Those who know me will be surprised to hear I’ve been reading a Policy Exchange report recently. PE, for those who don’t keep up with the ever-growing roster of UK think-tanks, is the leading centrist (read: sane) entity amongst the conservative ‘tanks. Unlike its crazier cousins, such as Civitas and Politeia, Policy Exchange serves as more than a mouthpiece for bored minor ex-ministers and a peddler of slightly silly state-the-obvious reports.¹ Despite the concerns of the Fourth International, PE is essentially a serious enterprise. And, determined to be taken as seriously as lefties such as IPPR, PE has taken the radical step of commissioning and publishing actual academic research, by actual academics.

This report, into the history of Britain’s urban policy, makes depressing, if fascinating reading. Five or six decades of urban policy, it argues, have essentially failed. Attempts to encourage, or even compel, businesses to open new factories in depressed areas simply prevented investment, the report states, and may have cost the country jobs overall. Despite the interference of more than 30 different government agencies in the last 20 years, Liverpool remains plagued by poverty and crime. And while they may enhance quality of life, it’s by no means clear that cultural institutions - the current regeneration fad - bring meaningful long-term economic benefits.

Ultimately, the report argues, to try to artificially kickstart the economies of Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and other depressed northern towns is simply to miss the point: these cities are poor for a serious economic reason. Not just the collapse of manufacturing, which could theoretically be replaced by other industries. Quite simply, they’re in the wrong place. Northern towns, in most cases, developed because of their access to the sea, through harbours, rivers and canals. In the age of shipping, this made them ideally placed for taking part in international trade. But now that goods are increasingly carried by road, and trade is more than ever with continental Europe, it’s the South that reaps the benefits. While the Northern cities languish, one of the fastest growing towns in the UK is Milton Keynes, the former laughing stock, now invaluable for distribution thanks to its central location and hub-like position in the road network.

The implication of this - and the failure of government policy to transform Northern cities in a lasting way - is a radical and scary one: that any attempt to rescue Northern towns as majors cities should be abandoned. Depopulation and migration to the South should be accepted as inevitable. Rather than spending billions trying to make these economies viable sources of employment for hundreds of thousands, we should let them shrink to a more sustainable size. Once, it made sense for cities like York and Durham to be the largest in the country; no-one tried desperately to sustain their importance as the industrial giants developed. Markets made these cities large, the report suggests, and markets must be allowed to shrink them again.

The government rejects the report’s findings, of course. But assuming the report’s analysis - prepared by an economic historian at LSE as well as Policy Exchange’s staff - is correct, the ramifications are faintly frightening. The South can barely squeeze in enough houses as it is, especially in the face of local opposition. And the tasks of managing such population decline in the North would be hugely difficult, with badly underpopulated built-up areas having to be cleared and demolished to prevent them becoming hotbeds of crime. But the vision of a bottom-heavy UK, with the South an extended mega-conurbation around London and the North a largely reclaimed rural zone, is a fascinating one.

Of course, there are lessons here for other countries . In the US, Detroit has struggled to cling onto its population in recent years in the face of the collapse of its manufacturing industry; its current population of just over 900,000 is around half that in 1940, when the city’s role in war manufactures earned it the nickname “the Arsenal of Democracy.” But perhaps it has to get much smaller before its population meets equilibrium with the jobs realistically available. And what about New Orleans? As the city rushed to rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, few stopped to ask if a city in the path of regular hurricanes might be better off abandoned.

As people become ever more mobile, it’s likely that cities will grow and shrink in response to economic trends faster than ever before. This could require a revolution in building, with cheap temporary buildings replacing grand civic projects. The implications of this for the quality of the built environment are, obviously, pretty unpleasant. But it might be better than the alternative: the endless, desperate struggle to artificially inflate depressed regional economies; the vast vistas of abandoned buildings, built to last generations but no longer required.

Even if we were prepared to face the implications of essentially abandoning the idea of the Northern city, it’s hard to see the idea gaining political traction under Labour, with its dependence on Northern votes. And the Conservatives, too, couldn’t afford the fury massive influxes of Northern migrants would create in the South. But political opposition might not make any difference. Just as government intervention has failed to stem the economic decline of Northern cities, nor can it stem their depopulation. Manchester and Liverpool have both lost almost half their populations since 1930. Whatever the government thinks, it seems the fifty-year battle to rescue the economies of the North may already have been lost.

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I suppose you could accuse me of jumping on the Mercury bandwagon. Although the ex-Pulp man’s croonings had floated onto my radar before his latest album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, I did take the opportunity of the nomination to give it a proper listen. For the uninitiated, Coles Corner is a richly orchestrated smoky-lounge bar album of wistful ballads that recalls Pulp’s This is Hardcore more than their more commercially successful material. It’s unashamedly retro, and unashamedly Americana.

Which got me thinking. As many of you will know, I went to university in Sheffield, and spent four mostly very happy years there. I loved the city, and I’ve always been pained by the tendency of those who don’t know it to write it off as a typical northern hellhole. While Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds have been rehabilitated in the public eye as they’ve been regenerated economically, Sheffield still seems to exist in some vague collective memory of the unpleasant 1980’s North. Weather maps, that handy barometer of city status, invariably show Leeds before Sheffield. If it wasn’t for The Full Monty, it’s easy to think people would forget the city exists at all.

