ABSTRACT
At this point in the book, we want to change mood and focus. We have spent three chapters providing a history of our two industrial cities in the North of England and offering an account of their common and different experience of ‘the end of Fordism’ and the demise of mass manufacturing-beginning in the early 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s. Our concern has been to provide what we see to be an essential context for and background to the analysis of ‘data’ we want to present in Part II and Part III. These data consist largely of observations made by citizens of Manchester and Sheffield in the early 1990s about what was happening to their cities. Some of these voices were heard, and indeed, recorded, in four ‘focus group’ discussions which formed part of an exploratory study conducted by Ian Taylor and Christine Peacock in Manchester in 1990;1 and, in 1992-3, when the authors of this study conducted 28 further one-and-a-half-hour discussions with a total of 178 people we had contacted in the two cities, primarily through a survey conducted on the streets of Manchester and Sheffield.2 A list of these (28) groups can be found in the notes to this section.3 We also made contact with groups of people who appeared to be under-represented in public spaces, through direct contact with relevant agencies. In addition, we talked to 89 schoolchildren, aged 13 to 15, in a series of 10 discussions held in three Greater Manchester and two Sheffield schools.
