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Putting the economy back in to the city

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2015

RICHARD RODGER
RICHARD RODGER*
Affiliation:
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Teviot Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG, UK
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Abstract

Given the dominance of economic matters in the daily news, this article speculates why the topic has attracted relatively little attention amongst urban historians over the last 40 years, and why it is important that the local economy gains a wider acceptance as a powerful determinant of a city's fortunes.

Type
Survey and speculation
Information
Urban History , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , February 2015 , pp. 157 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Falkus, M., ‘The development of municipal trading in the nineteenth century’, Business History, 19 (1977), 134–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 19 Feb. 1862, 6.

3 The phrase comes from Hennock, E.P., ‘Central/local government relations in England 1835–1900’, Urban History Yearbook, 9 (1982), 38–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 39. See also Ogborn, M., ‘Local power and state regulation in nineteenth-century Britain’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 17 (1992), 215–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Cummins, J., Francis, R. and Coffey, R., Local Solutions or Post Code Lotteries: The Acceptability of Difference in Public Services, Office for Public Management (London, 2007)Google Scholar. As the Guardian, 21 Jan. 2006, noted, men in the Calton district of Glasgow with a life expectancy of 53.9 years have the lowest life expectancy in Europe.

5 See Cambridge Journals Online at http://journals.cambridge.org/uhy_bib/action/search.

6 In addition to those from Diana Dixon and Tony Sutcliffe, British annual bibliography contributions were provided by Laura Balderstone, Lucy Faire, Gervase French, Nigel Goose, Barry Haynes, Malcolm Noble, Neil Raven, David Reeder, John Smith, Liz Tacey, Claire Townshend, Nicholas Verdier, Chris Williams, Nick Wilson and Neil Wood.

7 Bibliographical contributions from ‘foreign correspondents’ were also provided by Graeme Davison, Robert Fairbanks, Clyde and S. Griffen, Narayani Gupta, Alan Mayne, Zane Miller, Jose-Luis Oyon, Cincia Sicca and G.M. van der Waal.

8 For further details of the entries for the years 1972–95, and the list of over 750 journal titles consulted, see ‘Introduction’, in Rodger, R. (ed.), A Consolidated Bibliography of Urban History (Aldershot, 1996), xi–xxviiiGoogle Scholar, and the annual list published in the last issue of Urban History each year, and online (see above).

9 Review essays have been omitted from the classification since the works reviewed often straddle two or more categories.

10 See Rodger, R., ‘United Kingdom’, in Rodger, R. and Menjot, D. (eds.), Teaching Urban History in Europe/L’enseignement de l’histoire urbaine en Europe (Leicester, 2006), 11–30Google Scholar, for further elaboration of structural changes.

11 Higher Education Statistics Agency, Free Online tables, www.hesa.ac.uk/index.php/content/view/1973/239/; A. Smithers, ‘A levels 2012’, Centre for Employment and Education Research, University of Buckingham. See also www.buckingham.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/A-Levels-2012.pdf.

12 With ever greater emphasis on the funding of geography as a science rather than as a humanities subject, human and historical geographical appointments and publications have been curtailed, with corresponding implications for urban history which in the first two decades to 1990 relied heavily on the spatial dynamics associated with geography.

13 Dyos, H.J., ‘Editorial’, Urban History Yearbook 1974 (Leicester, 1974), 5–6Google Scholar.

14 Independent, 14 Nov. 2013.

15 In descending order, the top 10 were: Solihull (Birmingham); North Yorkshire; Hertfordshire; Nottinghamshire; Surrey; Warwickshire; Gloucestershire; Northumberland; Berkshire; Oxfordshire.

16 Another survey, based on energy, concluded that 8 of the 10 worst places in Britain were in Scotland. Only Edinburgh, the east of Scotland and the Borders escaped this classification.

17 Edwin Chadwick committed a similar analytical sharp practice in 1842 by showing that average life expectancy for tradesmen in Rutland (41) compared favourably with that for Leeds (27) and Bolton (23). See Flinn, M.W. (ed.), Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Gt. Britain by Edwin Chadwick (Edinburgh, 1965), 223–7Google Scholar.