national and international profile (Vall, 2011: 11–12). The best-known example from this period may be the monumental steel ‘Angel of the North’ by sculptor Anthony Gormley, erected in 1998 on the site of a disused colliery overlooking both Newcastle’s major road and rail arteries.
Comparison with other regions
The North East can be compared with other European regions on a number of dimensions, including regions transitioning from an economy dominated by coal mining, deindustrialising regions and regions near internal borders (a source of current and future uncertainty that may become more significant should Scotland secede from the UK [see Cowie et al, 2018: 74]). While studies of deindustrialisation tend to focus on cities and city regions, comparisons with coal-producing regions include rural areas where extraction took place and so are more truly regional in the sense of this account.
The extensive decline of coal mining resulted in the loss of around 250,000 jobs in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, and has been called ‘the most dramatic contemporary example of social transformation in Britain since the Second World War’ (Bennett et al, 2000: 1). While Bennett et al’s (2000) report focuses on the former coal-mining areas of South Wales and North Nottinghamshire, many of its findings can be applied to the North East. Due to the density of habitation left over from the extraction industry, these former pit villages ‘resemble many of the housing estates that ring the major urban centres’ (Bennett et al, 2000: 2). There was now no clear reason for such dense rural settlements and the cost of their upkeep became politicised. Many jobs that replaced mining were lower-paid, service sector jobs, often taken up by women, leaving many men with no alternative but long-term unemployment or low-paid, part-time work, exacerbated by regeneration strategies that attracted enterprises to former coalfield regions based on the promise of cheap land and labour (Bennett et al, 2000).
Probably due to the difficulties for small and medium enterprises to locate to disadvantaged and remote places, a large part of regeneration policy depended on attracting external or foreign investment. While this was effective in the city areas, it was less so in rural and former coal-mining regions of the UK, and investment proved unstable and vulnerable to rapid closures and relocations when economic conditions changed. The vulnerability of the North East to what became known as ‘branch plant syndrome’ came to national attention in 1998 (Pike, 1999) and continues to feature as an issue, as demonstrated by the shockwaves following the closure in 2015 of the Thai-owned SSI steel makers in Redcar (Blackburn, 2016) – a closure as symbolically important as that of the Consett steelworks in the 1980s.
The mapping of regions in relation to economic indicators such as GDP, jobs and employment figures often grapples with the issue of where areas of low population appear advantaged by comparison with more densely populated regions. Put simply, mapping a sparsely inhabited region with high average economic performance might give a misleading image of that region’s contribution to national prosperity and comparability with other regions. Ballas et al (2017) attempted to overcome this and compare European regions on a number of economic measures by expanding the size of the region to represent the number of people living there, so that a small but densely populated poor region shows up more strongly on the map than a large but sparsely populated wealthy one. Applying this, the rural two thirds of the North East all but disappear, swallowed up by the densely populated east-coast areas, which, on most economic measures, resemble Wales and Northern Ireland in terms of deprivation, as well as European areas such as Southern Italy, Southern Spain and Eastern Europe.
The UK’s growing regional inequality and population concentration in the South East has been challenged (GOS, 2010; McCann, 2016; UK2070 Commission, 2019). The UK’s spatial economic strategy functioned effectively from the late 1940s up to the late 1970s to reduce inequalities between regional productivity and bring city sizes in line with other countries. However, the pattern stalled and then reversed due to focusing the new industries of vehicle manufacture, aviation and electronic and electrical goods into Southern England, along with a range of new service industries (UK2070 Commission, 2019: 34). Policies since the 1990s attempted to ameliorate the immediate impacts of decline rather than unlocking opportunities, and developed an approach of managed decline of ‘left-behind’ places. The UK2070 Commission’s report draws a comparison between East and West Germany, which were much more spatially unequal than Britain in the 1990s; however, through a deliberate and unificationist policy, the situation was reversed, so that the UK is now regionally more unequal than Germany. Since the strong Conservative victory in the 2019 elections, including new gains of many traditionally Labour constituencies in the North East, various announcements have been made about ‘levelling up’ the English regions (Scott, 2019; Giles, 2020). The evolving COVID-19 crisis is likely to exacerbate existing spatial inequalities in the labour market. Although London has the highest percentage of self-employed workers (15 per cent), the self-employed in the cities of the North and Midlands have increased precarity, and more people in London and the South East are employed in occupations that can switch to home and remote working (Magrini, 2020). Within-region labour market inequalities between cities and towns in the North will become starker during COVID-19 as some Northern cities (such as Newcastle, Manchester, Warrington and Leeds) have been identified as having different economies that will better adapt to homeworking (Magrini, 2020). Pre-crisis proclamations of levelling up between the regions will need to account for these different regional and local economies and experiences once the COVID-19 crisis is over, as well as any implications of Brexit. However, based on the preference for a project-based as opposed to programmatic policy style, this may work to mitigate the uneven regional impacts of Brexit and COVID-19, rather than achieving a reduction in regional disparities.
Conclusion
Various challenges, which are either rooted in history or arise from increased global connectedness, confront today’s North East. Disadvantageous trading agreements following Brexit would have a major impact on the North East industrial sector. Some, however, hope that a weaker pound might create advantageous conditions for new trading agreements, though this has not been borne out by the actual figures since the Brexit vote (Edwards et al, 2018), at least until the COVID-19 crisis caused the pound’s value to tumble in early 2020. At the same time, EU subsidies have been important to the North East region. Between 2007 and 2020, the North East received over £800 million of EU structural funds, utilised in programmes investing in businesses, innovation, reducing firms’ emissions and upskilling workers (South Tyneside Council, 2017). Post-Brexit forecasts for the region anticipate the loss of the relatively politically neutral redistribution of EU regional funding streams, leading to further economic stress and sharpening the North–South divide, both economically
