ABSTRACT
Introduction Lancaster is an area replete with contrasts. From a distance four buildings in particular stand out against the skyline. The Castle, built on a promontory in a bend in the River Lune, is a well-preserved fortification made from dour local stone. The extraordinary Ashton Memorial is an immense folly demonstrating Victorian and Edwardian civic paternalism, designed in a ‘reactionary’ classical style yet partly built in the ‘modern’ material of concrete. Bowland Tower at the ‘1960s New University’, is an architecturally cautious and modest tower built of brick, yet dominating the surrounding landscape. Finally, the 1970s/1980s Hey sham nuclear complex, with its huge twin blocks located closer to a substantial conurbation than anywhere else in the UK, visually dominates what is otherwise the most beautiful bay in the north of England. These buildings stand as icons of different projects for the Lancaster area: that o f a historic centre of administration; that of the dominance of manufacturing employers cowing their workforces into supine acquiescence; that of the public sector optimism of the 1960s; and that o f Thatcherism, to continue developing alternative energy sources to coal where considerations of safety and the environment can be seen as lower priorities (although the actual decisions to build at Hey sham were taken by Labour).The area can be symbolized in another way, through a single building. St Leonard’s House was originally the Gillows furniture factory, specializing in high-class fittings especially for ocean liners. When the luxury market collapsed and the factory closed in 1962, it provided the first home for the university until it moved to its green-field site (like so much manufacturing industry at the time). And then, since the late 1960s, St Leonard’s House has provided the seedbed site for ‘Enterprise Lancaster’, representing another aspect of
the Conservative project where small business is seen as the means of economic regeneration.Interestingly, three kinds of building are missing from the area: large office blocks providing private sector service employment; extensive, council-built, high-rise housing blocks; and private sector built shopping centres. Their absence reflects the relative weakness locally of national and international consumer and producer service companies, and of the local labour movement.The built environment, because it alters relatively slowly, stands as a marker of uneven development. The buildings trace the changing economic functions of the town and the layers of human experience and social conflict which comprise its history. Lancaster was an established commercial and service centre in the eighteenth century when it was a port for the Atlantic trade, but that trade had declined by 1800. The Lancaster area, on the edge of the Lake District, is tucked into the north-west corner of Lancashire, and was peripheral to its core centres of nineteenth century industrial development in cotton spinning and weaving. Lancaster grew much later, concentrating on the production of the textile-related products of linoleum and oil-cloth. Morecambe, five miles away on the coast (and part of the same local authority district since 1974), developed into a working class holiday centre much later than many of the major resorts like Blackpool and never attracted large numbers of visitors from Lancashire itself. However, by 1920 or so Lancaster had become the major British centre for the production of linoelum, and Morecambe had developed into the quintessential working class holiday resort.The character of the area in the twentieth century was shaped by a particular structuring of working class experience. In Lancaster semi-skilled un-unionized male workers and an authoritarian paternalism combined to preclude even a working class defensive culture. In 1930 a senior trade union visitor described Lancaster as ‘a black hole of trade unionism’. In Morecambe, the petty bourgeoisie serviced the organization of ‘rational recreation’ centred around the contrived pleasures of the ‘family’ holiday. This gave a particular social and political fix to the area, indicated for exampleby the fact that its two constituencies have only once returned a Labour MP. Relatively isolated and rather parochial, the local population was distanced from many elements of the working class culture prevalent in the northwest in the first half of the century.The deindustrialization of the area developed both earlier and more extensively than elsewhere. It has transformed the locality in some ways for the better, although at the cost of generating new strains and social divisions, most obviously around unemployment and the
