For a long time now, poverty and affluence have remained geographically stable in Britain. Places such as Windsor and Edinburgh were rich 50 or more years ago, and they are rich now. And, equally, places such as Blackburn and Sunderland were poor then, and are poor now
Within cities, we find exactly the same sort of pattern, with London being an extreme example: the West End has always been richer than the East End.
However, London is also home to the most radical and successful regeneration that Britain has seen: Docklands.
Once the world’s biggest docks, the move to containerisation in shipping meant that every single dock closed between 1960 and 1980. Since then, the modern Docklands has arisen, with massive, shiny offices and often upmarket apartment blocks sitting side by side with extensive areas of social housing. The area was linked to central London first by the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), and more recently by the Jubilee Line extension.
The obvious conclusion is that infrastructure is useful in regenerating communities. But in fact, the DLR is an exception, not the rule. We can see this by looking elsewhere in Britain. The Sheffield Supertram began operating seven years after the DLR. The two networks are similar is scale, both covering around 30km, but usage is very different: the DLR is used by more than four times as many passengers, and the average passenger travels more than 50% further. As a result, Docklands track is used over six times as intensively as Sheffield’s.
Sheffield is fairly typical. The Tyne and Wear Metro has the same number of passengers per mile as the Sheffield Supertram, although a much longer network means higher average journey lengths. Even so, Docklands track is used more than twice as heavily as Tyne and Wear Metro track.
All of this suggests that high-cost regional infrastructure projects will not transform cities in the way of the DLR, and this proves to be the case. Economists use “gross value added” (GVA), essentially the local equivalent of national income, to compare the economic fortunes of cities.
In 1995, when Sheffield’s Supertram was completed, Sheffield’s GVA was 87.3% of the UK average. By 2004 it was 87.6%, well within the margin of error. The same is true for Sunderland, the area of the Tyne and Wear Metro that’s most in need of regeneration. In 1995 its GVA was 80.0% of the UK average, by 2004 it was 80.4%. In short, metros do not revive cities.
Docklands success story
To understand why the DLR is so much better used, and so much more useful, than either the Sheffield Supertram or the Tyne and Wear Metro, we need to understand the different conditions and opportunities that exist in each place.
Docklands was so successful because in the late 1980s, London had an industry – finance – that was bursting at the seams. It needed somewhere to go, and had that somewhere not been London, it may well have been Frankfurt. The traditional City was full, but the former dock areas offered eight square miles of land that could be redeveloped as a new financial and residential area. This would only work if some existing firms moved from the City to Canary Wharf, and they could only do that if their existing workers did not mind. Good transport links was part of the reason that staff did not, in the main, object to the move. This is not true for Sheffield, Newcastle or Sunderland. None of these cities has a sector that is so successful, it needs new land on which to expand.
As such, these regional systems do not have the same raison d’etre as the DLR, and are much less successful, both as transport systems and in transforming an area.
Location, location, location
This is the crux for poorer regional cities: they cannot be transformed by improvements to local transport because their existing firms are not constrained either by an inability to expand physically, or by the inability to find enough workers locally. The problem is much more fundamental: towns that were in the right place to do business a century ago are not in the right place to do business today.
One hundred years ago, the cotton towns of Lancashire were rich. With the best will in the world, policy-makers could not have moved chunks of that industry to Suffolk, then a very poor county. There were good reasons why high-wage cotton firms chose Lancashire a century ago, but there are equally good reasons why few high-wage firms would choose to locate there today.
