12   Small City, Large Town?

Reflections on Neoliberalism in the United Kingdom

Graham Day

As the introduction to this volume points out, deciding what exactly constitutes a “small city” is somewhat problematic. In terms of population, definitions have ranged from as few as 5,000 residents to more than 250,000, with an upper limit sometimes set at 50,000. Some conceptualizations embrace the whole of urban life “beyond the metropolis” (Bell and Jayne 2006), while others seek to anchor small cities more closely to a rural environment. In Britain, the term city retains something of its older connotations of relative prestige and social importance; the designation “city” is a badge of social status, for which towns can compete. But there is also a more modern presumption, namely, that, to count as a city, a place must be large and must exert a commanding influence over a much wider area. This chapter aims to position the small city in the British context, to examine the thesis that smallness correlates in some way with positive social outcomes (such as a sense of “community”), and to outline some of the main themes of recent academic and governmental urban discourse. I seek, in particular, to indicate the current “direction of travel” of British towns and cities and to illustrate with examples the wide variety of contemporary urban experiences. I will argue that diversity and division are a reality in British communities, no matter what their scale, and that a major effect of recent policies has been to weaken the power of local government, whilst increasing the complexity and fragmentation of the urban scene, often in the name of “localism” and community empowerment.

Locating the Small City

Officially, there are currently sixty-nine cities in the United Kingdom, of which fifty-one are in England. Until 1888, the title “city” was conferred only on places that possessed a cathedral. This meant that cities could range in size from absurdly small (St. David’s, in Wales, which, as of the 2011 census, had fewer than 2,000 residents) to very large. A number of cathedral cities today still have populations of 30,000 or less, among them Bangor, Ely, Ripon, Truro, and Wells. Conversely, some of the largest urban centres in Britain, without cathedrals, were not designated as cities until the ecclesiastical link was broken, after which recognition based on a combination of size and function, as well as effective lobbying, meant that most of the main urban centres qualified for the title. To celebrate the millennium, a competition was held, and three new cities—Brighton and Hove, Inverness, and Wolverhampton—were created from a list of thirty-nine applicants. Three more gained city status for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012: Chelmsford, Perth, and St. Asaph. However, there is still a group of very large towns, mainly in the old industrial north of England, that have never been granted official city status. Thus, for example, Barnsley, Bolton, Doncaster, Gateshead, Luton, Northampton, Rotherham, Walsall, Wigan, and Warrington are still “towns.”

Looked at in terms of scale alone, Britain currently has five urban centres—London, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, and Sheffield—with more than half a million inhabitants, and another forty or so with populations close to or over 200,000 (see figure 12.1). Together, these larger agglomerations account for well over a third of the British population. From a United Kingdom perspective, therefore, most of the best-known urban centres far exceed the scale of the small city. These include the chief cities of Scotland (Edinburgh and Glasgow), Wales (Cardiff and Swansea), and Northern Ireland (Belfast), as well as those of England. An extensive government report, titled State of the English Cities (Parkinson et al. 2006), took as its cut-off point a 2001 population exceeding 125,000, and on this basis identified fifty-six English cities, or “primary urban areas.” These were defined in physical terms, as consisting of continuous built-up areas, rather than in terms of any local authority or administrative boundaries. A set of associated thematic publications provided detailed analyses of these cities in relation to key aspects of demography, employment, ethnic composition, and social cohesion. The “major cities” examined accounted for 58 percent of the English population and 63 percent of its employment. This pattern reflects the early, and thorough, urbanization of Britain, especially England.

Figure 12.1. Small cities in England, Wales, and Scotland

According to the State of the English Cities report, in the British context, “small cities” could be defined as those with resident populations between 125,000 and 275,000. Urban areas containing between 50,000 and 125,000 inhabitants could be considered “large towns,” while those with populations under 50,000 would count as “small towns” (Parkinson et al. 2006, 25). The small cities considered by Canadian colleagues in this volume would therefore equate to a mixture of large and small British towns, all of which would be referred to commonly as “towns.” This still leaves a considerable range and variation in their shape and function, however. Apart from the cathedral cities already mentioned, many of which continue to act as significant county and district centres, these towns could be classified variously as market towns, seaside resorts, ex-industrial centres, and administrative and service hubs, which usually have a subregional rather than regional importance. Alongside a mass of fairly indistinguishable commercial, residential, and service centres, these towns would include a number of places that have international significance, like Stratford, Cambridge, and Canterbury. Since Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are notably more rural than England, nearly all large towns and small cities in the United Kingdom are in fact English.

There is some truth in the claim that these towns are relatively underresearched. Sallie Westwood and John Williams (1997, 4) comment that “current theorising about the city tends to celebrate the quixotic and the flux of the urban world, and the diversity of the cityscape. But, as with the earlier theorists, the emphasis . . . has consistently been on the cities of the metropolitan core.” The greater part of writing about “the city” and the urban, including most case studies, focuses on the very large centres—above all, London—and the pressing problems of the inner city, multiculturalism, and social divisions and differences (see, for instance, Buck et al. 2002; Pacione 1997; Taylor, Evans, and Fraser 1996). The experience of major urban riots during the summer of 2011 in some of England’s largest cities, including London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool (see Lewis et al. 2011), has strengthened this tendency. Trying to gain a clear impression of what is going on in smaller places is frustrating, given that, even when the processes under examination are very general and widespread in their impact, the detailed data and illustrations almost always refer to big city contexts. In the absence of more precise information, there is a danger that analyses that are accurate for the biggest cities will be applied willy-nilly to other places where they are not wholly appropriate, with a resultant loss of specificity.

