ABSTRACT
The decentralisation and regrouping of the population displaced on the reconstruction of the congested areas of Central Merseyside, in conjunction with the distribution and location of the new industrial areas constitute the main regional planning problem. (Thompson, 1945, p. 4) The economic future of Merseyside was thus seen to lie in the decentralization of industry and the matching dispersal of population. The idea was not new. Liverpool City Council, a decade earlier, had come to a similar conclusion and had sought from Parliament special powers to restructure its industry and population to this end. The Liverpool Corporation Act (1936) enabled the local authority to buy up land on its outskirts and to build on it factories for sale or rent and offer incentives to industrialists to do likewise. Two new industrial estates were begun at Speke, to the east o f Garston dock, and at Aintree, to the north-east of the city centre, and negotiations begun for a third, to the east o f Aintree at Kirkby. Sites for housing were also acquired in Cantril Farm, Huyton and Speke.While these municipal ventures were effectively interrupted by the onset o f war, the preparation for and duration of the conflict ensured that some development did take place in these newly industrial areas with the location by central government of important armaments and war-related production in them. Thus, Speke was the site of an important ‘shadow’ airframe factory run by Rootes while the then
rural area of Kirkby was completely transformed by the erection of a massive shell-filling Royal Ordnance Factory. And,postwar reconstruction on the lines o f those proposed by the Merseyside Plan, 1944 was to ensure that the importance of the outlying areas as production centres was to be sustained by the continuing dispersal o f jobs and people to them. The changing geography o f production: the \growth years' o f the 1950s and 1960s Conversion to civilian production after the war proceeded rapidly. The airframe factory at Speke was allocated to Dunlop to manufacture rubber tyres and footwear while the Kirkby Royal Ordnance Factory was acquired by Liverpool’s corporation to enable it to fulfill its original plan to develop an industrial estate in the area. Subsequent growth was initially based on firms relocating from inner Liverpool, although many of these moves proved to be relatively short-lived with a substantial number of the small firms that dominated this first postwar wave of investment either closing or moving on (Gentleman, 1970; Lloyd, 1970). Gradually however, national and multinational companies, many new to the area, began to set up. One - Albright and Wilson, the chemical manufacturer - even went so far as to bring its own premises with it, dismantling a wartime flying boat factory located at Windermere and transporting it to the Kirkby Industrial Estate for re-erection! Other newcomers to the Kirkby industrial estate in the years immediately following the war included Kodak, BICC and John Dickinson (manufacturing chemicals, electrical cables and stationery respectively). But the companies in this first wave o f investment did not employ anything approaching the numbers previously working on the Royal Ordnance site. At the end of 1950 they employed around 4700 workers, only a fifth of the wartime workforce. The Dunlop factory in Speke alone employed more than this (over 7000 workers).The situation was to change, however, in the 1950s, with an influx of companies taking advantage both o f the area’s ‘Development Area’ status - encouraged in this context mainly by the use of Industrial Development Certificates to control growth in the ‘overheating’ south and Midlands (Lister, 1983) - and of the labour force finally being dispersed to the area by the city’s corporation (Roberts, n.d.). The big national and multinational corporations that made up this second major wave of investment in the Kirkby industrial estate included Birds Eye, A.C. Spark Plug (now Delco Electronics, a subsidiary of General Motors), Fisher Bendix, Kraft, Otis Elevator (a subsidiary of United Technologies) and Yorkshire Imperial Metals.
