ABSTRACT
By the late 1960s, about one in eight of Merseyside’s population lived in the eastern crescent of predominantly local authority housing estates (Merseyside Council for Voluntary Services, 1978).It was these outer estates on which our research focused and particularly, because of their size and importance as industrial centres, on Kirkby in the north and Halewood and Speke in the south. As Figure 4.1 shows, these estates fall within the remit of two local authorities: Halewood and Kirkby are in Knowsley Metropolitan Borough and Speke is in the City of Liverpool. They thus offered the possibility of exploring local variations in political and policy response to economic restructuring. All three estates are in the same local labour market (the Liverpool ‘Travelto-Work-Area’), so analysis of labour market changes was framed accordingly. Political and policy response, however, required analysis in a different spatial context (for example, local authority areas for statutory responses and neighbourhoods for community-based initiatives).
