what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label service industries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label service industries. Show all posts

Sunday, June 10, 2018

Microcosm of a post-industrial town

It was exactly 50 years ago I ran my first successful election campaign in what was then a shipbuilding town (in its heyday, the yards kept 10,000 souls employed - if and when, that is, there were enough orders) and still remember the scorn with which my remarks at one meeting - about education being the future core of work in the town - were greeted. 
In 1968 it was only those of us who kept an eye on the United States who had a glimmering of the world that lay ahead. Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock may not have been published until 1970 and Daniels Bell’s The Coming of Post-industrial Society until 1973 – but Warren Bennis had written his “Coming Death of Post-Bureaucracy” in 1966

I’ve just looked at the latest employment statistics for this Scottish District which tell me that by far and away the largest source of employment in the area I was raised in - and represented politically for 22 years - is that of ……health!!! (and social work) - with a figure of….. 7,000 (no less than 23% of the total). 
Next, perhaps surprisingly, is the retail trade (at 4,500) – with education coming in at what I find is a surprisingly low figure of 2,500. I made that 1968 prediction in a room of what was then the town’s new Further Education College – clearly having a sense of what was to be the phenomenal (and global) rise of the further and higher education industry… 

Only 1750 people are still working in manufacturing industry……That’s 5.8% compared with about 70% in the 1950s. The town was selected by IBM as the location for an industrial plant which opened in 1954 to great ceremony; grew in its heyday to about 3000 employees – but now employs precisely zero!!! There is a fascinating video here which starts with that opening before suddenly cutting to the desolation on the site when it completely closed a few years ago
“Public administration” has its own separate category (basically the town hall and social security office) and also has a surprisingly low statistic of 1500 people – although there are 3500 jobs in another curious category of “administrative and support services. Significantly only two thirds of the 30,000 jobs are full-time......

I know that these days talk of “real jobs” and “dependency” is old hat – if not politically incorrect. But there is not a single job in the agricultural sector (the area used to have some farms) – and electricity, gas, water and sewage have only 90 workers.
This is simply not sustainable! The talk about “resilient towns” needs to get louder – particularly with the frightening picture which is emerging of the effects of automation…..


Tales of journeys around Britain have attracted readers since at least Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). The 1980s and 1990s saw that interest grow – think Bill Brysen and Jonathan Raban (by boat) to which the most recent addition was JD Taylor’s superb tale of a bike tour – Island Story - whose political commentary takes us back to the writings of Cobbett’s Rural Rides. George Borrow and George Orwell…
Writers such as Owen Hatherley have added a new dimension which builds on the architectural writings of Ian Nairn. I am just waiting for his New Kind of Bleak – journeys through Urban Britain (2012) which does not, however, include Greenock  

Those interested in tracing the rise and fall of a typical Scottish town should have a look at - 
- this collection of photos of the town in the 1960s (by a Frenchman)
- the collections here of the municipal museum (art and photographic)
- a rather grainy black and white of the town in 1959 
- a collection of old photos here; and here
- a short video montage of the town in the 1960s  
- a drone view of the contemporary town