had wide purchase across Britain from the early twentieth century onwards. Among other things, historians have pointed to the diminishing importance of the provincial press from its late nineteenth-century heyday, and the ebbing away of the local-based philanthropic activity and civic initiatives – various societies, athenaeums, libraries and other charities – that had added so much to the vitality of Victorian urban life.¹⁰ To this might be added an emphasis on the decline in the autonomy of municipal authorities, as state power became increasingly centralised, and with this the replacement of older forms of locally rooted political cultures with a newer electoral politics based on mass national organisations, general party programmes, and appeals to class interest.¹¹ Even large cities have been portrayed as being affected by such nationalising trends, as country and empire assumed cultural dominance, and “Englishness” overpowered localism and provincial identities.¹² Manifestations of national and imperial patriotism grew rapidly, encouraged by nationwide cultural institutions, events, and days of remembrance.¹³ While these trends were already evident in the Edwardian era, the First World War clarified and accelerated the process – or so it has been claimed.¹⁴ The Second World War had further socially unifying effects, and a “national” culture was promoted by cultural institutions, most notably the BBC, as well as events such as the Festival of Britain (1951) and the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (1953). These developments, it has been argued, undermined localism both politically and culturally.¹⁵

Recent research on the interwar period in particular, however, has taken a more nuanced approach to the narrative of “decline.” A number of political historians have emphasised the persistence of “the politics of place” deep into the twentieth century. As Jon Lawrence and Duncan Tanner have shown, the early advances of the Labour Party were importantly determined by local factors, while other scholars have pointed to the continued (if declining) importance of the provincial press in shaping electoral outcomes in the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁶ Still more relevant to our purposes here, case studies by urban historians have uncovered vibrant local cultures;¹⁷ shown how local authorities retained autonomy in the delivery of services despite central funding controls;¹⁸ challenged the accusation of municipal lethargy in public health provision;¹⁹ demonstrated how imperial discourse was filtered through the perspective of localities;²⁰ and questioned the decline of middle-class governance.²¹ Although these studies are welcome additions to the continuing interpretation of civic culture, they have mainly concentrated on large industrial cities, and tend to overlook the experience of smaller urban centres.

A significant aspect of this research has been the recognition of the part that public rituals, celebrations and commemorative events could play in the stimulation of local civic culture. One example was the historical pageant, as studies of Leicester and Manchester have noted.²² Historical pageants are the focus of this chapter. They took the form of a theatrical representation of a series of distinct historical episodes, usually around ten, performed by a cast of hundreds – and sometimes thousands – in an open-air arena. A town’s pageant would usually be performed on several successive days, in front of large paying audiences assembled in grandstands constructed specially for the event. Historical pageants were significant in promoting the civic culture of smaller towns, as Mark Freeman’s recent work on the St Albans pageants has shown.²³ Located in Hertfordshire, within twenty miles of London, and with a mixed population of industrial workers and commuters, St Albans underwent significa...