ABSTRACT
In 1914 London had been only one of a number of areas of relatively high working-class incomes, stretching as far north as the Clyde and as far west as South Wales. Events during the next decade were to end the prosperity of the coal/iron & steel/shipbuilding regions and the textile regions and plunge them into a long, painful, period of depression. The First World War marked a second major break in Britain's long-term spatial pattern of economic development. Interwar Britain compensated for the decline in visible and invisible exports through the growth of import-substituting industries serving the expanding domestic market.