And yet Sheffield boasts, amongst other things, one of the richest musical underground histories of any city. Beginning with the post-punk era, Sheffield bands have been consistently some of the most challenging and interesting, and often commercially successful: from the Human League, Heaven 17, ABC and Cabaret Voltaire in the early 80’s, to Pulp, the All-Seeing I and its offshoot Eye Monster and Moloko in the 90’s. Plus, as the home of Warp Records, Autechre and Gatecrasher, the city made a vital contribution to the club explosion of the 90’s, with Gatecrasher’s epic 24hr marathon - at which a couple of my braver friends did bar work - probably the dance scene’s most well-known Millenium Eve offering. Not to mention that one of the biggest-selling rock bands of the late 80’s, Def Leppard, and the band behind the fastest selling debut album of all time, the Arctic Monkeys, all hail from the city.

And yet, held up against Liverpool or Manchester, Sheffield is nowhere in public awareness. There are no bus tours, no elaborate BBC Easter programmes, no Mike Winterbottom films, to celebrate the scene (although there’s this reasonable documentary). How many of the bands mentioned above did you know were from the city? Indeed, the city’s attempt to recognise its and the rest of the country’s pop music acheivemetns - the National Centre for Popular Music - was a complete disaster, not in small part because the city’s people saw it as a bit silly. In Manchester, it would have had a chance.

So why this lacklustre performance, if not of the actual artists of the city, then of the idea of the city as a cultural centre? A quick listen to Hawley’s music offers an answer. Rooted in some imagined America, some time before punk and probably before the sixties, the album can’t honestly be said to represent any serious evocation of Sheffield life. And, thinking about it, the same goes for most Sheffield music. The Human League’s eyeliner-soaked energy-synth melancholy reflected the harsh landscape that created it, but sought a distant glamour with its gender-bending style. The Leppard never hid their determination to win an American audience with sounds they’d recognise. Even Pulp generally eschewed geographic specifics for a sort of universalist poor-geek solidarity (most in evidence on “Mis-Shapes”); their most obviously rooted lyrics are about London (”Mile End,” and “Common People”’s references to St. Martin’s College). While Joy Division/New Order confronted a range of apocalytic and fantasy images in their lyrics and videos, their essential misery always seemed to have seeped up from the streets of the then-beleaguered city. And the “Liverpool sound” is incredibly clearly defined, with the La’s and the Coral making no efforts to hide their debt to their Beatle forefathers.

The simple truth is there’s just not enough in Sheffield to build a mythology on. No crucial role in imperial trade; no guilt-ridden involvement in the slave trade, or proud part in abolition. A few closed-down steel factories, of course, but even the major battles of the 80’s industrial decline were fought elsewhere in Yorkshire. The empty building next to the old City Hall, that was built as the HQ of the National Union of Mineworkers but quickly abandoned, neatly summarises Sheffield’s sense of having not quite taken proper part in the industrial boom, and postindustrial decline, that drove British northern pop music for forty years or more.

Hawley’s one clear use of Sheffield detail makes the point. Coles Corner, the nominated album, is named after a meeting point in the city popular with lovers. I’ll admit to racking my brains when I heard this, as I’ll admit to not hearing of it when I was there. It turns out that it’s between two main commercial streets, and is so named because the Cole Brothers department store (the local face of John Lewis) used to be there. Now it’s a HSBC. As a point of collective memory go, it’s fairly mediocre. The Monkeys are discovering this now: in a recent interview on American radio, they blushingly batted away the interviewer’s attempts to pin down details of the “Sheffield scene.” Gatecrasher was referred to as “something our brothers told us about.” Attempts to build some sort of Madchester-style pop moment about Sheffield are doomed to fail when the live scene consists of the Leadmill, the University, and a few small pubs.

Sheffield is pulling itself up, of course, with the usual formula of designer clothes stores, lottery-funded musuems, and trendy branding. But its heart isn’t really in it. The much-heralded cultural industries quarter, designed to use the city’s creative heritage as a springboard for economic growth, was frankly a disaster. The pop museum now a student’s union, the area’s dominating business now is a Spearmint Rhino. Previous attempts at revitalisation, based around the city’s equally under-recognised sporting heritage, were equally doomed. Because Sheffield never found a really strong narrative of despair in the 1980’s, it naturally hasn’t embraced the narrative of rebirth that has captured Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds.

Instead, as always, Sheffield’s mind is on something else. Hawley’s Sinatra impersonation, like Phil Oakey’s eyeliner, shows the Sheffield spirit is still about escape and about fantasy: making something as mundane as a department store and turning it into romance. The Arctic Monkeys do boast a strong sense of place, and it’s lovely to hear the references to Hunter’s Bar and Rotherham in “Fake Tales of San Fransisco;” but let’s not start calling them anything as grand as a Sheffield Sound. The real spirit of Sheffield has one eye on the past, the future, the other side of the sea, wherever. Lying in the gutter and staring at the stars, I suppose. That’s what makes the city so invigorating. That, I think, is why I remember it so fondly: it’s a place that can’t help but encourage dreaming. That’s why it’s Hawley, and not the Monkeys, who really represents Sheffield in the Mercury shortlist. I wish him luck.

Richard Hawley website
Richard Hawley on Myspace
Listen to Richard Hawley
Watch “Cole’s Corner”:
Click here to view the embedded video.

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