ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the research and broad historical setting against which policy emerged. Historical studies underline the presence and contemporary awareness of urban deprivation from the early-Victorian period. Concerns abounded that urban Britain was suffering from degeneration and terminal decline. Municipal authorities were themselves increasingly important in challenging urban deprivation. Local government had a pivotal role in the transformation of British cities from the 1870s. Growing government concerns about urban deprivation in the 1960s and 1970s were inextricably linked to worries about the impact of immigration and fears of a breakdown in social stability. Invariably described as lazy, feckless and lacking moral fortitude, in the 1960s and 1970s residents of the rundown council estates and the inner city were again seen as responsible for their own fate because they suffered from social pathologies and transmitted deprivation.
