Manufacturing boom time has given way to new economic balance
CITY FACES THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGING DEMAND AND HABITS
BOOMING manufacturing companies once dominated the city’s economy – and experts explained how the landscape has dramatically shifted from the 19th century to the present day.
In the 1730s Nottingham started to become known as a “centre of textiles” but, at the turn of the 20th century, there was a shift from lace into hosiery and related trades.
Will Rossiter, associate professor at the Nottingham Business School, explained how some huge local companies rose to prominence.
He said: “At that time you kind of see the rise of some of the firms that would come to dominate Nottingham during the 20th century.
“So there you’re looking at Boots, you’re looking at Raleigh and later you’d be looking at Players, or British American Tobacco as they now are.
“But Players, Boots and Raleigh were the three big local employers and manufacturers who dominated the city in the mid-20th century.
“So really that period, between the end of the Second World War and probably the 1990s, was very much the story of Nottingham - the story of those three companies.
“They provided a lot of employment, an awful lot of people worked in relatively well-paid, relatively secure skilled and semi-skilled work in the manufacturing plants operated by those three firms.”
Boots, for example, rapidly expanded in a matter of years.
Having manufactured in Goose Gate, the company moved to Island Street, to the city’s east side.
By 1884 Boots had three stores – and, initially, over-the-counter medication was manufactured at Island Street as well as soap, beauty products and toothpaste.
By 1893 the number of stores had risen to 33 and, from the late 1890s, the company extended out into Station Street and Parkinson Street.
In 1893, 80 people were employed at Island Street – and, seven years later, 1,000 people were employed across the city centre network.
However, Prof Rossiter, who specialises in regional and local economic development, said in the 1980s and 1990s the manufacturing operations of the three aforementioned businesses “went into a significant decline”.
“Boots closed their city centre manufacturing facility on what’s now the Island site,” he said.
“It was manufacturing and it was warehousing. They closed that down and concentrated their local manufacturing in Beeston.
“They had been manufacturing in Beeston since the 30s so that wasn’t new in itself, but there was a rationalisation.
“But if you’re looking at the local economy you move from this position, in probably the 1950s, when more than half the local economy, in terms of jobs, was made up of manufacturing employment.
“If we asked that question now – how much employment in the city of Nottingham is manufacturing? - it’s actually about four percent.
“Over the space of half a century you’ve gone from a situation where manufacturing was probably more
than half of local employment to a situation where it is no more than about four percent.”
Prof Rossiter said there’d also been a rise in “business services”.
“Probably the most obvious example of that is Experian,” he said.
“Experian originated as the credit checking or credit referencing arm of Great Universal Stores.
“Essentially it was a back office function set up to support Great Universal Stores, based in Nottingham, but eventually was split off and developed as an entirely separate business by Sir John Peace.
“It evolved from the ’70s through into the major corporate presence that is Experian now.
“But in a sense that company and their history are quite emblematic really of the shift away from manufacturing towards services in general.
“And also I would say alongside business services, health and education: the two universities have become significant players in Nottingham, as has the health sector.
“And that took a real step up in the late ’70s when the QMC was opened.
“At the time it was the biggest purpose-built research active and teaching hospital that had been built in Europe at the time. It was huge.
“So you see a big shift away from manufacturing towards services.
“That’s the big change that we’ve seen if you’re thinking about the local economy of Nottingham over the long term.”
Explaining some of the challenges this shift has presented, he said: “The manufacturing industry in the mid20th century provided in large volumes relatively good quality jobs, I’m not saying they weren’t hard work, but relatively good quality jobs in terms of pay, security.
“But nevertheless pretty good, quality employment for the masses.
“The problem we now have, it seems to me, is that with the rise of services we’re struggling to find equivalent quality of employment for people who perhaps don’t have a university education.
“If you’ve left school with GCSES or
A levels, and you haven’t got a highlevel qualification, the employment on offer locally presents some challenges.
“There are some great professional and technical roles at the top end and managerial stuff in Nottingham but there’s also this large mass of fairly elementary roles at the other end of the labour market and not so much in between.
“The challenge really that the city faces is how to generate quality jobs for those people who don’t have a university education, higher level qualifications, and, therefore, are not going to access those managerial, technical and professional roles.”
Fast forward to the present day and the coronavirus pandemic has impacted on the local economy – particularly on the retail and hospitality sectors.
Prof Rossiter said: “Quite clearly we’ve seen a big move away from city centres, both on the part of shoppers, consumers – but also from office workers who are now discovering the ‘joys,’ in inverted commas, of working from home.
“We don’t yet know how people are going to respond to this experience, either on the employer side or actually employees.
“Some have discovered that actually it’s quite nice to work more at home and workers can be quite productive, particularly in some kinds of professional and managerial roles.
“I think what happens to the city centre in that context is a bit of a challenge.
“The big thing about city centres is, in a sense, if you’ve got falling demand for retail space, falling demand for office space, what does that mean for the way we use city centres in the future? Are we going to have to rethink more fundamentally their role?”
Independent retail analyst Nelson Blackley explained that shopping habits had changed during the pandemic.
He said: “There has been a switch during lockdown – people are choosing to shop away from city centres and shopping centres.
“However, it is the smaller local, urban centres and high streets, as well as edge-of-town retail parks, that have led the retail renaissance so far.
“With millions working from home, shoppers are visiting their local – and, in many cases, independent – stores because it’s quicker, more convenient and [you can] avoid large crowds or queuing.
“Customers are also attracted to the convenience of easy parking at retail parks and the fact they are outdoors is also appealing to all those shoppers now concerned about ‘infection protection.’
“Like so many aspects of life right now, everything depends on how quickly, and how effective, vaccines are to help things get back to ‘normal.’ “Some aspects of retail – in particular the millions of shoppers now very comfortable shopping online, as well as the increased home delivery capacity of major grocers – are unlikely ever to return to precovid 19 levels. “However, I do think the vital social aspects of shopping, which have been at the heart of towns, cities, and high streets for hundreds of years, will eventually recover and the demand for ‘experiences,’ which includes non-retail but as part of a day out shopping, will return.”
The challenge that the city faces is how to generate quality jobs
Professor Will Rossiter