BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY AND CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING
Building Bridges between Economic
Geography and City and Regional
Planning: Office Location in London
and the South East in the 1960s
JOHN GODDARD
The paper recounts the origins of a PhD under Peter Hall’s supervision at the London
School of Economics on a key issue of the mid-1960s – city centre office development
and its role in binding tertiary sector businesses to the city. There is a sub-plot of
a supervisor who opened all manner of doors to further research that underpinned
his own role in the higher echelons of policy-making. The paper summarizes the
key findings of the doctorate and discusses the influence of Swedish scholarship on
business contact networks and the emerging field of quantitative geography. The
paper concludes with a reflection on Peter Hall’s indirect influence on the principles
underpinning the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies established
by the author at Newcastle University after 1975.
One of Peter Hall’s many achievements
was to connect insights from research on
the changing location of economic activities
to city and regional planning. Like many
scholars this built on his PhD, in his case
at Cambridge as one of geographer Gus
Caesar’s ‘Praetorian Guard’ (Phelps and
Tewdwr-Jones, 2014). The thesis was about
the location of industry within London
from the mid-nineteenth century onwards
and in this Peter analysed the clustering of
related manufacturing firms in quite small
areas of the city. This paper tells the story of
how Peter persuaded me to do a PhD with
him at the London School of Economics on
what was one of the key issues in London
in the mid-1960s – office development in the
city centre and the role of office clusters in
binding office businesses to the city. There is
a sub-plot of how Peter opened all manner of
doors to me to help my research, which then
underpinned his contributions to the higher
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 41 NO 1
echelons of policy-making. He was a leading
light in the South East Economic Planning
Council and its plan for the South East,
which supported nodes around London with
offices decentralized from central London.
This was supported by the advisory role of
the Location of Offices Bureau. The Planning
Council also put pressure on the Greater
London Council to develop a planning framework for the 10 square miles (26 km2) of the
Central Area of London that took account of
the concentration of office development there
and the national government’s Office Development Permit (ODP) system. Peter saw my
work as contributing to this and secured
funding from the Planning Council to support
it. ODPs were much despised by the historic
City of London Corporation, which covered
one-tenth of the Central Area and represented
the UK financial community that was concentrated there. In this context Peter got me
into the consultancy team commissioned
9
PROFESSOR SIR PETER HALL: ROLE MODEL
by the Corporation to evidence the dense
network of highly localized linkages that
could be damaged by the OPD system.
This paper summarizes my key findings
and discusses the influence on my work, on
business contact networks and in the emerging field of quantitative geography, of
scholars that Peter introduced me to in
Sweden. The paper concludes with a reflection
on Peter’s indirect influence on the principles
underpinning the Centre for Urban and
Regional Development Studies that I established in Newcastle University after moving
there in 1975 and which like him, seeks to
combine academic work, policy advice, public
engagement and contributions to practise
through consultancy and in particular to build
a strong link between economic geography
and territorial development.
The Industries of London
In a move that was to characterize his future
career Peter published an accessible version
of his PhD on ‘The Industries of London
since 1861’ in the then popular Hutchinson
University Library Series (Hall, 1962). In
this he mapped the clustering of traditional
industries in inner London drawing attention to the intense division of labour between
highly specialized firms and to the agglomeration economies that underpinned each cluster.
