ABSTRACT
The South West Region of the United Kingdom is a paradoxical one. It is made up of a number of geographically contiguous administrative areas that stretch from one of the most western tips of Great Britain to the fringes of the economic hinterland of London. As a coherent regional entity, however, it appears to lack a unity of purpose and appears to fall into John Lovering’s (2001) category of ‘unfortunate regionalism’. That is, there is a tendency for many influential academics, policy-makers and practitioners to reify the region, and to insist upon its centrality as the contemporary basis of analysing economy and society, with reference to the complexities of geographical scale and the material distribution within it. In examining its potential for economic development, the region’s paradoxical nature therefore becomes more apparent.
