Britain has a duty to give fresh life to its faded ports

Author: Tristram Hunt
Date: 08/03/2010
Publication: Financial Times

What is wrong with Britain's ports? Recent figures from the Centre for Cities think tank (of which I am a trustee) reveal that nine of the 10 British cities with the fewest business start-ups are ports. While comfortable inland conurbations such as Milton Keynes and Crawley averaged almost 40 new value added tax registrations per 10,000 people between 1994 and 2007, cities such as Plymouth and Sunderland managed barely half that. The booming ports that once underpinned British industry and empire are now in real danger of business collapse.

At the height of Victorian prosperity, it was entrepreneurial, metropolitan Liverpool that fuelled the north-west's companies. One visitor to the Liverpool Exchange in the 1870s described looking down upon "a crowd of merchants and brokers swarming and humming like a hive of bees. All around the enormous hall were desks or screens or easels or huge slates covered with the latest telegrams, notices of London stock and share lists, cargoes, freights, sales, outward and homeward bound ships". The docks, too, were compelling: "Thousands of men are here measuring packages, invoicing goods, shipping merchandise; the tramp of horses, songs of stevedores, and shouts of sailors make a very Babel of industry." Today, that cosmopolitan bravado has all but evaporated, as the business start-up figures show.

Across the Pennines, William Ewart Gladstone described Middlesbrough as "the youngest child of England's enterprise", an "infant Hercules" whose industrial and trading prowess would wow the world. It was said of this north-east citadel that, "The iron it supplies furnishes railways to Europe; it streaks the prairies of America; it stretches over the plains of India . . . It has crept out of the Cleveland Hills, where it has slept since the Roman days and now, like a strong and invincible serpent, coils itself round the world." Today, Middlesbrough stands as the worst performing city for VAT registrations.

Similar stories can be told of the linen and ship-building port of Belfast; the jute capital of Dundee; the fisheries city of Hull; and the coal-mining might of Sunderland. All languish in the lower leagues for entrepreneurialism. Of course, there are seismic historical forces at work: the end of empire, postwar de-industrialisation and the 1960s move towards dock containerisation hit these cities hard. Many had become too dependent on their import-export economy or on single, large industries. Often, they failed to develop an educational ethos - why study, when there were good, unskilled, well-paid jobs on the docks, the boats and the railways?

From Trieste to Marseilles to Bilbao, continental governments have also wrestled with post-industrial ports. What is particularly worrying in the British case, though, is the limited success of government policies in turning round business confidence. Despite progressive and well-funded initiatives to promote enterprise, start-up rates have remained stubbornly static over the past 15 years.

The past decade has probably seen too much "place-making" at the expense of capacity building: lots of revitalised historic cores and dock-front leisure opportunities, with not enough concentration on schools, skills and transport. There is now a keen sense in Treasury circles that further physical investment will have to be matched by improvements to human capital.

This is especially so in certain port cities that have become over-dependent on public sector employment. As the axe begins to fall on government spending, these one-time entrepôts will look exposed. So what is needed is not more Whitehall relocations, science parks or expensive venture capital schemes, but an urban policy that confronts structural problems of economic legacy and geography. That means a much clearer lead from regional development agencies and a concerted approach to improve educational attainment and skills levels in struggling cities.

Glasgow, Rotterdam and Barcelona are good examples of how a postindustrial port can return to life. Such a journey begins with a realistic appreciation of strengths and weaknesses. Yet history and instinct should also play a part. Britain is an island nation. It surely owes its great port cities - the Ninevehs and Babylons of the industrial, imperial age - more than managed decline.

This article first appeared in the Financial Times.