rundown of Morecambe as a resort. In the past the area had a handful of fairly large manufacturing firms based in two or three industries, which employed mostly male semi-skilled workers, and had considerable business and personal linkages with each other. Their fortunes, along with those of the Yorkshire woollen industry, determined the state of the local economy. Now the local economy is more fragmented, containing education, health, gas field exploration and nuclear power; a number of growing areas of manufacturing employment, generally in small-medium companies in metals and engineering, printing and publishing; and a very depressed tourist industry starved of private investment and also of public investment at a time of local authority budgetary constraint. Previously important manufacturing industries - floor coverings, wall coverings, plastics, artificial fibres, clothing and footwear - now play a much smaller role and in some cases have disappeared entirely.The character of any particular place depends upon its location in a number of spatial divisions of labour and on the particular way in which those are combined together, in a kind o f ‘geological’ structure with economic, cultural and political components. That structure provides the conditions of subsequent development. The prospects for places like Lancaster are mixed. Though having suffered recently from large-scale national and international processes it is not merely at their mercy: localities possess their own pro-active powers. There is a strong emphasis within a variety of political parties and movements to develop more decentralized forms of politics and organizational structures. As a consequence we should, as Mike Rustin argues, ‘expect more of small and medium-sized towns, and not merely compare them disparagingly with the greater cosmopolitan excitements of Manhattan and similar metropolises’ (1986, p. 493). This is because
R E S T R U C T U R I N G LANCAST ER Restructuring the local econom y There have been three main phases of industrial activity in Lancaster in the twentieth century, separated by two periods of substantial restructuring (for the Morecambe equivalents see Urry, 1987b). These phases are, first, the beginning of the twentieth century until the end of the 1920s; second, from the 1930s to the mid-1960s; and third, from the 1960s to the present day. Phase 1: 1905-1929 The first phase is characterized by the overwhelming dominance of two firms manufacturing linoleum and related floor and table coverings: Storeys and Williamsons. In 1911 about 30 per cent of both men and women in Lancaster itself were engaged in the industry; by 1921 the proportion was probably 35 per cent (see Warde, 1988). Lancaster had at the time an extremely dominated labour market, which was also self-contained. Worker quiescence was probably not the product of ‘paternalism’ as such. Rather, it arose from the importance of the internal labour market which encouraged lifelong obedience. In Storeys, examination of the labour records for this period shows that there was a single port o f entry for labourers (below age 18) with very little recruitment of older workers. Since there was very little chance of gaining similar employment elsewhere locally, labour indiscipline would be extremely costly. The two main employers collaborated to control the labour force. One entry in Storeys’ leavers’ book, giving reason for the dismissal of a certain Vincent Landor in 1907, reads: ‘Discharged. We found he had worked for J[ames] Wfilliamson] and S[on] and had not left properly (they complained).’ They also colluded over wage rates and the prohibition of general labourers’ unions (see Warde, 1988).Both Storeys and Williamsons put resources not into facilities for their workers but into a strategy of civic benevolence, providing voluntary hospitals, educational institutes, public parks and civic buildings. The two benefactors apparently competed with each other to appear the more generous, even contributing to the building of Lancaster Trades Hall! During this period these two employers maintained a local political hegemony (see Mark-Lawson, Savage and Warde, 1985). Phase 2: 1930-1964 The industrial base began to change in the mid-1920s. A number of firms associated with textile manufacture and processing, and especially the production of the new artificial fibres, were established
LOCALITIES in the town. The labour market was consequently rather tight with remarkably low unemployment recorded in the 1931 census (6.5 per cent for men). The industrial base had become more varied and the population had expanded during the decade and was to grow even faster than the national average during the next twenty years. There was considerable reorganization of production in the late 1920s. The major form of scientific management introduced into Britain, the Bedaux system, (Littler, 1982), was rapidly embraced by the British linoleum industry. Storeys used Bedaux as consultants between 1931 and 1967, and three other major local firms, outside linoelum production, were also clients. There was thus an important restructuring of Lancaster industry in this period with both a deskilling of labour and the introduction of various schemes of work measurement. By the 1930s Lancaster industry was in the forefront of new systems of work organization. There was scarcely any labour opposition to the introduction of the Bedaux schemes. Absence of resistance was typical of Lancaster. Councillor L. Oakes, President of the National Union of Dyers, Bleachers and Textile Workers, commented after a failed strike at Nelsons Silk Ltd in 1939:
. . . it is time the people of Lancaster woke up and remedied the conditions, and the only way to do that was to get strong Union representation.We should not blind our eyes to the fact that some of these people bring their factories to this area, not because they want cheap water, cheap electricity, or cheap gas, but because they want to exploit a tradition of cheap labour - a tradition attached to this City which has got to be swept away.. . . (Lancaster Guardian, 14 July 1939, p. 5) Nelsons had probably located in Lancaster because of the low wages and its reputation for having a quiescent labour force, and employers sought to preserve a low-wage economy and oppose the unionization of the predominantly unskilled labour force. Some of the firms establishing themselves later in the interwar period, such as Lansils, did introduce welfare facilities but this mainly reinforced the strong internal labour markets found in many of the other firms as well (see Warde, 1988). This prevented labour from taking advantage of periods of tightness in the labour market to bargain up their wage levels. Conditions o f employment in Lancaster were the antithesis of the casual labour conditions in the port of Liverpool at the time.The phase from the 1930s to the 1960s was one of relative prosperity. There was extensive public and private investment, with strong representation in growing industries. Fogarty commented in 1945 that ‘the high rate of immigration and population growth before the war is sufficient proof of the prosperity o f the area, and there is no
reason to suppose that at least equal prosperity will not be resumed after the war’ (1945, p. 213).Indeed, both manufacturing and service employment grew considerably during the 1950s. So did the population, which increased by about 4000 (Murgatroyd, 1981, p. 8), though Lancaster never grew at anything like the rates of Swindon or Kirkby. There was new investment, in chemicals, oil refining, artificial fibres, plastic-coated goods and tourism. Lancaster attracted 7 per cent more new industrial building than one might have expected on the basis of its size and structure (Murgatroyd and Urry, 1985, p. 33). Even as late as 1964, local employers maintained that because there was more than full employment, they were unable to recruit the labour required, and indeed that labour had become much scarcer in recent years (see Fulcher, Rhodes, Taylor, 1966, pp. 40-1). By the late 1950s Lancaster, in marked contrast with much of the rest o f Lancashire, had developed an industrial structure highly favourable for future economic growth. As Fothergill and Gudgin note:
‘Expressed as a percentage of 1959 employment the worst subregional employment structure for manufacturing was North East Lancashire (—20.0%), reflecting its heavy dependence on the declining cotton industry, and the best [in the whole country] was Lancaster (+19.5%) . . . dominated by a handful of firms in growing industries.’ (1979, p. 169) Phase 3: 1965-the present A massive process of restructuring in the UK in the 1960s transformed the Lancaster area. Lancaster experienced a dramatic ‘deindustrialization’ of its economy, losing employment in.manufacturing earlier and more quickly than most other areas of the country. But because of its representation in growing industries, this cannot simply be attributed to sectoral decline. Transformations in the organization of manufacturing production under the sway of regional policy undermined the viability of established local firms and industries. Amongst the market leaders in the 1940s and 1950s, they failed to respond to the changed conditions in the 1960s. Simultaneously Lancaster was conspicuously unsuccessful in attracting new manufacturing industry. However, service and other non-manufacturing employment increased. Overall, manufacturing employment fell by 47 per cent between 1961 and 1981. while services employment rose by 28 per cent. Service sector employment in Lancaster grew rapidly in the 1960s, more slowly in the 1970s, but scarcely at all in the early 1980s. Most of this expansion took place in public sector services, although producer services grew in the 1980s. The pattern of service
Source: NOMIS, Census of EmploymentNotes: 1 The 1984 Census of Employment failed to cover one of the largest public sector service employers in Lancaster and indeed the whole of Lancashire. We have corrected the Service sector data for 1984 using our own information from the employer concerned. Other users of the 1984 Census of Employment should note that the problem applies to Lancashire as a whole (Lancashire County Planning Department, 1988). growth thus remains very different from that of Swindon or Cheltenham.The early 1980s have seen very rapid sectoral change (see Table 4.1 and Figure 4.1). Despite the changes in both the boundary of the TTWA and the industrial classification in 1981, the sectoral division of employment in 1981 remains remarkably constant, enabling fairly meaningful comparisons. In the three years 1981-4 the decline in manufacturing employment has been twice as fast as during the previous ten years. In complete contrast, the construction and utilities sector has grown almost twice as fast during the 1981-4 period. This is largely due to the construction of the Heysham nuclear power complex and, to a lesser degree, the development of the Morecambe Bay gas field base. The primary sector of employment resumed growth during the 1980s, albeit from a very low base, and the service sector experienced continued growth in financial services, hotels and catering, retailing and health.
