Abstract

This paper focusses on the geographies of deindustrialization and disadvantage in England’s deindustrializing towns. An assumed alienated working-class based in post-industrial towns have been central to recent debates on urban fragmentation and rising populism, mirroring developments in Europe and North America where peripheral deindustrializing areas have received overdue attention in both academic work and regeneration policy [Pabst and Lawson, 2018; Silva, 2019]. These people and places are said to have been marginalized and relegated, resulting in personal and social bodies accumulating feelings of alienation over generations. However, recent discourses tend to homogenize deindustrializing towns as wholly deprived and their histories subsumed into an overarching narrative of decline. The purpose of this paper is to advance less homogenizing and more geographically specific analyses, tracing and highlighting the heterogenous histories and conditions within and between deindustrializing towns. Following, I take a comparative urbanisms approach, investigating three deindustrializing towns that have featured heavily in recent socio-political discourse on ‘left behind’ places: Mansfield, Grimsby and Rotherham. Using archival research and critical GIS of deprivation data, I argue that experiences of disadvantage are more complex and heterogenous than political science discourse accounts for with inter- and intra-territorial differences in the processes and spatialization of relegation.