ABSTRACT

In Chapter 2 we suggested that many post-industrial rural-urban fringes have been subject to a transitional process stretching from production, through to redundancy and eventually to consumption. The era of production began with the Industrial Revolution which saw either industry growing adjacent to existing towns and cities, or towns springing up next to the primary extractive industries that fuelled Britain’s economic expansion in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Subsequent economic shifts evident from the late nineteenth century onwards and growing international competition and economic differentiation (the essential ingredient of globalization) put many UK industries – coal, steel and various forms of heavy manufacturing – under intense pressure. Thus the pre-war and immediate post-war periods became characterized by a progressive abandonment of industrial sites located at the edges of many towns and cities. But other processes in the post-war period – the creation of green belts, the demographic outflow to satellite and new towns, and an expansion of peri-urban road networks – sowed the seeds of new economic opportunity in the fringe. These opportunities began to be realized from the 1960s onwards, first with the relocation of light industries to fringe sites (exploiting the locational advantages provided by new motorways), and eventually with a raft of uses including office space, storage, distribution and retail. And throughout this recent period of transformation and consumption, farming has maintained a position in the fringe. We have already sketched out the narrative of economic shift at the rural-urban fringe: in this chapter, our intention is to bring the economic story of the fringe into sharper focus, but also to concentrate on more recent (late twentieth century) changes. We revisit some of the earlier developments and processes already mentioned, and also introduce some new concerns that have not been touched upon so far – including the position of farming in the fringe and the continuation of some extractive industries. For the sake of completeness – and given our intention to build a full picture of the fringe – our focus in this chapter is

the economic functioning of the fringe, and the future of the fringe’s diverse economic base.