Turning the Tide? The Impact of Urban and Regional Regeneration Initiatives in North East England

Abstract

The 1980s saw the growth of a plethora of initiatives and changing ideas on the part of central government as to what is appropriate for urban and regional regeneration in Britain. In many ways the significance of the policies of the successive Thatcher governments of the 1980s lay not in their immediate effects, but in setting a new agenda in terms of the scope for future economic development at the local level. This chapter explores this agenda in the context of solutions posed for overcoming the problems of the old and declining industrial areas. We will argue that central government intervention has avoided addressing the accumulated industrial problems of such regions in favour of a strategy designed to promote a new and radically different pattern of growth based on fostering entrepreneurship, particularly in the service sector. The target of policy, it will be argued, has amounted to no less than proselytising the desirability of achieving a transition from managed growth in manufacturing to market led post-industrial solutions as the only route to economic regeneration at the local level.