The main thrust of strategic attention to urban policy and governance is also directed at the “core” cities, which are regarded as the key drivers of economic and social change. Indeed, there has been something of a recent revival of enthusiasm for big cities and their dynamic influence, in Britain and across Europe (British Chambers of Commerce 2007; Buck et al. 2005; Power, Plöger, and Winkler 2007). According to the State of the English Cities report, so far as cities in England are concerned, “the process of urban renaissance, especially in city centres, is well entrenched” (Parkinson et al. 2006, 11). As the report goes on to say, “The years of decline and decay have been overcome. There is now an opportunity to create centres of economic and social progress that will shape the country for a generation” (13).

The UK government has responded to this challenge by promoting a series of “city deals,” in which city authorities, working in partnership with other local agencies such as enterprise boards, are given greater decision-making powers and additional funding, in exchange for assuming more responsibility to stimulate economic growth and development in their areas. Between 2010 and 2014, deals were struck in England with the eight largest cities outside of London, known as the Core Cities, followed by the twenty next largest and/or fastest-growing English cities. By 2016, the strategy had been extended to embrace Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Inverness, in Scotland, and Cardiff, in Wales (Ward 2016). Further impetus towards consolidating the dominance of the big cities is provided by efforts to bring all the great cities of north England together into a so-called “northern powerhouse,” a project that merited the creation of a dedicated ministerial post.1 By comparison, there has been a relative neglect of the part played by smaller urban centres, inspired perhaps by the conviction that they are somehow free of both the excitements and the problems of big city life, as is suggested in the implied contrast between the “flux” and diversity typical of the city and the sameness and calm to be found elsewhere. Big cities are regarded as the leading edge of social, cultural, and political development, whereas “lesser” places must trail along behind, subject to metropolitan influence but rarely themselves sources of leadership and innovation. The smaller the place, it would seem, the greater the dangers of provincialism and insularity.

This is a sentiment to which many social scientists subscribe, as is apparent in their choice of residential locations and topics of study. Their preference for the intellectual stimulations of the larger conurbations may explain the relative lack of detailed descriptions of life in the smaller towns and suburbs. In Britain, some early examples do exist of attempts to paint a rounded picture of small-town life, such as the repeat study of Banbury (Stacey 1960; Stacey et al. 1975) and research conducted in Glossop (Birch 1959) and in Peterhead (Moore 1982). One argument for focusing on smaller towns was that they represented more “manageable” social spaces, with greater potential for a “knowable community” (Williams 1973, 203), than did larger places, which made it feasible to examine them holistically. It could also be said that smaller places enabled their inhabitants to form a complete impression of local society and to know where they belonged within it in a way not possible in larger, more amorphous social surroundings. Such historically embedded systems of “local social status” (Plowman, Minchinton, and Stacey 1961) enabled places to be imagined as a single, functioning “community.”

However, in both the later investigations in Banbury and the study of Peterhead, the conclusion was drawn that it was becoming impossible to sustain this position. Stacey (1975) wrote of the “kaleidoscopic” nature of modern Banbury, while Moore (1982) confessed that he was unable to get a theoretical grip on the complexity of social organization in Peterhead, despite its small size. Those anthropologists and geographers who were keen to maintain the holistic approach retreated to the still smaller scale of the “village” or very small town, with populations of no more than a few thousand (Bell 1994; Cohen 1982; Rapport 1993). Consequently, a gap, or grey area, opened up between knowledge of city life and of the intimacies of the small, usually rural, “community.” A wave of “locality” studies (Cooke 1989; Harloe, Pickvance, and Urry 1989; Day and Murdoch 1993) did turn attention again to several of the larger towns (Cheltenham, Lancaster, Middlesbrough, Swindon, and Thanet), but this time with the explicit intention of locating them within a broader explanatory framework, so as to uncover how general economic and social processes of “restructuring” (Lovering 1997) produce local effects in particular places. This meant that these towns tended to be seen as on the receiving end of external pressures and forces. Nevertheless, the research attracted criticism for treating places as “hermetically sealed” and so failing to escape the impression that the world was composed of a series of “static and bounded” units (Charlesworth and Cochrane 1997, 219).

Such an impression is important for the expectation, if not the reality, that the town is different from the city: self-containment, a coherent and readable structure, and at least a relatively “human” scale, could be thought to provide the conditions for a safe, stable, and potentially “idyllic,” social milieu. Although there is not such a strong tradition of admiration for the town in Britain as in the United States, such a view does have many supporters, who uphold the model of the town as a peculiarly satisfactory social environment. A 2011 BBC television series (Town, with Nicholas Crane) explored the theme that, by virtue of their scale and depths of connection, towns could offer the perfect recipe for living.2 Arguably, even in the larger cities, many of the worst threats of anonymization, disorder, and social alienation feared by urban theorists are staved off by breaking up the urban mass into smaller, more controllable districts, neighbourhoods, and “urban villages”—rendering them more like a set of adjacent towns than a single gigantic sprawl. To many of its residents, even London resembles an amalgam of distinctive town-sized locations rather than a single entity. People live in and identify with their borough rather than (or as well as) with London as a whole. In some instances, they hardly ever leave the local area (O’Byrne 1997).

