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The North East of England: place, economy and people

Elizabeth Brooks and Mel Steer

Introduction: a portrait of the North East

This chapter introduces the North East of England: its people, industries, how it is governed, how it compares to other regions and its future outlook. Before this account, the origin of the idea of the North East is considered, bearing in mind that, at least in England, regions are both historically recent and fragile entities, their integrity challenged by a raft of devolution initiatives at sub- and supra-regional level. This sets the scene for the next section, a thumbnail portrait of the North East’s geography, industry, heritage and culture. The section further explores the challenges of deindustrialisation and of governance and economic restructuring. A final section explores how the North East compares with similar regions in England and Europe. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of what the future may hold for the region.

The idea of a North East region

Although it may seem to have always been with us, the idea of a North East region is a relatively new one. Soon after its emergence as a nation, England was split up into counties for the purpose of governance, a division that is reflected in today’s local government structure. Although regional terms such as ‘The North’ were in common usage, they were generally ill defined and subject to interpretation. The North East only began to be viewed separately from the North West during the mid-18th to early 19th century (Green and Pollard, 2007: 12–20), at which point academic interpretation, industrial specialisation and, mainly as a consequence of this, political interests clustered around the distinctive characteristics of the area, in particular, the varied commerce and industry based on the ready supply of energy from the Great Northern Coalfield. The recognition of a North East region in England has subsequently waxed and waned, along with periodic attempts to address regional economic problems and create regional governance that have met with only temporary or partial success (Elcock, 2014). For this reason, studies and detailed analysis at the North East region level, though relating to a wide historical period, date mainly to the recent period of regional governance (1994–2010/12), with a number of notable exceptions outside of this period (for example, McCord, 1979; Jackson, 2019).

While the region continues to exist culturally and in official statistics, various decentralisation drives since 2009 have resulted in many supra- and subregional governance bodies, differently defined by economic, health and combined authorities, explored later in the section on governance; this has resulted in fragmented and overlapping governance structures, with consequences for transparency and accountability. Nevertheless, consideration of the historical path and current challenges of the constituent parts of the region suggests continued value in considering the region as a whole, as will emerge from the following sections.

A thumbnail portrait of the North East

The North East region of England covers a varied urban, rural and coastal landscape, with diverse communities and 12 local authorities (municipalities) situated in the region (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1: North East England and its constituent local authorities

Source: Wikimedia Commons (available under the Creative Commons CC0 License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License)

Population

The North East is the smallest English region outside of London, extending over an area of approximately 850,000 hectares. In the 2012 mid-year estimates, the region also accounted for only 4 per cent of the UK population (2.6 million), giving it the lowest population of any of the English regions, and one smaller than Scotland and Wales, though still larger than Northern Ireland. Over much of the 20th century, the North East suffered from population decrease, mainly due to net outmigration. Even as early as the years between 1927 and 1938, a national scheme to relocate people living in poor mining areas moved around 100,000 people out of the North East. In the 1950s, the population of the region fell by around 70,000, largely due to people relocating to other regions in pursuit of work (Renton, 2008). By the end of the 20th century, the Government Office for the North East (GONE, 2008: 7) was reporting a decades-long trend of outmigration. However, the trend began to reverse around 2008, as shown by the 2011 Census, which found that the population had risen by around 3.2 per cent since 2001.

Historically, the North East was always the site of population flows and exchanges, and archaeological artefacts bear witness to the diverse origins of troops sent to defend the Roman wall from across the Roman Empire, including Belgians, Dutch and even Syrian cohorts. The growing number of Christian foundations across Dark Age and medieval Northumbria embedded the importance of the region within wider European scholarship and exchanges, while invaders from what is now Scandinavia changed the population and influenced place names from the 8th century onwards.

