The fortunes of our towns and cities have swapped
Patrick Hurley is the Labour MP for Southport
When I was a child, my home town of Prescot in Merseyside was thriving. The centrepiece of the high street was Lennons Supermarket, a local chain, and the rest of the shops were overwhelmingly made up of independent businesses. There was the Margaret Rose clothes shop, Graham’s toiletries, Showering’s the family butchers, a locally-owned video rental shop on the corner opposite Ray’s Bakery, and so on and so forth. There was a factory at the top of the street, British Insulated Callender’s Cables, or the BI for short. It employed maybe a thousand local people. For our cities, however, it was a different story back in the 1980s. In contrast to my thriving town, the inner city of Liverpool, just ten miles away, was an awful state. Botched town planning after the war, urine-soaked multi storey car parks, subways and skyline corridors you’d do your best to avoid, and an undercurrent of tension that made the place feel unwelcome.
Manchester, at the other end of the East Lancs Road, wasn’t any better, with every street corner seemingly an unloved brownfield site turned into an ad-hoc car park; dereliction rife; graffiti on so many buildings that had been built a hundred or more years earlier with such promise for the sharing of the proceeds of the industrial revolution. Yet fast forward thirty years, and things have changed utterly.
In my home town, the BI closed down, the workers all made redundant. The factory site became a retail park, with the big Tesco on it. And the big Tesco and all the other out-of-town retailers took trade away from the high street, leaving the town centre looking like a mouth with teeth missing. Shuttered shop windows, buddleja growing out of the roof tiles. The youth clubs are gone; the library that helped me learn to read demolished.
Until recently, it was a town that look depressed because it was depressed. But the cities are transformed. We no longer tend to use the term “inner cities”, with all the connotations it brings. Instead, we call them “city centres” – places of economic activity, cultural events, a huge amount of residential living, places teeming with life. The skyline of Manchester in 2025 is a wholly different proposition to what it was 30 years ago. And the old Second World War bomb sites of central Liverpool now house the Liverpool One retail development, rather than the somewhat misnamed Chavasse Park, a derelict site with some grass seed on that they told us was now an urban park.
The fortunes of our towns and cities have swapped. So the domestic challenge now is not to continually improve the centre of the largest conurbations in the country. The task, rather, is to bring up to standard the hundreds of towns that have seen better days. To work to reopen the youth clubs, to invest in our neighbourhoods, to bring back a sense of pride in place for the vast majority of our people.
In Southport, the most visible manifestation of the austerity years is the closure of our much-loved pier, a pier I’m working hard to get reopened. But the rot goes deeper than that. Department stories and state investment have fled the town. Street drinkers and rough sleepers have arrived. New grot spots appear by the month, overwhelming a council and a business and charity landscape that can’t cope. There’s one youth club in a town of 85,000 people, and there are too few places to go to socialise, whether you’re 18 or 80.
I mentioned earlier how the town I grew up in, just 20 miles or so from Southport, was depressed “until recently”. And that’s because the work that’s been undertaken there in recent years points the way to a brighter future for our towns. The Combined Authority led the way in an ambitious proposal to build a theatre there. The £40m Shakespeare North theatre now sits at the end of Eccleston Street where there had once been a huge bus turning circle. This development went hand-in-hand with the local council implementing a programme of built environment renewal in the town, working with private sector partners to renovate the town’s shop fronts, sandblasting the painted brickwork, removing the UPVC shop fascias and putting back in wooden, hand-painted shop signs and aesthetically-pleasing bay windows.
The result is a town of just 15,000 people or so, that now has a high street people want to visit again, a plethora of independently-owned shops, and a theatre-led night-time economy that can sustain several restaurants and cafe bars. It’s a model of renewal for our towns that doesn’t just hark back to the past, but which takes the best of our history and refashions something better for the 2030s and beyond. Policymakers would do well to look at Prescot’s story and learn the lessons.
So what previous Labour governments did for our cities, it falls on us to do for our towns. The British public are a fair people, they recognise what went wrong for those places, and they’ll give us a chance to put it right. But they won’t give us too many chances. And if we don’t put it right, they’ll be unforgiving in their assessment of us.
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