ABSTRACT
The designation of Trafford Park Development Corporation in February 1987 was a much more instrumental affair than that of the London Docklands six years earlier. If the Docklands had been a grand strategy (the enterprise solution) looking for an area, Trafford Park was more akin to an area looking for a strategy, and what needed to be done seemed tailor-made for the ministrations of the instrument of a development corporation. In this it was more typical of the second generation development corporations (of which it was one) in which corporation status was used more instrumentally than (as was seemingly the case in London and Merseyside) to prove a point.