The region has been a major centre for migration in two modern periods: the first was from 1820 to 1920, when it saw mass migration from Scotland and Ireland, mainly attracted by the high wages and abundance of work in the region; the second period has taken place since 1987 as a result of the government’s dispersal scheme, which has sought to distribute refugee communities across the country to moderate the impact of international migration on London and the South East (Renton, 2008). Academic studies have connected recent arrivals with the history of the region’s migration flows, while illustrating that their experience has varied with the type of community they have joined and the prevailing economic conditions (for example, Olsover, 1981; Lawless, 1995; Buckler, 2011).

Industry

The national image of the North East has undoubtedly been shaped by its past economic and industrial strengths in coal, steel, shipbuilding, heavy engineering and armaments, and indeed as one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution. It was economically important from around the middle of the 19th century until the last quarter of the 20th century. With the emergence of a global industrial system, the North East fell behind newly industrialising countries with abundant primary resources and a cheaper labour force. By the last quarter of the 20th century, the region’s economic role in the UK had significantly declined, a decline accelerated by the withdrawal of government subsidies to heavy industry in the 1980s.

In general terms, the region has been riven with internal inequalities throughout its history and its industry also participated in generating inequalities elsewhere, having been imposed on other nations through the political power of the British Empire (Hudson, 2005). This history of severe and visible inequalities (McCord, 1979) had its counterpart in influential thinkers challenging the status quo, including the historical North Eastern reformers and activists Thomas Spence, Josephine Butler, W.T. Stead, Emily Wilding Davison and Ellen Wilkinson (‘Red Ellen’). Spence was an early champion of rights for all, Butler and, fatally, Davison fought for women’s rights, while Butler and W.T. Stead also worked to combat child prostitution. Wilkinson was a politician and journalist who became the first female Education Secretary in 1945, introducing free milk and school meals. Notably, the region has a prominent link with the civil rights movement that stretches from Earl Grey (Foreign Secretary in 1806), who introduced the Act that abolished the slave trade, to Newcastle University awarding Martin Luther King an honorary doctorate in 1967. Between these periods, the important visitor Frederick Douglass (an abolitionist and former slave) lived for a time in Newcastle, where sisters-in-law Anna and Ellen Richardson raised the £150 to secure his freedom (Hodgson, 2016). The Richardsons also campaigned to refuse goods from slavery, to educate the poor and for teetotalism (Hodgson, 2016).

Deindustrialisation has resulted in improvements in air quality, healthier cities and a rural area that is increasingly attractive to ex-urban migrants, particularly in County Durham. The growing public sector and services economy that replaced industry created jobs that were accessible to, or even targeted, women workers (Hudson, 2005: 587). The range and quality of the region’s educational institutions has led to its growth as a ‘knowledge economy’. The low cost of property and land relative to the England average can provide a draw for in-migration and business relocation, and has allowed the development of a more outward-looking, multicultural region. The region’s long and often strife-riven industrial history has left a legacy of successful workplace organisation and campaigning; today, the North East region is notable for having the highest number of workplaces with a trades union presence in England, with over a quarter of the workforce belonging to a union (DBEIS, 2017).

Environment

In spite of its industrial reputation, around two thirds of the North East region is rural, with half of the rural area either designated as a national park (Northumberland and North York Moors) or as an area of outstanding natural beauty (AONB) (GONE, 2009). Although the imaginary of the North East in national policy continued to be centred around work and productivity, some awareness of its cultural and environmental assets emerged in the latter part of the century, when radio and television disseminated its traditions more widely (see later section on cultural regeneration) and tourism rose in prominence as part of its economy. In terms of environmental assets, the North East has been described as having ‘some of the UK’s finest high-quality and diverse countryside, and natural and built heritage, including a varied coastline ranging from extensive sandy beaches, dunes and inter-tidal flats, to spectacular cliffs, islands and rocky outcrops’ (GONE, 2008: 6). The region was awarded two world heritage sites in the mid-1980s: Durham Castle and Cathedral from 1986; and Hadrian’s Wall from 1987 – shared with the North West of England and part of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire international sites (GONE, 2008: 6).