He argued that the many small firms were
linked by the physical movement of semifinished goods and bound together by access
to the pool of skilled labour and the scale
and nature of the London market. Peter then
went on to examine the suburbanization
of industries in the 1930s and 1950s made
possible by technological advance and improved transport and communications – both
enduring themes in his later work. In the conclusions to his book Peter made extensive
reference to the 1940 report of the Royal
Commission on The Distribution of the
Industrial Population (The Barlow Commission) set up in 1937 to review the problem
of industrial decline in the older industrial
10
areas of the North, Wales and Scotland and
the burgeoning growth of newer industries
in London and its environs. But writing in
the 1960s Peter drew attention to the consequences of the dramatic growth of employment in central London which was not in
manufacturing industries but in offices. One
of the most notorious developments was
Centre Point at the bottom of Tottenham
Court Road, the first high-rise building in the
previously residential, retail and entertainment area of the West End (figure 1). Peter
wrote:
Until 1955 this growth attracted little attention
from planners. The County of London Plan in 1943
ignored the problem; the Greater London Plan in
1944 dealt with it in hope rather than policy; the
machinery for national policy created in 1945–7
ignored it; and the 1951 L.C.C. Development
Plan made generous increases in the areas zoned
for offices… No less than 44.4 million square
feet of office space was approved in central
London between 1948 and 1958… The resulting
controversy has unfortunately taken place in an
almost complete factual vacuum. The subject
of office location has been virtually ignored by
economists, economic historians and economic
geographers. (Hall, 1962 p. 180)
Office Location Patterns in Central London
This was the challenge Peter presented to me
when I joined him as a new PhD student at
LSE in 1965. More specifically he encouraged
me to explore the factors that tied one out of
seven office workers subsequently identified
by the 1966 Census in England and Wales to
the ten square miles (26 km2) of the officially
designated Central Area of London.
I started my work following Peter’s model
by mapping the changing location of offices
in Central London between 1918 and 1966
using trade directories. I added the dimension
of the birth, death and migration of firms
drawing inspiration from work on industrial
clusters as incubators for new business
undertaken by an industrial economist in
the West Midlands (Beesley, 1955). Peter was
on the Editorial Board of the journal Urban
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 41 NO 1
BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY AND CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING
Figure 1. Centre Point. (Photo:
Mike Peel [www.mikepeel.net])
Studies and encouraged me to submit a sole
authored paper based on my findings and
this was published in 1967 (Goddard, 1967).
The paper was much influenced by the work
of the economist Robert Murray Haig for
the New York Metropolitan Regional Plan
way back in 1926 to which Peter referred me
(Haig, 1926). Haig had identified the intense
division of functions between businesses in
downtown New York based on a detailed
analysis of business types. The selection of
case studies I made for the Urban Studies
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 41 NO 1
paper – publishing, advertising agents and
civil engineering consultancies – revealed a
declining spatial concentration of firms over
time, but still within an extended central area
which, I argued, was partly attributable to the
increasing use of telephony alongside face
to face contact between businesses in each
cluster (Goddard, 1969).
At this point Peter introduced me to the
work of Swedish geographers and business
management experts working on the role
of contact systems in regional and business
11
PROFESSOR SIR PETER HALL: ROLE MODEL
development, most notably Gunnar Tornqvist
and Bertil Thorngren at the Stockholm School
of Economics. (Tornqvist, 1970; Thorngren,
1970). Peter was a frequent visitor to Sweden
and much influenced by the Swedish
approach to territorial development. In particular Thorngren had been using contact
diaries to identify those long-term, horizon
scanning relationships between firms that
were highly dependent on inter-personal
relationships (which he called ‘orientation’
contacts) and which contributed to nonpecuniary external economies linked to
agglomeration. He distinguished these from
middle range relations with established
partners or ‘planning’ contacts and routine
day to day links which made extensive use
of telecommunications in the form of ‘programmed’ contacts. He had identified these
underlying structures through multivariate
analysis of contact diary data using the
technique of Latent Profile Analysis.
I saw this work as highly relevant to my
own on office agglomeration but how could
I obtain data to identify the precise functions
of offices in Central London and measure
interdependencies as revealed by contact
networks? And then came one of those
lucky breaks that Peter engineered for me.
Before I had completed my PhD Peter had
moved to Reading where he established
links with the Professor of Economics in the
University, John Dunning, who had secured
a consultancy contract to advise the City of
London Corporation on its development
strategy for the City. Peter introduced me
to Dunning and I in turn drew attention to
confidential data I knew were held by the
Corporation under the terms of the Office,
Shops and Railway Premises Act and which
recorded the precise nature of business and
employment details of each establishment in
the City. The consultants enabled me to gain
access to the records and develop a detailed
location and business type coding.