A good example of the way in which geographical boundaries fail to match up with social perceptions is the planned “new town” of Milton Keynes, which has been among the fastest growing British towns in recent years and, with a population now standing at over 265,000, is firmly entering the “city” dimension. Its founders were influenced intellectually by North American visions of the city of the future as a car-centred, low-density, postindustrial “non-place urban realm” (Webber 1964), but these ideas were subverted by its residents’ desire to envision the place instead as a set of interconnected villages. Although this “bucolically English retreat into a simulacrum of village life” is attributed to a fit of “collective nostalgia” (Charlesworth and Cochrane 1997, 224), it suggests the power exercised over people’s imaginations by images of desirable, historically grounded versions of urban life, in which a moderate-sized town will provide the best sort of setting for comfortable everyday social interaction. However, it has to be recognized that these symbolic constructions are vulnerable to disconfirmation by empirical reality: towns do not always work as well as expected. In fact, towns are extremely varied, generalization is fraught with danger, and smallness alone will not guarantee order and social harmony.

Differentiating Towns

There is no reason at all to expect all towns to be alike, since they develop under different circumstances and for different reasons and follow their own routes to growth and change. In most cases, they grow up around a specialization in some key activity, usually a particular trade or industry—or a function like a market town, spa, or leisure resort—to which their fortunes then become tied. At the same time, there are economic and social forces so powerful that they leave few places unchanged. A number of key influences have affected the position of British towns, large and small, over recent decades, to which towns have responded in differing ways. Depending on the outcomes of this interplay between external and internal factors, as well as on the balance between the pressures for everywhere to become more alike and the struggle to maintain some distinctiveness, their fortunes have diverged considerably.

A great swathe of former industrial towns have had to struggle with the consequences of deindustrialization. Writing in the early 1990s, one author commented that large parts of Britain contained towns and cities that had lost their purpose: “Built in an ugly age, hewn out of red brick and smoke, such places have little to recommend them beyond their grainy accents and a certain stoical resignation” (Burns 1991, 63). Many, but by no means all, of these ex-industrial centres were in the North and the Midlands, and one consequence of their decline has been the disappearance of “the world of the proud, resolutely local Midland or northern English industrial city” (Wilson 1997, 131) that was once the epitome of provincialism. However, a crude north-south division would be overly simplistic, since there are also towns in the south and southwest that have suffered from a similar collapse of a previously dominant kind of work, and with it, their raison d’être; the Medway towns in Kent would be a case in point. Wherever there is industrial decline or a sharp change of economic direction, towns can be left high and dry, with all the concomitant problems of unemployment, poverty, poor skills, and lowered motivation. (See Charlesworth [2000] on Rotherham, for a graphic example.) For many, these struggling towns have become unattractive places to live, and they have produced more than their share of social problems. Their persistent malaise has led some to argue that many are now “not only in the wrong place, but are also of the wrong size” (Leunig and Swaffield 2007, 17); since they have outlived their usefulness, their populations should be encouraged or persuaded to decant elsewhere, probably to the larger, more dynamic cities (Webber and Swinney 2010). As well as being highly controversial politically, such a migration would require a reversal of recent population trends whereby people have tended instead to move out of the larger British cities towards more desirable suburbs, the countryside, and, in many cases, the towns. Of course, the towns that attract them are different from those that are decaying socially and economically.

For every “failing” town or small city, there are as many examples of success. Towns of similar size and configuration feature among both the ten best and the ten worst performing British places (Webber and Swinney 2010), and there are some strong performances in places outside of London and the South East. Towns that have managed to diversify their economic base, to attract significant service or financial activity, or to plug into the knowledge economy have done well, and it is these towns that often seem to hold out the greatest contemporary appeal for their quality of life and social desirability. A list of towns notable for their “affordable affluence” drawn up in 2007 by a British bank named, among others, Beverley, Chester, Perth, and Salford—all towns in northern Britain. The list was compiled on the basis of availability of upscale places to eat and drink, museums and galleries, good schools, and prestige car dealerships (Hooper 2007). The connection between these attributes and social class is obvious: these are (or are on the way to being) middle-class or “gentrified” towns. In an era of place marketing, the possession of such prestigious cultural “lifestyle” facilities has become a key consideration in determining how well a town does in comparison to others. Towns compete with one another to sell themselves as safe and prosperous places in which to live, work, and have one’s children educated. The most successful are those that manage to discover a distinctive and enviable niche, which gives them a purpose and draws people to them.

It was no accident that the BBC Towns series included episodes on both Ludlow and Totnes. Located in the West Midlands county of Shropshire, Ludlow (population 11,000) has gained a reputation as a centre for high-quality food and eating, built initially around its possession of Michelin-starred restaurants. Material accompanying the BBC series refers to Ludlow as “the loveliest town in England.”3 Totnes (population 9,000) is an environment-friendly “transition town,” located in Devon, that is home to alternative middle-class or “new age” lifestyles.4 Both could be said to generate exceptional levels of social and cultural capital, helping to keep alive the notion that it is still possible to find a twenty-first-century urban idyll. Both, however, are also very small market towns in rural surroundings. A similar case would be Hay-on-Wye, which, through a process of clustering like that undergone in emerging industrial districts, became known as the “town of books” for its multiple bookshops and then its prominent literary festival. By mimicking the entrepreneurialism of some of the larger cities through strong discourses of local success, distinctiveness, and community-mindedness, these towns are currently the kind of places that are probably best able to perpetuate the mythology of the homogeneous, trouble-free, rewarding social environment. They are as attractive to comfortably off, well-educated, mobile professionals as the more salubrious, “posher” city districts. Many, however, would consider them to be little more than country villages, whose contribution to overall national well-being is strictly limited. It may be that smallness is crucial here in facilitating a single-mindedness of purpose that would be hard to achieve elsewhere without intervention by a very determined and powerful central authority.