Regarding its rural areas, the agriculturally productive land is mainly found along the coastal plain (particularly in Northumberland), while higher ground to the west provides large acreages of pasture (Faulkner and Gregory, 2010: 10). Along the line dividing the pasturage from arable land are located the region’s main historic market towns – due to their origins as places for exchange between the different products of each type of farming. While the rising role of coal in the region’s economy came to reduce their relative prominence, many of these towns retain regional significance as rural ‘hub’ towns and visitor destinations (Roberts, cited in Green and Pollard, 2007: 10).

There is a trend for the rural areas to increase in population at a higher rate than the urban ones, influenced by those from the urbanised parts of the region moving out to the rural west, as well as through in-migration from other regions by those in mid- to later life, who are particularly attracted to Northumberland and County Durham (Midgley et al, 2005: 6). At the 2001 Census, 16.9 per cent of the North East’s population lived in a rural ward (Midgley et al, 2005: 4). By the 2011 Census, this proportion had increased to 18.4 per cent of the population, while 81.4 per cent were classed as urban dwellers (ONS, 2013).

Governance restructuring

The North East’s distance from central government in London, and its proximity to the Scottish Borders, is a thread that runs through the governance of the region. The dominant neoliberal emphasis on regional productivity and employment continues to shape a negative image of the North East nationally, and in England, central government exerts a high degree of control over investment and spending (Raikes et al, 2019). Attempts to increase regional autonomy were made in 2004, when the North East was the first English region to have a referendum on an elected regional assembly. Based on a turnout of nearly 50 per cent, the proposal was rejected and, as a consequence, similar referendums that were planned elsewhere were abandoned (Rallings and Thrasher, 2006). Nevertheless, regional structures, including its regional development agency (ONE North East) and GONE, endured until the regional tier was abolished by the Coalition government (2010–15).

While regional devolution failed, various other forms of devolved governance have been introduced that have produced a confusing and fragmented institutional array. There are now four layers of regional devolution, added to disparate catchment areas used by the health, emergency and police services. This creates a disjointed picture of governance, with impacts for public participation and accountability (Shaw and Robinson, 2018), and many of the new bodies ‘fail to offer equity for rural communities and places’ (Davoudi et al, 2017: 20).

Of the four layers of devolution, the first consisted of supra regional growth deals, including the Northern Powerhouse, which unites North East, North West and parts of North Wales. At the subregional level, the first was city-region devolution (‘combined authorities’), introduced through the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009. By April 2018, 12 devolution deals had been announced for England (at the time of writing, 11 remain). Eight of these, including the Tees Valley Combined Authority and the North of Tyne Combined Authority, have elected ‘metro mayors’ (Wilson and Paun, 2019). Of the eight combined authorities with metro mayors, the North of Tyne and Tees Valley have the fewest devolved powers (Wilson and Paun, 2019).

The second layer of devolution (‘city deals’) was brought about through the Localism Act 2011. In December 2011, the first wave of city deals was launched, offering new powers over finance and planning to more than 30 major UK cities to date. Newcastle was in the first wave of the eight largest British cities, while Sunderland and the North East were in the second wave (Ward, 2018). A separate round of local growth deals was launched in 2014, applying to local enterprise partnership areas: the North East, Tees Valley and York, North Yorkshire, and East Riding growth deals were all announced in 2015.

A further trend that may raise concern for regional cohesion and spatial justice is the breaking away of more from less prosperous subregions. Real growth in gross value added (a measure of the worth of goods and services generated) between 2009 and 2017 in (what has become since 2018) the North of Tyne Combined Authority set of local authorities was 13.8 per cent, while growth for the same period in the Tees Valley Combined Authority was only 2.8 per cent (ONS, 2018).

Economic restructuring

The turn of the millennium saw a period of restructuring and improvement of economic performance for the North East. Regional gross value added for the North East grew by almost a third between 1995 and 2002 (Midgley et al, 2005: 4). The declining traditional industries (mining, steel, shipbuilding, chemicals and heavy engineering) gave way to a services economy, entrepreneurship, innovation and new forms of industry, including pharmaceutical, digital and biotech (GONE, 2008; CLES, 2014; Charles and Liddle, 2018). This transformation has been encapsulated in the phrase ‘from coal to call centres, from ships to microchips’.

