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An economic history of the north of England. Part 1: Medieval failure and the "urban desert"

How did this happen? The urban form of the north today. Image: Alasdair Rae, University of Sheffield.

Even other multi-centred conurbations don’t generally have quite so many competing cities as the north of England. The region stretching across the Pennines, from Liverpool to Hull, is all but unique.

How did it get that way? In this three part series, Dr Stephen Caunce, a former history lecturer from the University of Central Lancashire, explains that it’s all a matter of history and economics.

As CityMetric has noted before, the area between Liverpool and Preston in the west and Hull and Sheffield in the east is remarkable in having four of the major English conurbations in a linear sequence.

The Merseyside conurbation is more conventional than the rest, but from the M6 east this is utterly unlike south-eastern England. Hull is a detached port for the West Yorkshire conurbation, which itself is effectively an empty-centred urban ring whose leading element lies in its north eastern corner.

Even today the various elements of the whole sequence consist of a set of strong and very local identities, exemplified by intricate and sometimes strong accent differences and, until recently, a thriving mosaic of truly local newspapers. The region lacks any dominant city which could credibly emerge now as a "capital" of the whole system.

This is an unusual pattern of urbanisation, even when compared to other urban regions, like the Ruhr or the Randstad. Yet few academics have really investigated its origins.

As a historian, I have researched this for nearly two decades. In this three-part series, I’ll offer a very brief account of my findings. Nearly everything discussed here has long been accepted in isolation: it is largely the combination and conclusion that is novel.


To explain this pattern of urbanisation, we must go back to before the Black Death of the mid 14th century. The area's urban patterns at the time simply reflected its low population: Medieval towns had been founded there as elsewhere in western and central Europe.

There was even a clear regional equivalent to London in York, located on the river Ouse, about forty miles from where the vast Humber estuary forms at the junction with the Trent. Ships would moor right in the city centre and offload their cargoes for sale or trans-shipment.

The site of the city had been continuously occupied from Roman times onwards, and whenever the economy supported organised international trading, York emerged as the best potential regional capital. The Vikings even created an independent kingdom of York, comparable to their more successful try in Dublin.

By 1300 York was a significant European trading city, supported by a substantial zone of fertile soils. It boasted one of the largest and most splendid cathedrals in northern Europe, which was the seat of an archbishop the equal in law of his Canterbury equivalent. The city had a stone castle and substantial walls, plus elaborate civic buildings and many parish churches. Many gilds had been established, and its Merchant Adventurers acted jointly with their equivalents in London in trading with Europe and beyond; it was the main centre of northern wool textiles, too.

Occasionally, York was used as a royal base of government, and a very active executive agency, the Council of the North, was based here for a century before the Civil War. Its main weakness was that the Ouse had little capacity for river transport beyond the city as it divided into many small tributaries, unlike the Thames, but both were convenient for European voyages.

E. Ridsdale Tate's panorama of 15th century York. Image: public domain.

Elsewhere in the region, Hull grew steadily as York's external port. Beverley had been of some European significance, but had totally inadequate river links and declined rapidly. Along the Humber were several prosperous ports, notably Howden and Selby which, like Beverley, had splendid, enormous churches that showed the wealth generated in this area. The agricultural Vale of York supported numerous towns, some with castles as well as markets, such as Pontefract and Ripon. 

These towns formed a network up to the Pennine edge; but there the hills prevented any easy integration of the land beyond into a unified north. The medieval north west also had nowhere to trade with to the west, and almost all its land was hard to farm. Villages were scarce and towns decidedly fewer and smaller than in Yorkshire.

If there was a theoretical equivalent of York and London on this side of the hills, it was Chester. But it lacked most independent trading connections and the Dee was already silting up badly. It, Carlisle and Lancaster had functioned mostly as fortresses, or to support military operations against the Welsh, Irish and Scots.

Pestilence and death

The Black Death, which reached England in 1348, delivered a massive blow, killing between a third and a half of the population. Afterwards, economic recovery tended to centre on London as its natural advantages were so strong. Its merchant community established a pre-eminence that has remained unchallengeable ever since; they reduced the York Merchant Adventurers to irrelevance.

