Regions Revisited: The Importance of the Region in Understanding the Long-Term Economic and Social Development of Europe

Abstract

The regional pattern of most European industrial economies that had emerged by the late 19th century has remained in place ever since. Even where manufacturing and working coalfields have largely disappeared, taking the initial material basis of an area with them, such regions and regional identity endure culturally and in the popular imagina-tion, endorsed by the legacy of the built environment, by memory, and by the various reifications of the heritage industry. Visit any one of Europe’s old industrial areas and you are struck by the influence of the past. It is easy to see and to sense the material and social survivals from the dominant employment sectors of recent centuries. They have left their mark on the topography, housing, industrial and transport infrastructures, civic buildings, and social spaces, public amenities and market places, waste heaps and derelictions, museums and heritage sites. The 21st-century inhabitants of these regions have inherited a strong legacy of a material and cultural past that emerged from the industrialization process, even if it is overlaid with later arrivals and departures of jobs and migrants. To visit a former ship-building town is entirely different from experiencing an old textile centre. Sites of coal mining and heavy industry have inherited their own distinctive cultural and physical remains manifested in living conditions, social and family lives, and skills and aspirations, as well as in bricks and mortar.