Obviously, extreme caution should be exercised before accepting these versions of small town life at anything like face value. In an ethnographic account of his hometown, Todmorden (population 16,000), Steve Hanson (2014) describes some of the local practices that not only make the town distinctive but also capture considerable media attention. In his description of the community’s food-growing scheme, known as “Incredible Edible Todmorden,” Hanson notes how these activities create the sense that the town “is constructed and reconstructed by benign, holistic localists” (44), obscuring the extent to which life there is just as open to contemporary flows of migration, capital, and technology as it is in larger places. Ideas of friendliness, intimacy, and community are mobilized on behalf of what he terms “deracinated localism.” Hanson excoriates the degree to which “small towns have been understood in the past as discretely bounded, framed by methodological nationalism, viewed through the lenses of a provincialism which has produced much that is negative in sociology as a whole, not just community research” (24).

Trouble in Eden?

From time to time, dramatic events remind people that smaller and less well-known towns and cities are not at all immune from the problems and crises of larger urban centres: serial killings of young women in Gloucester (1992) and prostitutes in Ipswich (2006), grooming and sexual exploitation of young people in Derby (2011), Rochdale (2012), and Oxford (2013), racial and ethnic violence in Burnley (2001) and Wrexham (2003), even acts of terror with origins traceable to Oldham (2012) or Luton (2005). Like instances of gun crime in the very small towns of Hungerford (1987) and Dunblane (1996), such events frequently evoke a shocked response: these are not places where such things should happen. But this reaction merely shows an ignorance of the darker side of communities. There is ample evidence that nowhere is “ordinary” enough to be immune from social division, deprivation, violence, and abuse.

The presumption that smaller places may function better as communities relies heavily on deductions made from their assumed homogeneity: “smallness” is supposed to signify an absence of splits along the key socially divisive lines of class, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. If towns are assumed to be undifferentiated spaces, then their populations may be thought not to vary starkly enough, or in sufficiently large numbers, to create strong lines of demarcation. However, as Norbert Elias and John Scotson (1965) showed so brilliantly, localized differences and local social constructions of difference, like small-scale divisions between neighbourhoods and estates, mean that even towns and villages are far from impervious to social cleavage, including the extraordinarily fierce antagonisms that can be generated by what Freud (1930) termed “the narcissism of small differences.” Furthermore (and as preceding chapters have shown so clearly), small numbers and social rarity can make people vulnerable to being marginalized and ostracized as “deviant” cases, with their behaviour scrutinized more closely than it might be in a more anonymous setting. When probed by ethnographic research, the denial of difference and division is invariably revealed to have more to do with subjective frameworks of “community in the mind” than any objective reality. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that under the pressures of contemporary change, towns have not only been compelled to distinguish themselves as much as possible from one another; they have also been pulled apart internally.

Urban Policy: Modernization and Regeneration, Inclusion and Exclusion

For the past thirty years, British politics has been dominated by neoliberal thinking (Hall 2011). Despite changes of government and ruling party, the underlying tenets have remained consistent throughout the period: the primacy of the market, the gradual narrowing and/or withdrawal of state intervention, and its replacement by a mixture of private enterprise, voluntary action, and individual self-provision, often in the form of local “partnerships.” Theodore, Peck, and Brenner (2011, 15) summarize the goal to which neoliberals aspire as “open, competitive and unregulated markets, liberated from state intervention and the actions of social collectivities.” The implementation of this philosophy has had profound spatial effects, with consequences for the social geography of Britain, including the organization of towns, their interconnections, and internal structures. Some of the early effects were explored in the “localities” research referred to previously (see also Pacione 1997), which dealt with the urban repercussions of deindustrialization and deregulation of labour markets.

Subsequently, the central concern of urban policy has been “regeneration,” primarily or exclusively understood as an economic matter. This has involved the remaking of urban spaces to accommodate new industries, centres of consumption, and upscale residential properties. Success is measured by the development of business parks, shopping centres, and office blocks. Towns have been encouraged to become more competitive with one another, including as recipients of public funding. In 1994, twenty urban initiatives were rolled up into a Single Regeneration Budget (SRB), for which local authorities had to bid. After 1997, the “New Labour” government of Tony Blair continued in the direction of reducing the role of the public sector and enhancing that of private enterprise. The powers and resources of local authority were curtailed, and “many local services were privatised or opened up to competitive tendering” (Parkinson et al. 2006, 15). A number of new quangos (quasi-autonomous nongovernment organizations), such as Development Corporations and Regional Development Agencies, assumed responsibility for strategic planning and delivery, weakening the role of local government and diluting its democratic accountability. Usually, these bodies were headed by business and commercial interests, especially property developers, who have been active wherever possible in clearing out “redundant” urban facilities and replacing them with new, more economically “vibrant” activities.

Concentration on economic revitalization and “modernization” of the urban fabric and governance often came at the expense of widening social division. In particular, there was growing evidence of significant spatial concentrations of deprivation, social isolation, and exclusion. Areas and neighbourhoods left out of the regeneration process were likely to suffer from poor and deteriorating physical environments and associated social stigmatization. Although these problems were more visible in the big cities (Lovering 1997, 66), they were also reflected elsewhere: growing inequality and polarization were general features of British society. Indeed, the team documenting the condition of English cities in the mid-2000s noted that, while overall levels of deprivation and concentrations of poverty were greatest in the largest cities, cities were not necessarily more polarized than the rest of the country because they also had fewer areas that were especially prosperous. In fact, on the basis of comparisons of the incidence of the most and least deprived 10 percent of neighbourhoods, it was apparent that deprivation was almost as marked in the towns of the north and west and was an equally prominent feature of some southern towns (Turok et al. 2006, 9–11).