Although he could not be described as a
quantitative geographer, Peter encouraged
me to use the technique of factor analysis
12
introduced into geography by one his US
contacts, Brian Berry, to identify groups
of offices with common location patterns
within the City. This analysis enabled me
assist the consultancy to identify clusters of
spatially interdependent businesses within
this particular part of the central area of
London and which might be damaged by
ongoing central government bans on office
development. Now as Editor of Regional Studies,
Peter encouraged me to submit a paper based
on my findings which the consultants’ used
in their final report to the City Corporation
(Goddard, 1968; Dunning and Morgan, 1971).
But this analysis of spatial clustering could
only infer functional inter-dependence. Peter
once again came to the rescue by persuading
the South East Economic Planning Council
to fund through the LSE an extension of my
work for the City of London Corporation to
the whole of the Central Area and to include
within this study an analysis of contact
networks using the methods developed by
Thorngren. This involved hiring research
assistants to help code the location and nature
of business of 30,000 office establishments
and selecting a sample of these businesses
to participate in a three-day diary survey of
face to face and telephone contacts. This huge
undertaking enabled me to complete my
PhD, subsequently published in Progress in
Planning (Goddard, 1973). The spatial analysis
revealed a number of business clusters and
the diary survey groups of firms strongly
linked together by orientation contacts and
other more potentially mobile firms with a
predominance of programmed or routine
contacts networks that made greater use of
telecommunications.
The final link in my analysis of Central
London was provided through Peter’s
relationships with the London Transportation
Survey. Peter secured access for me to a
large-scale survey of taxi movements by
traffic zone in the central area which I was
able to analyse as an indicator of personal
movement between different parts of the city
centre, the bulk of which were likely to be
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 41 NO 1
BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY AND CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING
to support inter-personal contact networks.
Factor analysis of the movement data enabled me to complement my analysis of
location patterns and contact networks by an
analysis of physical movements and identify
a number of functional areas within the city
centre (Goddard, 1970).
The Communication Factor in
Office Decentralization
My findings for the South East Planning
Council prompted Peter to make a link for
me to another of the Cambridge group of
economic geographers, Gerald Manners,
who had been appointed chairman of the
Location of Offices Bureau (LOB). LOB was
charged with encouraging offices to relocate
from central London – in today’s parlance to
help address market failures by providing
information on the costs and benefits of
relocation. Amongst other things it mounted
an advertising campaign on the congested
Underground to encourage office employers
to relocate (figure 2). LSE was funded by LOB
to compare firms that had relocated with
those that had approached the agency but
decided to remain with a view to identifying
differences in communication patterns and
the potential influence of the greater use of
telecommunications in the case of the latter
group (Goddard and Morris, 1976). The
bulk of relocations from Central London
were to centres around London such as
Reading. However these relocations were not
contributing to a more balanced pattern of
office development nationally. In a reflection
of his enduring concern for more balanced
regional development Peter encouraged me
to use the data I had obtained to consider the
possibility of longer distance relocations to
metropolitan areas outside of the South East.
Exploring this possibility suggested that
higher order functions could be located if
London based ‘orientation’ contacts could
be replaced by local linkages within regional
capitals such as Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle (Goddard and Pye, 1977).
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 41 NO 1
Figure 2. A typical example of a Location of
Offices Bureau advertisement displayed on the
London Underground in the 1960s.
National Settlement Systems
As others have commented in relation to
Peter’s career, his focus on London was tensioned against his concern for the national
settlement system and more balanced regional growth hubbed around provincial
cities. This was reflected in his work for the
Town and Country Planning Association
and his definition of Standard Metropolitan
Labour Areas (or Daily Urban Systems)
derived from the US model of Standard
Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Peter used
these areal units as a framework for the
major study of the impact of the UK Planning
System that he led at the think tank Political
and Economic Planning (PEP) on the
Containment of Urban England (Hall, 1974).
