Economic geography of the United Kingdom
Halford John Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, 1904
The Economic geography of the United Kingdom as well as reflecting its position in the current economic league tables, also reflects its long history as a trading nation and as a imperial power. This in turn was built on exploitation of natural resources such as coal and iron ore. Mackinder's comment, above, is a metaphor not only for this exploitation but the - at the time of writing - overwhelming power of the Royal Navy.
Almost everything has changed since then, with the coalfields largely deserted and the Empire relinquished. With its dominant position gone, the UK economic geography is increasingly shaped by the one constant: it is a trading nation.
Agriculture
The UK has rarely been self-sufficient in terms of food supply and its modern pattern of agriculture reflects a combination of public policy and comparative advantage.
Most UK agriculture is intensive and highly mechanised, with the use of chemical fertilisers and insecticides routine. By European standards it is very efficient, although that does not necessarily make it profitable. This intense nature was compounded in the post-War years, with fields being expanded at the expense of hedgrows. This process has been heavily criticised for damaging biodiversity
Since the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century, the UK's uplands (including Wales and the Scottish Highlands) have largely been associated with animal husbandry and forestry.
East Anglia and South West England have been centres for grain production, while much of South East England has specialised in market gardening. The county of Kent was so well known for this that it is often referred to as the Garden of England.
The detailed pattern of modern UK agriculture is heavily influenced by the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union.
Primary industry
The UK's primary industry sector was once dominated by the coal industry, heavily concentrated in the Midlands, Yorkshire North East England and south Wales. The coal industry is all but gone - despite substantial reserves remaining - leaving a legacy of dereliction and environmental damage and exacerbating already present regional disparity.
The major primary industry is North Sea oil. Its activity is concentrated on the east coast of Scotland and North East England.
Manufacturing
| Region | Manufacturing Employment |
Manufacturing as a % of total employment |
|---|---|---|
| North East | 175,569 | 18.2 |
| North West | 499,020 | 17.6 |
| Yorkshire & Humber | 383,641 | 18.4 |
| West Midlands | 494,798 | 21.6 |
| East Midlands | 383,360 | 22.1 |
| Eastern | 333,781 | 15.0 |
| South East | 436,753 | 12.0 |
| South West | 302,288 | 15.0 |
| London | 287,211 | 7.1 |
| Wales | 200,951 | 18.6 |
| Scotland | 302,473 | 13.6 |
| Great Britain | 3,799,845 | 15.1 |
| Source: ONS Annual Business Inquiry | ||
At one time or another virtually every product that can be imagined has been made in the UK. In particular its heavy manufacturing drove the industrial revolution.
A map of the major UK cities gives a good picture of where manufacturing occurred, and often specialisations could be identified: in particular Birmingham, (automotive) Glasgow (shipbuilding), London (everything), Manchester (textiles), Newcastle (shipbuilding and steel), Nottingham (apparel, medicine).
Today there is no heavy manufacturing industry in which UK-based firms can be considered world leaders and no priouduct in which a UK city or region is the word leader. However, the Midlands, in particular, remains a strong manufacturing centre and the East Midlands Development Agency has a policy to mainting this characteristic.
More recently, high technology firms have concentrated largely along the M4 motorway, partly because of access to Heathrow Airport, but also because of agglomeration economies.
Finance and services
Once, every great city had a stock exchange. Now, the UK financial industry is concentrated overwhelmingly in the City of London and Canary Wharf, with back office and administrative operation often dispersed around the south of England.
London is one of the world's great financial centres, which is one of the factors that is commonly considered to make it a world city. Central London contains some of the most expensive commercial property in the world because of this.
From around the early 1990s London has been able to boast of having more U.S. banks than New York, as well as being host to branches of more than 500 overseas banks. It is one of the principal financial centres of the world, usually ranked alongside New York and Tokyo as one of three where any serious financial player must be represented.
The City of London boasts around 300,000 employees, largely concentrated in the financial and professional sectors.
Within London, the desire for banks to be there put pressure on the City of London's ability to accommodate them. In the mid-1980s a crisis point was reached and, although the City was able to expand its stock of modern office space, this did not happen before Canary Wharf had been set up as a competitor. The irony is that Canary Wharf was built in the London Docklands that had, until 1970, been among the largest docks on the world. All manner of goods had been shipped from the factories of east London to the world.
In this respect, Canary Wharf is arguably more symbolic of the changed economic geography of the UK than any other place.
Regional disparity
The combined effects of changing economic fortunes, economic restructuring and the decline of the UK as an imperial power have created the so-called North-South divide, in which decaying industrial areas of the north of England and Scotland contrast with the wealthy, finance-and-technology led southern economy. This has led successive governments to develop regional policies to try and rectify the imbalance.
The success has been, at best, patchy and the uneven distribution of economic wealth in the UK has led to migration from north to south, creating serious pressure on the southern housing market. However, in 2004, house prices in the north of England and Scotland have been increasing faster than those in the south.
This is not to say that the south is uniformly wealthy: some of the worst pockets of deprivation can be found in London, especially east London.
References and further reading
- An Historical Geography of England and Wales, Robert A. Dodgshon, R.A. Butlin, Academic Press, ISBN: 0122192524
- The Changing Geography of the United Kingdom Hugh Matthews, Vince Gardiner (eds), Routledge, ISBN: 0415179017
- Spatial Divisions of Labor, Doreen Massey, Macmillan, ISBN:0333594940
- The book and film Akenfield, by Ronald Blythe and Peter Hall respectively, painted a detailed picture of agricultural life in Suffolk, from the turn of the century to the 1960s (although fictional, Akenfield was a amalgam of eight real villages).
See also
External links
- Office of the Deputy Prime Minister - controls regional policy
- Department of Trade and Industry