In 1997, the incoming prime minister, Tony Blair, referred to the growth in Britain of “an underclass of people cut off from society’s mainstream” (quoted in Buck et al. 2002, 7). This was an acknowledgement that the distance between different social groupings within the society was expanding, a development to which the changes taking place in urban space had made a significant contribution. Gordon Hughes (2007, 180–83) describes how patterns of social inclusion and exclusion had been rearranged as urban regeneration and development projects produced outcomes of simultaneous “gentrification” and “ghettoisation.” Certain groups were being denied access to particular areas and facilities, leading to struggles over the control of public and private spaces. The divisions that resulted were heavily inscribed by class, race, and ethnicity but also reflected distinctions of age, generation, gender, and sexual orientation. It was the vulnerable and marginal who were being penalized—those who were homeless, poor, very elderly or very young, or in any way considered to be socially disruptive and out of step with the main currents of behaviour and lifestyle.

These processes of separation and exclusion, thoroughly documented for the metropolitan centres, had their counterparts in the smaller places. One example that has attracted much comment is the decline of the urban “high street.” The development of out-of-town shopping centres in almost every place of any size has brought about a desertion of the traditional retail and commercial streets that were once the main focus of everyday urban activity. A typical account describes how the nation’s high streets are “being taken over by identikit chain stores and supermarkets. Guilty of destroying the identity of our towns, this cloning of our town centres also increases their vulnerability to economic shocks” (NEF 2010, 6). Economic recession and austerity since the financial crash of 2008 has indeed aggravated the situation, with large numbers of closures of independent stores and retrenchment by some of the larger chains, leaving gaping holes in many high streets and emptying the town centres. Increasingly, these areas are used, by day, mainly by the urban poor and the relatively immobile (older people, young mothers) engaged in low-price and “charity” (thrift) shopping. By night, they are occupied predominantly by the younger generation, whose behaviour, fuelled by alcohol, often intimidates others into staying at home. Fear of crime and antisocial behaviour results in widespread avoidance of town centres after dark.

According to the 2010 New Economics Foundation “clone town” report, despite their other attractions as university towns, Cambridge and Exeter were found to be among the places with the least diverse, blandest retail offerings. The greatest variety of independent stores was found in Whitstable, a town of 30,000, whose residents were said to be joining together to ensure that any future development “celebrates local distinctiveness, and supports the development of a local culture that is sustainable” (NEF 2010, 3). Other towns are doing likewise, especially by battling against the continuing encroachment of the giant supermarket chains (Harris 2011). In Britain, four supermarket groups dominate the retail grocery market, together commanding roughly a 70 percent share of sales.5 The town of Crediton, not far from Exeter and hailed as enabling “a near-idyllic lifestyle” featuring “good community spirit, glorious Devon countryside and great shopping” (NEF 2010, 21), saw the opening in 2009 of a new Tesco superstore, covering 5,500 square metres of land just outside the town—the eighth supermarket to appear within a fifteen-mile radius. In more populous regions, the construction of giant shopping malls located close to the main population concentrations has sucked much of the spending power out of vast numbers of towns around them. These consumer “paradises” are patrolled by private security guards and are easily accessible only by car; they are targeted primarily at families and young people with ample disposable income. Meanwhile, struggling local economies are forced back towards reliance upon the money spent by “failed consumers” and the welfare dependent (Hughes 2007, 182), together with those excluded on other grounds from sharing in the new retail opportunities. As has frequently been noted, for example, young black men attract especially close attention from security staff.

The physical separation of different types of urban spaces does much to exert control over people’s behaviour, but it is supplemented by other more direct measures. By 1994, it was said that 95 percent of local councils were considering installing CCTV schemes, and Britain already had more such systems in operation than any other nation. Much of the actual surveillance was carried out by private for-profit organizations, bringing a whole new set of enforcement agents into operation alongside the police (Gerrard and Thompson 2011; Lewis 2011). This brought “the spectre of social control and growing segregation to previously-public spaces where people used to mix more or less freely” (Graham, Brooks, and Heery 1995, 17). It exposed to sanction those who were felt not to “belong” or whose behaviour was frowned upon; in King’s Lynn, for instance, CCTV was employed to monitor offences like drunkenness, evading parking meters, littering, and underage smoking (18). Following the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, reinforced in 2003 with the Anti-social Behaviour Act, offending individuals could be subjected to “antisocial behaviour orders” (ASBOs), and places could also be restricted by blanket bans on groups congregating together or on actions such as consuming alcohol. There were also experiments with imposing curfews on repeat offenders and teenagers. The first place to attempt to enforce such a measure was Wigton, Cumbria, with a population of 6,000 (Lusher 2004).

Cohesion and Empowerment: Mobilizing “the Community”

Serious disturbances in some of the largest English northern towns in 2001 prompted a number of government reports examining their causes and policy implications, including a national level review commissioned by the UK Home Office and known as the Cantle Report, which introduced into public policy the concept of “community cohesion” (Cantle 2001). In many ways, cohesion could be seen as a suggested remedy, intended to repair some of the damage being inflicted by regeneration and renewal, although the report’s findings added a further important dimension to the growing impression that all was not well in British communities:

The team was particularly struck by the depth of polarisation of our towns and cities. The extent to which these physical divisions were compounded by so many other aspects of our daily lives was very evident. Separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks mean that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives. These lives often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote any meaningful interchanges. . . .

