Voluntary or potentially compulsory depopulations in the UK?

DH1Commuter · 2026-10-18T18:38:43+0100

Egg Centric said:
Im not really familiar with them in depth, having done little more than drive through them, but Thornley and Bill Quay are very "commutable" to somewhere with plenty of skilled employment so it's not a surprise to see them become a relative success. I guess Horden kind of is commutable now there's a station but it's pretty new (and you can see most people who live in the numbered streets clearly don't have cars by how empty they are and I dunno if I'd want to leave one there if I lived there tbh, although I'm sure there's plenty of nuance if you're local). Blackhall Colliery still totally uncommutable.

Yes, the cat D villages that survived and have done ok since are basically all commuter-heavy now - BQ was on the railway (Pelaw, now Metro) to Newcastle, S Shields and Sunderland, Thornley works for Durham, Teesside, Newcastle and Sunderland due to being by a major junction and the villages around Durham City have grown as the city benefited from university/govt offices/council/NHS/light industry/professional services growth.

Places like Chopwell or Horden it would have been a kindness in the long run to push through Cat D and let them depopulate.

As for those facing major coastal erosion, I think very few will be economically justified in saving long-term unless vital infrastructure happens to be nearby. So possibly the coastal railways along with anything near a nuclear plant, gas terminal or port.

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Yew · 2026-10-18T20:28:41+0100

ainsworth74 said:
But, life and humans in general aren't very good at being utilitarian/technocratic. Perhaps its just me but the thought of Horden colliery closing in 1987 and then in 1988 we load the 8,000 odd residents onto buses and ship them around the country to towns and cities feels wrong, feels like something a Fascistic or Stalinist regime would do.

It seems to be that building new industries for those towns, where possible, is the solution

ainsworth74 said:
Equally the idea of just saying that you can continue to live in Horden but we're not going to be providing you with any financial support, no benefits, nada unless you move hardly feels equitable either.

I feel that money is better invested in bringing in new industries to places, and supporting training and a controlled transition, compareed to dealing with the fallout of a lazzez-faire approach when it inevitably fails and then you're paying the benefits bill.

HSTEd said:
Governments have been trying to move jobs around by fiat for decades and so far it hasn't really worked.

~~Indeed, I feel that the benefit of moving jobs from London isn't really for the towns receiving the jobs, but as a blow-off-valve to control rents in London.~~ EDIT: Actually, no, I don't think I think that, I think I'm going to go with "transferring jobs costs a lot of political capital, and has a high risk of creating inter-regional tensions, relative to the likeliehood of success of the outcome , compared to supporting new industries or organic growth"

Tetchytyke · 2026-10-18T20:49:43+0100

ainsworth74 said:
They seem to just now be misery factories to a great degree. We spend vast sums of money on enabling people to live in unremitting poverty for several generations in a row at this point. Wouldn't it be better spent on moving people to places where there is more opportunity?

The people with the skills and the good health necessary to take up opportunities elsewhere have moved and taken up opportunities elsewhere. These villages and towns are dying because the only people left are the ones who either can’t or won’t get on their bike and move to where the jobs are.

Of course it’s always someone else’s fault, and so these are the places where the far right are doing very well politically.

It isn’t exclusive to the UK either. Look at places like Mecklenberg-Vorpommern, exactly the same state of affairs there.

The trouble is, you could move these people anywhere in the country and they’d be no better off. In fact, if they had to survive in more wealthy/expensive places they’d struggle even more.

Egg Centric · 2026-10-18T20:50:13+0100

Yew said:
It seems to be that building new industries for those towns, where possible, is the solution

Who is going to build these industries though? While there's no law of the universe that says it has to be the case, in practice state managed industries with very few exceptions fail miserably. Private enterprise can be attracted to a certain degree, but it needs the right kind of (at least potential) workforce and it isn't going to find that in Horden - it might have done when the pit closed but it's too late now.

I agree this is a good solution when it can be made to work but some places feel too far gone.

Tetchytyke · 2026-10-18T20:55:44+0100

Yew said:
t seems to be that building new industries for those towns, where possible, is the solution

Industry now requires brains not brawn. The people with the brains go off to university and they don’t come back.

