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