There is little wonder that the ignorance about each other’s communities can easily grow into fear, especially where this is exploited by extremist groups determined to undermine community harmony and foster divisions. (Cantle 2001, 9)

The unstated premise behind this passage is that the key dividing lines now are those that arise between different ethnic and religious groupings: between the white majority and ethnic minorities, but also among the ethnic minorities themselves. The potential for such divisions is an element that has been added to British towns during the decades following the Second World War, as a result of substantial immigration from the former British Empire, which brought in new workers to fill jobs at the lower levels of the labour market, mostly in old industrial centres. When the emphasis shifted away from traditional industries, especially textiles and clothing, these workers suffered particularly badly.

Ethnic minority populations add a further element of variability to urban locations. Although they are concentrated mainly in the Midlands and, especially, London and the South East, they represent a significant percentage of the population in most regions of England (ONS 2012, 6–7). The State of the English Cities report noted that their overall share in the population decreased steadily in line with the size of places, in a clear urban-rural (and hence city-town-village) gradient (Parkinson et al. 2006, 52). At that time, the proportion of “non-white” residents in the cities varied from 27.4 percent in Bradford to 0.9 percent in Barnsley. The distribution of specific ethnic groups was also found to vary considerably, with one or two groups predominating in some cities whereas others had a more varied ethnic composition (53). Over time, minority individuals and families have spread out from their original areas of residence, so that some minority presence is now standard in most places.

Between 2006 and 2014, around 1.5 million EU nationals moved to Britain, the majority from the accession countries of Eastern Europe, with Poles surpassing Indians as the largest foreign-born community in Britain (ONS 2016, 7; see also Hawkins 2018). Many of these new migrants moved to places in which ethnic minority populations had not previously figured strongly, to work, for example, in food production and processing centres in relatively rural areas. According to an index of integration constructed by the think tank Policy Exchange (Goodhart and Norrie 2016), the least integrated places in Britain are either the old mill towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, with large minorities of people of Pakistani heritage, or towns in eastern England that have experienced an influx from the European Union. Out of 160 towns and cities with a population of at least 20,000, Boston, in Lincolnshire, which has a particular concentration of Portuguese and eastern European residents, was ranked at the bottom, closely followed by nearby Wisbech and Spalding. Oldham, which lies in Greater Manchester, and Bradford, in West Yorkshire, were the other worst-performing towns (4–5). In 2016, anti-immigrant sentiment proved to be one of the strongest factors behind the British decision to leave the EU, and it was places like these that voted most enthusiastically for Brexit.

The disturbances that occurred in 2001 had a strong ethnic dimension, involving young South Asian (mostly Pakistani) men in confrontation with local white youths and the police. Understandably, then, the Cantle Report focused on issues related to the separation of ethnic “communities.” It concluded that area-based regeneration initiatives often reinforced this separation, as well as fuelling resentment when it appeared that certain groups were receiving disproportionate support or that “funding was being provided to minority ethnic groups for what some white political leaders saw as being trivial or unnecessary purposes” (Cantle 2001, 17). Racism and Islamophobia were also seen as playing a part in bringing about social exclusion. “Community cohesion” was thus about helping such divided communities to develop “common goals and a shared vision” and thereby “mesh into an integrated whole” (70). Acting on the Cantle Report, the central government determined that each area should prepare a local community cohesion plan, to promote “cross-cultural contact between different communities at all levels, foster understanding and respect, and break down barriers” (Cantle 2001, 11). In 2006, the government convened the Commission on Integration and Cohesion (CIC), which amended the initial “one size fits all” national strategy to permit greater emphasis on particular places, neighbourhoods, and communities, thus enabling “a distinctively local focus” (McGhee 2008, 51).

In developing their plans, many local authorities broadened the range of cohesion to embrace differences of age, gender, and interest. A typical example was the town of Wrexham, in Wales, which had its own brush with intercommunal violence in “riots” between locals and Iraqi Kurd refugees in 2003. According to its Community Cohesion Strategy, Wrexham contains “a significant number of geographical communities and communities of interest” knitted together in a “complex array of community relationships” (Wrexham County Borough Council 2011, 1). The strategy seeks to foster community cohesion by providing “a measure of how well different communities develop and relate to each other”:

Our definition of cohesion describes the ability of all communities to function and grow in harmony together. It aims to build communities where people feel confident that they belong and are comfortable mixing and interacting with others. . . . The process of integration is about helping positive relationships to develop between different groups and communities, towards a shared understanding and common values. (1)

As this quotation suggests, the development of the cohesion agenda involved a step forward in recognizing the reality of division and diversity in most modern British communities, regardless of their scale. McGhee (2008, 51) cites statements made by government ministers and officials responsible for the work of the CIC acknowledging the need to tackle “new elements” associated with “new and complex pictures of diversity in our local communities, reflecting globalisation and economic change” and to adapt policies that reflect the circumstances of local communities that are “each experiencing changes in a different way.”6 Nevertheless, an implicit sense lingers that with the right policy corrections and an appropriate local steer, it will be possible to return to something like the traditional version of a cohesive, integrated, and active local community. As members of the 2006 State of the English Cities research team conceded, however, the prospects for the successful implementation of such an agenda seem limited, owing to the “many ambiguities and differences in the way the terms social and community cohesion are interpreted and acted upon by different organisations. Although these concepts seem useful for involving diverse stakeholders in consensus building, there is a danger of glossing over dilemmas, differences and divisions with fairly meaningless generalities and innocuous objectives” (Turok et al. 2006, 281). Peter Somerville (2011) similarly warns that the notion of a “strong, cohesive, active community” that undergirds the community cohesion agenda “assumes the absence of an analysis of the problems and value conflicts that beset communities in Britain today: it alludes to those problems, but in such a way as to depoliticise them and turn them into problems of municipal management” (213).

