Conclusions

In this book we have striven to offer a more theoretically nuanced examination of regional changes in England, thereby addressing a lacuna in recent publications on regions and devolution. In Part I of the book, situating our analysis at both the national and regional scales, we went beyond description of current modes of governance and institutional development, taking a more geographically informed and theoretically grounded critical analysis rooted in concepts of uneven development, and drawing on the rich tradition of regional geography. Regions were once the core of the discipline of geography, and gave prominence to the connections between areas of land, on several scales: it referred to pays, to regions and their combination with national borders, and brought out their ‘personality’ (Claval, 1998: 18). Those who engaged in regional geography emphasised the specific nature of areas and the lifestyles of those who lived there, and, in Part II in a series of theoretically grounded regional essays for all nine regions, we attempted to capture the unique atmosphere of the English regions. The contributors to this book have worked within the constraints imposed by the English ‘administrative region’ map and used this administrative structure to present a regional geography of England.