The northern economy stagnated, and in 1660 York's city council lamented: "The shoes of our predecessors are too big for our feet, and the ornaments which they had will not serve now to cover our nakedness... Trade is decayed, the river become un-navigable… Leeds is nearer the manufactures and Hull more commodious for the vending of them."

By 1750, York was primarily a county town – even though Yorkshire's three traditional ridings mostly ran their own affairs, and York was part of none of them. It remained a leading regional centre in population terms; but London had monopolised almost all urban growth since the Black Death. The gulf between the capital and other towns on the island of Great Britain was unparalleled; outside London, 20,000 people was a substantial place; London had 650,000.

Such universal urban failure has no parallel anywhere that I know of, and certainly none in Europe

York had never possessed either the legal or de facto powers seen in European cities to hinder the leakage of economic activity to other places. And against the assumptions of proto-industrialisation theory, York merchants seem not to have played any role in organising the growth of cloth manufacturing then visible in scattered rural locations in the Pennines – much less controlling and exploiting it. This was probably because they had dealt in luxury products, whereas the new producers could only make very low quality goods aimed at poorer people. The rewards therefore seem to have gone entirely to local people, and to have been consistently re-invested on the spot from the start.

Any textbook map of towns shows that, by the 17th century, the north had become an urban desert. Its medieval town foundations survived only to host markets and fairs, or more commonly reverted to village or even hamlet status. Only a handful maintained any vestige of corporate identity, and in none apart from Hull and Preston and Chester did it have any meaning beyond empty ritual.

Much further north, Newcastle-upon-Tyne grew to equal York's population; but that was a special case driven by London's need for house coal (which could be exported via boats down the east coast). Its growth had no connection at all with Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Such universal urban failure has no parallel anywhere that I know of, and certainly none in Europe. Historians agree that, across western and central Europe, the urban network of today was already more or less complete by 1500, and since then there have been few additions or deletions.

Even Scotland, with a more hostile natural environment, tiny population and weak economy, possessed a large and growing number of miniature but active towns eager to assert their separation from rural life, in the way normally held to be the essential pre-requisite for developing a modern way of living.

The northern urban failure alone would definitely not have led to what we see today, of course Yet it was the essential pre-requisite, allowing a fresh start. 

The second part of this series, which you can read here, looks at how the economy of the north developed during the early modern period.

Dr Stephen Caunce was formerly a senior lecturer in history at the University of Central Lancashire. He has published a range of books on oral history and the north of England. You can buy them here.

 
 
 
 

From Singapore to Scranton, PA: What does economic resilience really look like?

Scranton, Pennsylvania – a town which bounced back, and then, sort of, didn't. Image: Christopher Seliga/Library of Congress.

In the first of two articles, Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the US non-profit Center for Community Progress, asks: What does it mean for a city to be economically resilient?

Urban resilience is the ability to respond to physical, social and economic challenges; not only shocks, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, but to the stresses that weaken a city’s fabric, such as high unemployment or endemic violence.

In an increasingly uncertain global economic environment, economic resilience has become increasingly important. But, as cities become increasingly polarized – spatially, economically and racially – I fear that this is not only impeding their ability to respond to their challenges, but has become in itself a challenge to future urban economic resilience. In this article, I will try to lay out a framework for looking at this issue, and in the next one, I will try to drill down and assess what it means for American cities.

I’ll start with two economic resilience stories, one fairly well known and one less so.

In 1965, Singapore split off from the newly established nation of Malaysia to become an independent nation. At the time, its prospects did not look inviting. It had no natural resources, little industry and no domestic market, it was, in fact, little more than a sleepy port widely seen as in decline from its days as a bastion of the British Empire. At that time, as one writer has since written, it was “poverty-stricken, disease-riddled little entrepôt.”

Within a few decades, though, it had been transformed into a model of growth and prosperity – the smallest, and in some respects the most consistently successful, of the so-called “Asian Tigers”.

