ABSTRACT
The most enduring feature of the interwar years in the popular memory is the mass long-term unemployment of 'outer Britain'. Britain witnessed both high nationwide unemployment and staggeringly high rates in its traditional industrial areas. Following the rise of the Hitler government in February 1933 Britain had received a growing stream of Jewish refugee industrialists. The lack of industrial estate facilities and suitable factories was highlighted by contemporaries as a major impediment to attracting new manufacturing enterprises to Britain's peripheral regions. Regional policy during the 1930s is best characterised as a series of experimental activities that, while successful relative to the resources committed, made a negligible impact on Britain's regional problem. Britain's recovery from the 1929–32 depression was one of the strongest for any major industrial nation. Special Areas cing estate and corporate finance initiatives were important chiefly as successful experiments in regional intervention, rather than in the employment they created.