Accentuating the Local

Despite very strong contemporary pressures conducive to making places more alike, often subsumed theoretically under the term globalization, many of the developments sketched above have had quite opposite effects: they introduce heightened possibilities for local variation, which works its way through the entire urban system. Thus, when discussing the small towns of rural Wales (of which there are more than eighty, with populations ranging between 1,000 and 17,000) Woods (2011, 162) comments that, like towns anywhere else, they are “dynamic places that have evolved over time and are continuing to develop according to the particular configurations of social, economic, political and environmental forces and resources found in each town.” He adds that, as the rural population has become more mobile and more fluid in lifestyle and consumer choices, an ordering of functions has emerged that is not necessarily determined by population size or accessibility. Corinna Patterson (2011) illustrates this with a comparison between two Welsh market towns, seemingly alike in size and historic roles and both comparatively remote from large population centres. Despite their similarities, they appear to have become locked into greatly contrasting trajectories, one stagnating, if not in actual decline, and the other showing a capacity to innovate and develop, earning a reputation for forward-looking social and environmental change. The differences are due to a complex combination of the attitudes of local authorities, evolving social composition, and variations in cultural ethos and values, channelled by some key local actors. In the case of the more successful town, for instance, considerable leadership has been exercised by a group of incomers closely associated with a local centre for alternative technology. The other town appears to lack any equivalent dynamic focus.

In the past, governments might have considered it a priority to assist local authorities in levelling out these differences. Now, however, with a change in prevailing political ideologies and in the face of severe and growing fiscal pressures, the state has gradually been withdrawing its readiness and ability to do so. Under New Labour, this withdrawal involved a reduction in the level of central state support and a smaller role in people’s lives for local government. There was, within the national government, a deep suspicion of the power of elected local members and, perhaps even more so, of appointed local officials, who were viewed as potentially obstructive, bureaucratic, and not sufficiently “on message” with the modernization agenda. According to Hazel Blears, who served as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 2007 to 2009,

we brought into government quite big prejudices against local authorities across the field of policy. And in some ways quite rightly. Because some of them were rubbish. And you wouldn’t have trusted them to wash the pots, let alone run a community. . . . What the Labour government did was, in its early days, create a series of parallel tracks almost to get round local authorities . . . whether that was in further education, or housing, or the NHS foundation trusts—all that kind of thing. (Quoted in Jones 2011, 208)

On the one hand, New Labour continued the process of hollowing out the local state that Margaret Thatcher had begun. On the other hand, there was a rhetorical commitment to engage with and “empower” communities to take a more active role in shaping their own futures. This was exemplified in programs like the New Deal for Communities (and its Welsh parallel, Communities First) and the National Neighbourhood Renewal Strategy, both targeted at the most deprived neighbourhoods. After 2006, Local Strategic Partnerships were given a key role in formulating Local Area Agreements, which aimed at “joined up” working across different public services; the partnerships acted as forums in which key interests, including hard-to-reach groups and voluntary organizations, could be brought together (Hughes 2007, 17). As already noted, these developments ensured a substantially increased role in local decision making for business and the organized voluntary sector, but real participation that reached beyond this into the lives of “ordinary” citizens was often limited. The transfer of funding from the public sector towards support for private enterprise and voluntary effort made welfare for individuals and families increasingly conditional upon the effectiveness of the local economy (Eisenschitz 1997, 131): the provision of both public and private services tended to mirror local growth and affluence. Popularly, this is known as “the postcode lottery”—where you happen to live becomes decisive for opportunities and rewards—and, as Aram Eisenschitz notes, it enhances local discretion while undermining universal rights.

Despite the avowed ideological distance between the main political parties, there is a marked continuity between these tendencies and the “Big Society” strategy advocated by the former Conservative leader, David Cameron. The strategy, adopted by the (Conservative–Liberal) Coalition Government formed in 2010, was underpinned by core themes of localism, a diminishing role for the state, increased accountability, and greater individual responsibility (Lawless 2011). Stuart Hall (2011, 718) described the coalition as “saturated in neo-liberal ideas,” a neoliberal machine working at full throttle. Among its core tenets was what Hall calls “the lure of ‘localism’” (720). The 2011 Localism Act was intended to “replace the old, top-down systems of targets and central micromanagement” and to “turn government on its head, taking power away from Whitehall and putting it into the hands of people and communities” (United Kingdom, DCLG 2010a, 1). Allegedly, a smaller, rebalanced state would “improve people’s lives, encourage innovation to flourish and draw people together in civic pride.” Rewards and incentives will be deployed to “nudge people in the right direction” (2).