The strong growth trend, which coincided with a period of high levels of investment from EU structural funds prior to the accession of East European countries to the EU, peaked in 2004 and has never been attained again since (Charles and Liddle, 2018). Besides a reduction in EU funds, the economy was hit by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent austerity; public sector jobs were particularly hard hit. Summary statistics from March 2008 to June 2017 show a decline in public sector jobs in the North East from 25.7 per cent of all jobs to 20.3 per cent of all jobs – effectively around 60,000 jobs, more than one in five, were lost to the public sector over this period (ONS, 2017). This was a greater proportion than any other English region and only comparable to Wales. This level of loss also generates local multiplier effects within the economy (CLES, 2014). By 2019, the North East had the lowest employment rate (72.2 per cent) of all nine English regions and UK administrations, even lower than that of Northern Ireland (ONS, 2019). Reciprocally, it had the highest unemployment rate nationally (at 5.8 per cent in 2019) (ONS, 2019), a labour market characterised by lower than average wages and high rates of poverty and poor health, demonstrating substantial challenges for social renewal.

Cultural renaissance

The modern cultural image of the region was to a great degree shaped by post-war arts policy. At the end of the Second World War, developments in broadcasting and cultural policy fostered the development of ‘cultural regions’ in the UK. Radio programme makers in the North East gave an outlet for the kinds of pipe music, popular songs, stories and dialect associated with the area – ‘The Blaydon Races’ ballad being the best-known example – which may have supported the consolidation of a regional culture (Vall, 2011: 7). The North East has some well-established world heritage sites, as mentioned earlier, and several established museums of national importance, including the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle and the Great Museum of the North (formerly The Hancock). Other formal expressions of culture, such as orchestras and art galleries, have historically been sparse in the region, but beginning in the 1980s, the provision of formal arts venues began to improve. Since the late 1980s, culture featured as a pioneering way to spearhead regeneration. The Gateshead Garden Festival in 1989 was one of the foundational initiatives in the region, using a cultural event as a way of attracting investment for regeneration, and attracted both national and international attention. Following on from its success, Northern Arts published a document entitled ‘The case for capital’ in 1995, which helped to bring in funding for culture-led regeneration, including the creation of what have since become iconic buildings and heritage attractions, and the improvement of existing features. Outstanding examples include the National Glass Centre in Sunderland and the Sage (international music centre) and Baltic (centre for contemporary art) in the Quayside area of Newcastle and Gateshead, with more projects, such as the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), following after the millennium. A recent addition is the Auckland Project, a museums complex in the Durham market town of Bishop Auckland that includes a restoration of the historic castle, a new Faith Museum, a viewing tower and a Mining Art Gallery. The original flagship regeneration projects, often with an arts focus, not only made the region a beacon for the economic benefits of a public and private sector mix in urban regeneration, but also raised its 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 and politically.

While EU structural funds are to be replaced by a UK Shared Prosperity Fund after the EU funding ends in 2020, concerns surround how it will operate, including: whether it will match or exceed EU investment; whether it will be devolved to regional decision-making or tightly controlled from the centre; whether there will be a smooth transition between EU and UK funds (Cowie et al, 2018); and whether the funds will become more politicised (Bell, 2017). Furthermore, the probable choice of the urban-located Local Enterprise Partnerships to manage the new fund has raised concerns over the future equity of distribution between urban and rural areas (Dwyer, 2018), which is of significance for the growing population of the North East that lives outside of its cities.

As this chapter has indicated, the North East region has an influential and varied cultural heritage, outstanding and diverse landscapes, with many distinctive cities, towns and villages, offering the potential for an excellent quality of life. Regional inequalities in wealth, prosperity and health, the effects of austerity, and the implications of Brexit present challenges for the foreseeable future. The outlook is uncertain for the economy and bleak for the vulnerable; however, the strength of the region rests in its people, and the case studies in the following chapters describe some of the initiatives that are offering hope.

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