Britain's Cities, Britain's Future by Mike Emmerich: A Review

Earlier this year I spent a week’s holiday with my family in Germany’s beautiful Black Forest – a rewarding experience which should be more popular in Britain. Despite all the distractions, I did find myself noting some significant differences from home in the (mostly) rural landscape. Firstly, there were modern-looking factories, obviously prospering, on the edge of every reasonable sized town or even village. Secondly, in an area that is one of the country’s scenic gems – there were houses everywhere, many relatively recently built, far more than in a British equivalent such as the Peak District or Cotswolds – but there was no sense that they were spoiling the landscape.

Why has Germany been able to develop and maintain a highly skilled, highly productive industrial economy, unlike Britain? Why has it been able to build more and more spacious homes for its inhabitants – and create more liveable and prosperous cities – despite having, in the West at least, a similar population density?

Mike Emmerich’s Britain’s Cities, Britain’s Future, goes some way to answering these questions, among others. An important if somewhat depressing book, it begins by charting the course of Britain’s cities since the dawn of the industrial age. The huge growth and global domination of the Victorian era was followed by gradual decline as Germany and the United States, among others, began to catch up – and eventually supersede – the first mover. The twentieth century was largely a story of further urban decline, alleviated only by the phenomenal revival of London from the 1970s onwards and, perhaps, the more recent, modest, and often superficial renaissance elsewhere.

According to Emmerich, the factors behind this decline are deep rooted: Britain’s industrial revolution was centred around one industry – cotton – and on a highly individualist and free-market approach to business. The pioneers were practical men with little formal education, and they employed vast numbers of relatively unskilled workers. Neither they nor the British state had much interest in the formal provision of training. The result was a ‘path dependency’ in business and the economy – a habit-driven inability to think about industry in a more strategic way, and to promote a more activist approach in areas such as vocational training and education. Counties such as Germany, which focussed on skills – and institutional arrangements to promote them – had, and have, a very different ingrained model of industrialisation which enables them to compete so strongly today.

Meanwhile, a profound anti-urbanism – which appears to have deep historical roots – was bolstered by the pollution and squalor of early industrialism and a longing for the aristocratically-orientated country life among the newly wealthy. Together with the ingrained laissez-faire approach to economics, this explains not only the inability to plan cities and produce urban places worth living in, it also lies behind the housing crisis. Surely the post-war defence of the green belt at all costs - the current utter resistance to new homes in anywhere except existing urban areas - is another manifestation of this long tradition of not being entirely comfortable with cities and modernity more generally.

This explains much of the malaise in the British economy outside London and the South East (which have benefited from a combination of public transport investment, financial services and the attraction of highly-skilled workers from all over the UK and beyond). Low skills, poor education, low standards of health, insufficient and inadequate housing and an underinvested urban fabric are not the ingredients from which to produce either manufacturing or services sectors that can compete on a world stage.

 Britain has, outside the capital and its hinterland and a few specialist sectors elsewhere, become locked into a low-growth, low-productivity economy – something that central government does not seem willing or able to change. Centralisation of all power in London – and disproportionate investment in transport in the capital – has only accelerated the process. He is, at the same time, sceptical of arguments in economic geography that it is people, not place that matter, and that interventions should be based on upskilling people and allowing them to move: the idea that the country would be better off if we accepted that city systems are simply giant sorting mechanisms. Quite correctly in my opinion, he accepts that this insight is important but adds that socially and psychologically, places are important.

With the causes of the Brexit vote, and the huge challenges posed by trading outside the European Union yet to come, this book is timely in many ways. The idea that Britain could be turned into an Atlantic Singapore seems fanciful, at least outside the M25, after just a cursory glimpse at productivity and trade figures for the English regions – and some of the skills problems that underpin these.

Fortunately, this book is not just a diagnosis of the problems – it does also offer a route forward. Central Government is paralysed by workload and competing demands and cannot address these problems. Ultimately, they are all about city-regions and their individual challenges, which means that they can only be saved by more and deeper devolution, bringing back the independence that they enjoyed during the Victorian era. Skills, housing and health budgets need to be handed over to these new administrations, so they –working in hand with businesses – can help create the environments that highly-skilled, competitive sectors need. It’s a British version of the ‘Metropolitan Revolution’ outlined by Bruce Katz a few years ago – with Washington in a permanent logjam, it is up to the ‘metros’ to solve the nation’s problems.

