Urban Decline (Routledge Revivals) by David Clark

Author:David Clark [Clark, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Human Geography, Demography
ISBN: 9781135095062
Google: TYDdAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-09-13T05:50:29+00:00

Of all the changes outlined in the majority report, those concerning the conurbations were among the most far-reaching and most politically contentious. They amounted to a complete redrawing of the political geography of metropolitan England. The merging of the county boroughs to create the three metropolitan areas would of itself have given the West Midlands, Merseyside and Greater Manchester (SELNEC) increased power and influence. The Commission went much further, however, by proposing a very loose set of boundaries for these metropolitan areas. They were to include not only the whole of the physically built-up area but large parts of the dependent hinterland as well. These proposals for the metropolitan areas cannot be regarded as ‘city regional’ in the strict sense since the suggested boundaries did not encompass all daily movements into and around the conurbation centres. However, they did represent a compromise between the theoretical notion of the city region and the requirements of practical administration. With the lapse of time it is easy to forget just how geographically extensive were the metropolitan areas that were proposed by Redcliffe-Maud. Thus the proposed West Midlands metropolitan area was to consist of the county boroughs of Birmingham, Dudley, Solihull, Walsall, Warley, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton together with extensive tracts of surrounding Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire (see Figure 11). Within these boundaries the authority would have ample land for peripheral expansion, housing overspill and new industrial developments and initiatives.

A strong urban orientation also characterized the proposals for the shire counties. Insofar as local circumstances and the preservation of existing loyalties allowed, the pattern of county boundaries was drawn up to reflect the city regional influence of the major freestanding cities. The proposed fusion of town and country was reflected in the labels used by the Commission when they referred, for example, to ‘Bedford and North Buckinghamshire’ (Unit 47), ‘Bournemouth and Dorset’ (Unit 40), and ‘Sunderland and East Durham’ (Unit 4). Although the freestanding cities would lose their coveted county borough status, their size and centrality suggests that they would have dominated the new counties. Moreover, the fact that unitary powers were proposed for these areas would have given the cities considerable influence over these wider areas. For example, it seems reasonable to suppose that as the major centre of population and economic activity, and the main focal point, Coventry would have exercised dominance over the whole of the proposed county of ‘Coventry and Warwickshire’ (Unit 28). The same pattern would be repeated across large parts of the country. Rather than merely running their affairs as tightly bounded county boroughs, the freestanding cities would become the focal points of local government power in non-metropolitan England.

The Commission reported to Harold Wilson’s Labour Government in 1969. In the government’s response published in the White Paper Reform of Local Government in England (HMSO, 1970), the Commission’s proposals for unitary county and two-tier metropolitan government were accepted. However, the West Yorkshire conurbation and the South Hampshire growth region were added to the list of metropolitan counties (see Table 16).

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