Growth of British Industrial Estates, 1900-1939

During the last two decades research on industrial districts, flexible specialisation, and high-tech regions has highlighted the importance of the local business environment to successful industrial development. Nineteenth century Britain developed a series of specialised industrial districts, providing pools of skilled labour, highly developed ancillary trades and services, networks of cooperative subcontracting relationships, and (in some cases) rented factory accommodation including power and utilities. However, the 'new' industries of the 'second industrial revolution', tended to locate outside such districts, in new 'green field' industrial areas. These often involved a new, more formally constituted, form of industrial agglomeration - the industrial or 'trading' estate. Closely associated with the rise of electric power and the internal combustion engine, and highly concentrated in the South East, industrial estates rapidly expanded to accommodate plants employing around 285,000 people by 1939, including some of Britain's best known companies such as Ford, HMV, Hoover, Lever Brothers, Mars, and Metropolitan Vickers. Despite considerable contemporary interest in their development, there has been little academic analysis of the general growth of pre-1939 industrial estates. This may be due, at least in part, to the paucity of quantitative and other evidence regarding their early development.<br> <br> The main aims and objectives of the research project from which this dataset arose were:<br> (1) To asses the contribution of industrial estates to the growth and location of new manufacturing enterprises in interwar Britain;<br> (2) To examine the ways in which location of interwar industrial estates boosted firm growth;<br> (3) To explore the contribution of industrial estates to fostering locational externalities for the firms which located on them;<br> (4) To examine the regional impact of industrial estate development.<br> <br> <br>