ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a possible worst-case scenario for British towns and cities: one in which those urban areas, overwhelmingly in the North, which are most affected by loss of industry and population and burdened with more than their fair share of the weaker members of society and the physical detritus of dereliction, would be left to decay. Within them, a few professionals, heavily guarded, would be well paid to man minimum-standard hospitals, schools and refined versions of the truck-shop. Other cities and towns, predominantly those in the favoured high-tech corridor, would live in a reverse situation in which the so-called underclass would be penned into ghettoes and allowed out to perform menial tasks. Politicians too enjoy the opportunity to blame one another and to offer their own pragmatic or ideological answers to the perceived problems of the city. Such sensationalism nurtures two of the deep-seated images and myths which we unconsciously accept: anti-urbanism and the myth of a golden age.