Now financially incentivising companies to move to these places may help prevent the brain drain. But I’m not sure it actually does move the dial very much- there are a lot of well-paid technology jobs at Sellafield but West Cumbria is still incredibly deprived.

Egg Centric · 2026-10-18T20:56:10+0100

Tetchytyke said:
The people with the skills and the good health necessary to take up opportunities elsewhere have moved and taken up opportunities elsewhere. These villages and towns are dying because the only people left are the ones who either can’t or won’t get on their bike and move to where the jobs are.

And it's not as if they have to move to London either. There are loads of jobs within 50 miles of Horden.

Tetchytyke · 2026-10-18T20:58:53+0100

Egg Centric said:
And it's not as if they have to move to London either. There are loads of jobs within 50 miles of Horden.

And with the new station it’s easily commutable into Newcastle. It’s not the shortest commute but it’s perfectly doable, I used to do it in the other direction when I lived in Newcastle and worked for Durham University, including having to spend a couple of days a week down at the old Stockton campus.

Bletchleyite · 2026-10-18T21:08:00+0100

Tetchytyke said:
And with the new station it’s easily commutable into Newcastle. It’s not the shortest commute but it’s perfectly doable, I used to do it in the other direction when I lived in Newcastle and worked for Durham University, including having to spend a couple of days a week down at the old Stockton campus.

Where the town is near a big city that's usually a decent fix. It can also mean businesses will locate there. Kirkby's two stations will certainly make it economically stronger than Skelmersdale, for instance, despite both being in a similar position otherwise.

Egg Centric · 2026-10-18T21:11:13+0100

Tetchytyke said:
And with the new station it’s easily commutable into Newcastle. It’s not the shortest commute but it’s perfectly doable, I used to do it in the other direction when I lived in Newcastle and worked for Durham University, including having to spend a couple of days a week down at the old Stockton campus.

Yes, it will be interesting to see what a difference it makes. It's kind of thing that could be a genuine step change. I suspect they'd be best to demolish the housing and start again though (in the main), although a group made up mostly of people who don't have to live there (from the looks of it, although there are figurehead locals, and my interpretation may be wrong) is doing their best to stop this since apparently terraced streets are rare in the north.

Bletchleyite · 2026-10-18T21:12:35+0100

Egg Centric said:
Yes, it will be interesting to see what a difference it makes. It's kind of thing that could be a genuine step change. I suspect they'd be best to demolish the housing and start again though (in the main), although a group made up mostly of people who don't have to live there (from the looks of it, although there are figurehead locals, and my interpretation may be wrong) is doing their best to stop this since apparently terraced streets are rare in the north.

Demolishing perfectly good terraced housing was a mistake in the 1970s and it would be a mistake now.

The housing we could do with demolishing is the junk designs that pervaded the early New Towns (fortunately aside from the Lakes Estate and Netherfield MK lacks this as it's a later design).

Yew · 2026-10-18T21:13:30+0100

Egg Centric said:
Who is going to build these industries though?

I think the first point is that a one-for-one replacement is likely not to work, we need to build it up in the aggregate. I think a more accurate description would be "across a mixture of different roles and sectors in the vacinity". I think saying "sorry the coal mine is closing on fridya, don't worry you start at the solar panel factory a week on monday".

Egg Centric said:
While there's no law of the universe that says it has to be the case, in practice state managed industries with very few exceptions fail miserably.

I think this is an interesting thing to explore, but the counterpoint would be that selling them to overseas corporations hasn't worked out massively well for UK jobs either.

Egg Centric said:
Private enterprise can be attracted to a certain degree, but it needs the right kind of (at least potential) workforce and it isn't going to find that in Horden - it might have done when the pit closed but it's too late now.

I agree this is a good solution when it can be made to work but some places feel too far gone.

I completely agree, we need to be starting this process in the spin-down phase of industial activites, not burying our heads in the sand and crossing our fingers stuff just works out okay.

Voluntary or potentially compulsory depopulations in the UK?

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