The context has changed but much of this ground has been trod long before this book: for example, CP Snow’s argument that at the root of Britain’s dysfunction is a division into the two cultures of arts and science. Policymakers are almost always drawn from the former; industrial leaders, generally, from the latter. “Intellectuals, particularly literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites”, he claimed, in 1959. “How many educated people know anything about productive industry?”. Snow contrasted this with Germany’s focus on scientific, technical and vocational education. The rise of economics has changed this to an extent, but too often it is a discipline obsessed with theoretical and mathematical elegance at the expense of accepting evidence from real world problems (there is a long-running joke about the economist who angrily dismisses an evidence-based argument: “that’s all very well in practice, but it doesn’t work in theory”).

I do have a few quibbles with some of the points made in the book. London has never been as dependent on financial services as Victorian Manchester was on textiles – as the growth of its technology and life sciences sectors in recent years demonstrates. The decision to invest in the tube in the 1960s and 1970s (Jubilee, Victoria) was not some grand strategic attempt to shore up London; it was rather because the attempts to build urban motorways – the government’s preferred form of transport investment – had been proved impossible in the capital, unlike in many Northern and Midland cities.

Spending on the motorway network was, in its early years at least, disproportionately focussed on the regions outside London: this made the rest of the country highly car dependent. Manchester was the first of all UK cities to make the decision to rip up its extensive tram system, in 1949 (South Manchester once had the densest tram network in Europe); it was followed by other cities with extensive networks, including London, although Glasgow still operated trams until the 1960s. Admittedly Manchester did suffer more than most from Beeching’s cuts to railways, but this did put it in a strong position when bidding for Metrolink funding in recent decades.

More importantly, a greater reference to the history and situation of other British regional cities, which often developed very differently and were sometimes more influential, would have led greater support to the arguments. Emmerich jumps from Manchester’s heyday and the dominance of the cotton industry to the revival of London, without any reference to the intervening period. It was actually the first half of the twentieth century which saw the strongest local government in the UK, and also one in which this government had most impact on national policy. And, indeed, much of this was orientated around trying to get the UK’s cities and education systems to catch up with those of other industrialised countries. It seems most peculiar that there is almost no reference to this period in the book, given the topic – although perhaps that it is because it was led by other cities, with Manchester something of a laggard. (There is a reference to Chamberlain’s reforms in Birmingham, although only in a somewhat inflated comparison to what has been achieved in Manchester in recent years).

It is perhaps understandable that Emmerich views the problems of the country outside the capital through the prism of Manchester, where he has been a leading light in hard-won devolution deals. It is partly because of the energies and talents of Emmerich and people like him that the city is where it is on the national agenda. It has dominated urban policy outside London for two decades, and has shaped much of the government’s current approach to regional cities. There is now a considerable ‘Manchester lobby’ in urban policy, with well-connected individuals (Jim O’Neill, George Osborne, several high-status academics) making the case for it as the only serious candidate for government attention outside London, in Whitehall and beyond.

Their views have spread beyond, to other opinion formers who have little real interest or deep knowledge of cities outside London. It has done this by producing a significant evidence base and coherent arguments, often based on institutions such as New Economy Manchester (Emmerich’s project), which other cities have failed to do to the same extent. But that does not mean it is healthy. Other cities have very different industrial, social and political histories, and at various times, and in various ways, some have overshadowed Manchester in both economic importance and national impact. It could be argued that this is a short book, but in that case perhaps a less all-encompassing title would have been more apt: perhaps replacing “Britain’s Cities” in the title with “Manchester” might do it.

Two examples might demonstrate the downside of this myopia. Even at the height of empire and industry Manchester was not the most important city outside London (even if the cotton industry was by far the most significant export sector). That was Glasgow, the second city of empire and Betjeman’s “greatest Victorian city in the world”. During the period in question it was the third largest city in Europe. Scotland had developed a modern educational system much earlier than England. Its universities – including Glasgow’s, which predates Manchester by several centuries – had begun teaching science far before Oxford or Cambridge, or indeed before any other universities had been established in England. The Scottish Enlightenment, rooted in that deep tradition, was one of the great European intellectual movements, and fed off deep pan-European relationships: the Low Countries, France, Scandinavia, the Baltic coasts. This is why Scottish engineers such as James Watt were so disproportionately visible during the industrial revolution – and indeed, this reputation would persist into the twentieth century: think of Scotty in Star Trek.