The second is closer to home. In the late 19th century, Scranton, Pennsylvania was a major center of iron and steelmaking, with its economy dominated by the massive Lackawanna Steel Works. To the city’s shock, in 1902 Lackawanna announced that it would move its entire operation to Buffalo, New York. The city barely skipped a beat. The population kept growing, fuelled by new industries and the steady demand for the region’s anthracite coal. In many respects, the years between 1900 and 1950 were the high point of Scranton’s history.

How cities bounce back

While the sometimes quasi-authoritarian rule of Singapore’s long-serving former president Lee Kwan Yew has legitimately been criticised, that should not detract from the remarkable nature of his and his nation’s achievement. While their economic strategies were brilliantly opportunistic, the two critical underlying themes that drove Singapore’s growth were first, a determination to provide honest, transparent and competent government based on the rule of law; and second, an intense focus on education, to maximise the value of the nation’s human capital.

The fact that Singapore was a relatively cohesive society, in which its leaders operated with a high level of legitimacy, was important – but that would have mattered little without those leaders’ systematic, long-term, laser-like focus on those two themes.

Scranton's rail yards, in the town's 1890s heyday. Image: Library of Congress.

Scranton’s task was easier. Coal mining helped propel its economic revival, while local entrepreneurs did the rest. A local button maker realized that his equipment could be adapted to make the newfangled phonograph records, and went on to become one of the nation’s premier suppliers to that growing industry. Human capital and transparency were less of an issue in the early 1900s, as government by elites was little questioned, and a steady flow of immigrants provided the brawn for the mines, factories and workshops.

Both Singapore and Scranton offer useful lessons. What Singapore shows is that, in the absence of natural resources, the principal resources a city, region or country can bring to bear for economic growth are its human capital, the competence and transparency of its government, and a determined focus to maximise the value of whatever locational or institutional assets it may possess. These are assets that should withstand future economic shocks. Despite the many differences between Singapore and cities in the United States, the lessons are equally relevant in today’s American context.

While Scranton’s strengths enabled it to be resilient in its particular early 20th century context, those strengths were – unlike Singapore’s – limited to that context. When coal mining declined and deindustrialisation spread after World War II, Scranton had little to fall back on, and entered into a long-term economic and demographic decline.


Gentrification and resilience

When we look at the revival of American cities since the 1990s, that story too can be told as one of resilience: cities like Pittsburgh or Baltimore, thrown by the loss of the manufacturing industry that fuelled their growth, roaring back to become post-industrial cities, driven by world-class medical centres and universities.

Today, neither city has much of an industrial base; roughly one out of every six Pittsburgh residents is a college student, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is the largest employer in the state of Pennsylvania. More than one of every three jobs in both cities is either in education, health care or social services; if you plug in a reasonable multiplier, one can estimate that two thirds or more of the local economy in both Pittsburgh and Baltimore is driven by education and health care, including the billions in medical research dollars that flow to places like Johns Hopkins and UPMC.

Crime is down in most parts of these cities, and thousands of highly-educated millennials are flocking to them, turning areas like Baltimore’s Hampden into hip destinations.

But is this resilience, or something else? Large parts of these cities are still impoverished and disinvested, and many neighborhoods that were vital 10 or 20 years ago are losing ground. These cities are becoming more and more polarised, spatially, economically and racially.

The new jobs are mostly filled by suburban commuters; fewer and fewer city residents have jobs, and most of them commute long distances to the suburbs. Baltimore’ unemployment rate in 2014 was 12 per cent, and 16 per cen for the city’s African-American population. Crime may be down in the Inner Harbor, but is still endemic in many parts of the city.

Are Baltimore – or Pittsburgh, St. Louis or Seattle – resilient cities? Or are they simply riding a wave of economic and demographic change, fuelled by the pure dumb luck of having institutions like Johns Hopkins and Carnegie-Mellon, or entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, in their midst?

I suspect it’s the latter. In the next installment, I’ll look more closely at why these cities’ growing polarisation and their failure to address critical issues of governance and human capital are actually making them less resilient, and less likely to respond effectively if and when they no longer find themselves at the crest of the economic wave.

Allan Mallach is a senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress, a US non-profit organisation which focuses on urban America.