ABSTRACT
I was born and brought up in Alnwick, a small market town just off the northern tip of the north-east coalfield in rural mid-Northumberland. The town is located at a sort of cultural divide, between mining areas to the south, agricultural ones to the north. The northernmost deep mine, Shilbottle, is (or, more accurately, was) located some three miles south of Alnwick and provided employment for many men in the town, my father amongst them. In the latter half of the 1960s I went off to university in Bristol. As I returned periodically for holidays I become conscious of the changes that were increasingly apparent in the region: collieries closed while new factories opened, railways were shut down while new roads opened, town centres were pulled apart and put together again in a very different style – all around there was evidence of change. In 1972, more by an accident of the labour market for recent doctoral research students than through any design of mine to become a return migrant, I took up a job at Durham University and returned to the North-East (albeit on the ‘wrong’ side of another critical cultural divide within the North-East, the River Tyne). I was curious to discover more about the character of and the reasons for the changes that were, in various ways, transforming the North-East and affecting the lives of people that I had known for many years. Even the most cursory examination soon revealed the enormous significance of state policies as the proximate causes of these changes. Thus began a series of research projects, centred on trying to unravel the relationships between State policies and different aspects of such changes that have provided the basis for this book.