For this and other reasons, Scotland also had – and has – a far more continental culture of urbanism, with the middle-classes living in flats in the inner city throughout its recent history. As a result of all this, Glasgow is culturally richer, and its buildings far grander, than any English city outside London. The middle classes have always lived in areas such as Kelvinside and the South Side in the sort of large, lateral flats that are commonplace on the continent. These areas are among the most civilised and rich urban environments in Europe. Glasgow, alongside Birmingham, was a leader in the muncipial reforms of the late 19th and early 20th century, far ahead of Manchester. What happened here? It has ended up in the same place as England’s cities, but it must surely have been caused by different factors (although centralisation is surely an issue here too, as well as the expenditure of Scotland’s intellectual capital on the Empire). But what were they?

Even if we concentrate on England, the book could benefit from a few more references to the other great industrial city to have a major impact on the British state, Birmingham. Its industrial growth and political impact preceded the rise of the Northern cities, and fascinated thinkers such as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As an “innovative milieu” it regularly overshadowed Manchester, producing the first commercially viable steam engine, the beginnings of the chemical industry, the first plastics, among others.

More importantly its economic development was almost its polar opposite. Rather than giant cotton mills bestriding the world’s cotton industry, this was a city of small enterprises working in a dizzying number of trades, which perfectly suited it both for gradual innovation and the rise of engineering industries in the second phase of the industrial revolution. The more highly skilled work and the possibility of social mobility meant education was more important; and the greater exposure to economic cycles led to a greater desire for government intervention.

Politically, too, Birmingham represented the antithesis of the laissez-faire approach to industry that would become associated with Lancashire (and the City of London). Before the ‘Manchester school’ of laissez-faire liberalism and free traded dominated British political life, there was the proto-Keynesian ‘Birmingham school’ which called for the abandonment of the Gold Standard and government reflation of the economy. Its leader, the banker Thomas Attwood, was much less successful here than in his leadership of the Birmingham Political Union, which was central to the First Reform Bill that introduced the first parliamentary representation for the growing industrial cities. Joseph Schumpeter wrote that "it is from these writings that any study of modern ideas on monetary management ought to start".

If these unorthodox polices were rejected by the British state, which would soon adopt Manchester liberalism as its creed, they would re-emerge later in the 19th century. Birmingham’s economy began booming again as engineering took over from cotton as the main growth sector of the industrial economy; by the early 20th century Birmingham would overtake the Lancashire cities to become the second largest in the country. And at the same time, after several decades in which regional leadership had passed to Manchester (Chartism, Corn Laws), Birmingham took its place on the national agenda again, under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlain, his colleagues and family, once again proposing unorthodox policies.

Through the Birmingham-founded National Education League, the city was the most enthusiastic funder and proponent of board schools (the major opposition, as with tariff reform, came from Manchester). The explicit aim was to help improve the skills of the industrial population. The UK’s first municipally funded art school, and slightly later, the first civic university on the first custom-built campus, all date from roughly this period. (The first municipally funded orchestra would have to wait for another few years). It was being referred to in American journals as “the best governed city in the world”. Other civic figures would pioneer town planning, garden suburbs, and council housing, with huge impacts on the British state, partly through the leaders’ progression into Westminster. (They were also advocates of tariffs and a Empire-based customs union – so-called ‘imperial preference ‘– partly because US and German industrial capability had been developed behind such walls). Given that these sorts of policies, and their locally-driven nature, represent perhaps the best British exemplar of what Emmerich is advocating, they would really benefit from inclusion.

The great period of civic government in both Glasgow and Birmingham – and other cities – ended not with the end of the 19th century, as the book implies, but with the second world war. The war economy had been run centrally and had demonstrated what could be achieved by central government. The ‘commanding heights’ of the economy – and indeed the welfare state – would be run in a similar efficient way from Whitehall. And this, not the late 19th century, sounded the death knell for municipal power in a city such as Birmingham.

Nor did economic growth falter in all industrial cities during the 20th century. During the first half of that period, the West Midlands was actually the fastest growing regional economy in the UK (London included), with by far the greatest productivity growth (spurred on, admittedly, by its central role in providing armaments for two world wars). The rate of population growth was also equally spectacular.

