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Divided Nation

There are encouraging signs of recovery. Prosperity has returned already to a large area of Britain - a huge triangle stretching across southern England between CAMBRIDGE, BRISTOL and BRIGHTON. Here are expanding new towns, such as Milton Keynes, Harlow, Stevenage and Crawley, and resuscitated older ones like Swindon. From HAMPSHIRE to the valleys of the CHILTERNS, villages have doubled in population. The electronics industry, much of it defense-related, is among the growth leaders of a new, high technology industrial revolution. However, the decline of the older' smokestack' industries - coal, iron and steel, textiles, heavy engineering and so on - has deeply affected Scotland, Wales, THE MIDLANDS and the north of England, creating major unemployment areas and draining away manpower to the more affluent south-east.

This was factor in an upsurge in regionalism in the 1 970s, when nationalist political parties in Scotland and Wales gained sufficient strength to make themselves felt in the General Election of 1974. Devolution, the dispersal of political power from the central parliament in Westminster to proposed new assemblies in Scotland and Wales, became dominant topic of political discussion. The issue was finally put to Scottish and Welsh voters by a referendum in 1979 - with the result that schemes for regional parliaments were abandoned.

The new realignment of industry and workers is, in fact, a fairly modest reversal of the huge population shifts generated by the mightiest social and economic upheaval of all - the Industrial Revolution that made the nation an empire and changed the world itself. British ingenuity was what sparked it; coal was what fueled it - coal by the billion tonnes won from seams scattered through England, Scotland and Wales.

The revolution created immense wealth and prestige for the country. It financed Britain's expansionist policies abroad and the military muscle to safeguard them; and the wealth of empire poured back to the mother country to complete the cycle. It also created poverty, squalor and misery as men, women and children were drawn into the insatiable maws of mines and factories. Wages were often at starvation level, working hours long and housing frequently congested - miles of brick terraces in streets blackened by the smoke that now enveloped the ever-expanding industrial towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions, the new factory owners and entrepreneurs paid scant attention to the cost in human terms of products stamped "British Made'.

Reform was slow, despite the efforts of a few philanthropically minded industrialists to improve the lives of their employees. Mill owners such as Sir Richard Arkwright, in the early years of the revolution, and Sir Titus Salt, in its Victorian heyday, were far ahead of their times. Arkwright (1732-92) and his son built two cotton mills In the Derbyshire village of Cromford - and lavished money on the village, building a church, a school and houses for themselves and their employees.

Next: Titus Salt