In this process, large sectors have been taken out of the sphere of local government control. There have been significant political battles around health, previously reorganized away from democratic local authority control into unelected local NHS trusts, and now operating through direct commissioning of services by medical practitioners themselves, with a steadily growing role for private sector providers (Matthews 2017), and education, with the creation of so-called academies and “free”—that is, deregulated but publicly funded—schools, both independent from local government supervision. Social housing, formerly a key local responsibility, had already been taken away by Conservative “right-to-buy” legislation in 1980. Now the planning system has been relaxed, with an imposed predisposition to approve new developments (qualified only by a vague test of “sustainability”), which favour developers and the construction industry. The new approach has been justified by claims that the planning process had allowed local government and “special interests” (like environmentalists and countryside campaigners) to act as a brake on necessary growth. Changes in the provision of social care and welfare have gone in the same direction, with a war waged on “benefit dependency.” Some spectacular failures of social care have led to fierce political and media attacks on the capacity of local government to take responsibility for, and to administer, social programs, while the delivery of services and benefits is increasingly entrusted to an ever-expanding assortment of private providers and “social entrepreneurs,” with the recipients cast as “customers” and “clients.”

In the name of empowerment and community involvement, these developments shift power away from the authority of elected representatives and public officialdom towards particular sectional groups and interests, such as parents, faith communities, and (largely self-selected) voluntary associations. Those groups, or “communities,” that are able to mobilize the loudest voices and command the greatest resources are privileged, while the weak and vulnerable are left out. A dreadful confirmation of this conclusion was provided by the Grenfell Tower disaster in June 2017, in which a twenty-four-storey housing unit was destroyed by fire and scores of poor people lost their lives. Residents of the public housing block had been warning of serious safety hazards for years, but their voices had been ignored. The ensuing public controversy laid bare the gross disparities of wealth and power and the severe spatial inequalities existing within one of the richest of London boroughs, Kensington and Chelsea.

Reflecting on the earlier New Deal for Communities program, Lawless (2011, 60) notes a predictable finding: an overrepresentation of the views of older, white, employed, more “middle-class,” and better educated sections of the community. Furthermore, and more fundamentally, the program raised questions as to whether, in a society so thoroughly divided by differences of occupation, interest, and social stratification, it was actually possible to define “communities of place”—that is, to make any assumptions about how local opinion would coalesce around a shared location. He suggests that, if it is possible to define them at all, then such communities would not exist even at the modest scale of 10,000 people: a consistent message emerged from the program that such a number was “simply too big” to make sense to residents themselves (58).

Conclusion

In justifying its “localism” strategy, the UK Coalition government contended that it was keen to disperse power away from the centre and eager to see communities take charge of their own fates. Rather than resulting in an unfair “postcode” lottery,

decentralisation will allow different communities to do different things in different ways to meet their different needs. This will certainly increase variety in service provision. But far from being random—as the word “lottery” implies—such variation will reflect the conscious choices made by local people. The real lottery is what we have now, where one-size-fits-all policies are imposed by the centre whether or not they work locally. (United Kingdom, DCLG 2010b, 5)

This shift of responsibility to the local level has been speeded up significantly by pressures to cut the public deficit and make major reductions in the costs of the public sector—the “austerity” imperative brought about by the financial crash of 2008, which has bitten deeply into local authority budgets. The end result has been further fragmentation and complication in the provision of services and resources, as well as an additional loss of coherence in the framework of urban governance, as an increasingly mixed bag of agents and interests are brought into the process. This fragmentation continues a pattern of urban disintegration that has been going on in the United Kingdom for decades. The changes assist some local people (and many others who are not at all local) to secure the ascendancy of their views over those of others, and help to perpetuate the relationships of inclusion, marginalization, and exclusion which ensure that few places, no matter what their size, can truly be represented as homogeneous or “cohesive” communities.

As we have seen, the evidence base in relation to Britain’s large towns and small cities tends to be lacking; they form something of a “missing middle” between the very large metropolitan centres and the more “homely” small towns and villages. They are subjected to many, if not all, of the same pressures that affect the core urban centres—albeit, with respect to policy decisions and interventions, more often as an afterthought to intentions and purposes directed elsewhere. However, despite the encroachment of cultural and material sameness, often characterised simply as “globalization,” there are many continuing social and economic processes which serve to encourage differentiation and diversity among smaller urban centres, enough to guarantee that they will continue to react in their own distinct and interesting ways.

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1 For more information on the government’s Northern Powerhouse vision and the nearly £17 billion investment in “skills, innovation, transport, and culture” to boost local economic growth, see https://northernpowerhouse.gov.uk.

2 In the BBC’s description of the series, Crane “celebrates the forgotten world of the town, smaller than a city, more intimate, more surprising.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b020t88m). For additional discussion, see “Insight into Towns,” OpenLearn, 2011, http://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/insight-towns.

3 Graham Nielson, “Ludlow: The Loveliest Town in England?” OpenLearn, 2011, http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/politics-policy-people/sociology/ludlow-the-loveliest-town-england?in_menu=19028. Nielson is quoting John Betjeman, who wrote in 1943 that Ludlow “is probably the loveliest town in England, with its hill of Georgian houses ascending from the river Terne to the great tower of the cross-shaped church” (English Cities and Small Towns [London: William Collins, 1943], 24).

4 The transition town movement seeks to develop more self-sufficient and low-carbon ways of living, to combat the threats posed by climate change and fossil-fuel consumption. See, for example, the website of Transition Town Totnes, https://www.transitiontowntotnes.org/, a community-based organization that seeks to “strengthen the local economy, reduce our environmental impact, and build our resilience for a future with less cheap energy and a changing climate.”

5 “Market Share of Grocery Stores in Great Britain from January 2015 to March 2017,” Statista: The Statistics Portal, 2017, https://www.statista.com/statistics/280208/grocery-market-share-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/.

6 “Ruth Kelly’s Speech on Integration and Cohesion,” The Guardian, 24 August 2006. Kelly delivered her remarks at the launch of the CIC.