From the 1950s on, Birmingham’s expansion – like London’s – was curtailed by industrial and planning policies aimed at spreading industrial activity and the industrial population around the country. The West Midlands plan explicitly called for a reduction in population density within the city, with the ‘decanting’ of the population to out of town estates (such as Chelmsley Wood, childhood home of the writer Lindsey Handley) and new towns such as Redditch and Telford. Most damagingly, the government’s control of industry regulations explicitly forebode new industries from being set up in the city, with the aim of helping other parts of the country. It actively forced nationalised companies, such as British Leyland, to move production to struggling cities such as Liverpool. It has been argued that the contact between Birmingham workers – previously renowned for peaceful industrial relations – and the former dockers of Liverpool led to radicalisation and the subsequent strife of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, nationalisation had forced all of Birmingham’s disparate and varied car manufacturing firms (and some that were not previously in the automotive sector at all) into a single, dysfunctional entity: British Leyland. Unable to expand many companies left the city. The service sector, which was also growing quickly after the war, suffered too, partly under later restrictions which prevented office development. It changed from being perhaps the most diverse urban economy in the world to a single-industry city based on a poorly managed and increasingly strike-ridden nationalised automotive company.

Meanwhile, the controls of office development, which were extended from London to Birmingham in the mid 1960s, did much to curtail the growth of what was a rapidly expanding services sector. The city was also committing a reasonable amount of damage itself, through perhaps the most misguided of the post-war city centre redevelopments. When decline came in the Midlands, it came hard: it was the most serious casualty of the 1980s (and the strong pound in particular). With a disproportionate amount of its employment still in the automotive industry – other cities, such as Manchester, had already begun to see replacement of manufacturing jobs with service employment, but not Birmingham – it was particularly poorly placed to cope with the twin challenges of a strong pound and international competition. At the beginning of the 1980s, it was the richest region outside the South East; at the end of the decade, the poorest.

 And after two decades in the doldrums (notwithstanding the Highbury initiative, Symphony Hall, Brindley Place and Centenary Square, and the heroic lowering of Manzoni’s ring road, which were both pioneering and influential, if now somewhat overlooked), it is only now beginning to revive in a far more meaningful way – although industrial jobs still comprise a higher proportion of its employment than many other cities.

Why is this important? Partly because any consideration of Britain's industrial problems needs to recognise this twentieth century history of nationalisation and control, a sort of industrial policy in reverse (albeit one that did not particularly affect the North). Certainly, the inability to train, to invest in education was certainly a factor in the current malaise in the Midlands, as it is in the North. But the story, patterns and timing of decline is quite different. This may mean that the approach that best suits here may be quite different from that which has developed in Manchester – which after all, had a head start in regeneration given its earlier decline, and benefits from a strong position as a regional capital given its historic position at the heart of the monocentric Lancashire cotton economy.

This doesn’t change the fundamental point of the book. Whatever the divergent economic history of the North and the Midlands in the 20th century, Birmingham’s industries would still have struggled given the inability to support and develop industry and enterprise in the way other countries did. Indeed, the struggles around nationalisation reflect perhaps an extreme example of this failure, given the poor management and low skills base of companies such as British Leyland.

Where I think Emmerich is absolutely right is that Manchester, at present, seems to have much more of the spirit of Chamberlain’s Birmingham (if, to be frank, quite a long way from matching its achievements). It is far more down the path of devolution and self-government that must surely be the only way to match former glories. It is perhaps apt to finish with the words of George Dawson, the Birmingham nonconformist preacher of the “civic gospel” which so influenced Chamberlain – which seems to contain all the spirit of Emmerich’s conclusions (if not the economic slant). The book seems to be echoing him, 150 years on, without any recognition of its lineage.

“I sometimes think that the municipalities can do more for the people than Parliament. Their powers will probably be enlarged; but under the powers they already possess they can greatly diminish the amount of sickness in the community and can prolong human life. They can prevent – they have prevented – tens of thousands of children from becoming orphans. They can do much to improve those miserable homes that are fatal not only to health, but to decency and morality. They can give to the poor the enjoyment of pleasant parks and gardens, and the intellectual cultivation and refinement of public libraries and galleries of art. They can redress in many ways the inequalities of human conditions. The gracious words of Christ…. Will be addressed… to those who support a municipal policy which lessened the miseries of the wretched and added brightness to the life of the desolate.”