Читать книгу Great Book of Spoon Carving Patterns - Joseph Fullman - Страница 23

Fishing, shipbuilding, trade (of various dubious sorts including, for more than a hundred years, slavery), smuggling and mining have all played their part in creating the economy of the Southwest. But today, from Bath to Land’s End, one industry towers above them all – tourism. Out of every five pounds spent here, one goes on some kind of tourist service. In many places tourism has supplanted the long-established industries (the last mine closed in the 1990s), and in those places where traditional trades continue, on the farms and in the fishing villages, tourism often provides a vital form of additional revenue. This is no doubt set to increase in the future unless farming and fishing can arrest their current decline.

Manufacturing hasn’t been wiped from the landscape entirely. The extraction of kaolin, or china clay, for use in pottery and paper-making is still a going concern in Cornwall. Both Plymouth and Appledore maintain shipbuilding industries. And Bristol still has relatively healthy finance, technology and aeronautics sectors, which is just as well as the city has never been able to draw the paying punters in anything like the numbers of its more preened and pampered neighbour, Bath. Elsewhere, however, the demise of industry has often been replaced by a big gaping void. Cornwall endured such a pronounced decline in the 1980s and 1990s that the European Union was prompted to pour hundreds of millions of pounds of aid into the economy. The effect, however, has arguably been limited. Per capita earnings here are still on average 10% lower than they are for the country as a whole.

This is of particular concern because, not only is the Southwest a pretty sparsely populated place (out of Britain’s 60-million-odd citizens, around 3 million, or just over a twentieth, are resident in these three counties, most of them in Devon), but those that do live here are not really of an age to kickstart the economy. The Southwest’s population is old and getting older. There are more senior citizens here than anywhere else in Britain, with over a third of all residents aged fifty or over. It’s a situation that is likely to get worse. The lack of opportunities for young people forces many to move out of the region, most heading to London and the Southeast. At the same time, the Southwest is fast gaining itself a reputation as England’s retirement home. So it’s a double whammy. Not only are the locals getting older as the younger generation seeks its fortunes elsewhere, but new arrivals are often at the end of their working life. This situation helps to make the Southwest a calm and placid place, but not a very economically vibrant one.

And just to throw another problem into the mix, many of the region’s more desirable villages are now suffering from second home syndrome: wealthy professionals from other parts of the country buy up holiday cottages, which are then left vacant for many months of the year, damaging the local economy.

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. Tourism has brought wealth to the region and provided work for many people. There’s just a feeling that, on its own, it doesn’t provide quite enough opportunities to stop the region’s youth from seeking their fortunes elsewhere.