13
PROFESSOR SIR PETER HALL: ROLE MODEL
Although this work was mainly influenced
by US experience, Peter was also plugged
into the work of the Swedish geographer,
Torsten Hagerstrand and his studies of time
geography, more specifically to the space/
time constraints that meant that people and
businesses perforce operated within bounded
spaces (Hagerstrand, 1970). Peter introduced
me to Hagerstrand at the University of Lund
whilst I was still a postgraduate and Torsten
subsequently asked me to work with him on a
project for the then European Free Trade Area
on New Patterns of Settlement (Goddard,
1974). This broadly speaking identified the
importance of sub-national centres in the
national settlement hierarchy.
So when the opportunity of an endowed
research chair in Regional Development
Studies in Newcastle was announced (named
after another Cambridge geographer, Henry
Daysh, who had influenced Peter’s supervisor, Gus Ceaser) both Peter and Torsten
encouraged me to apply. More specifically
they both argued that I should practise what
I had preached by relocating from London
and establish a new network of local links to
complement those I had in the capital. From
his time-geographic perspective Torsten
pointed out to me that there was ‘an excess
of worthwhile combinations’ in London and
that in Newcastle I could bring together
multi-disciplinary research and influence
policy and practice in a way that could
make a real difference to the city and region.
Given his long-term advocacy of the need
to bridge the regional divide in Britain (e.g.
Hall, 1975), a divide that was widening with
the concentration of information intensive
occupations in London and the South East,
and for a strong local research base to
support public policy interventions, Peter
concurred with this view.
Conclusion
When I arrived in Newcastle in 1975 I took on
the role of pulling together research relevant
to urban and regional development from
14
across the university. Like its counterparts
in the great northern cities of England,
Newcastle University was established with
local support to underpin the industrial
development of the city in the latter part of the
nineteenth century (Goddard, 2009). During
the Great Depression of the 1930s Henry
Daysh and the Department of Geography
had played a key role in the development of
the UK’s first industrial estate. In the postwar period research relevant to city and
regional development had emerged in a
number of the departments of the University:
Geography, Town and Country Planning,
Economics, Politics, Sociology and History.
After lengthy battles I persuaded the Senate
to allow me to establish in 1977 a multidisciplinary Centre for Urban and Regional
Development Studies (CURDS) with three
posts – my chair, a fixed term Fellowship
and a secretary. The subsequent growth of
the Centre is another story in which Peter
was less directly involved, although I suspect
his support was important behind the scenes
when CURDS was recognized in 1980 as one
of the first of the Social Science Research
Council’s Designated Research Centres with
eight years of core funding.
Although we were not working together
Peter had a profound if indirect effect on
the Centre’s profile. For example, he recommended Ash Amin who was his doctoral
student in Reading for appointment as the
second holder of our fixed term Fellowship.
He also handed over the editorship of
Regional Studies to me and this was very
important in establishing the standing of the
Centre. More generically Peter had taught
me that academic research of the type for
which Ash subsequently developed a global
reputation could be combined with work
for and with policy-makers and translating
that work into practice through consultancy.
While he undertook a vast range of activities
himself across this spectrum, I sought to build
a centre through external funding which
was large enough for members to perform
different roles at different times. And while
BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 41 NO 1
BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY AND CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING
London was a key focus for Peter, CURDS
sought to help the North East of England
through high-quality academic work with
national and international standing that at the
same time addressed many of the challenges
facing the region (e.g. Amin and Goddard,
1986). Peter’s interest in technological
change, including the role of information
and communications technology in city
and regional development has been a core
concern of the Centre alongside his interest
in the definition of city regions (e.g. Hall
and Preston, 1988; Hall and Castells, 1994;
Hall and Hay, 1998). Like Peter, members of
CURDS have not eschewed advocacy – for
example around new approaches to regional
governance. Most important of all CURDS
has followed Peter’s example of supporting
doctoral students and young researchers,
providing them with openings to enable
them to develop their own careers. Finally,
in his work on cities Peter frequently referred
to the role of universities and when I became
Deputy Vice Chancellor responsible for the
University’s city and regional engagement
Peter remained an inspiration. This has
continued in my work on the university and
the city (Goddard and Vallance, 2013). So for
me personally I remain indebted to Peter as
a great mentor in the broadest sense of that
word. It was therefore a great pleasure for
me when he gave what was to turn out to be
his last public lecture, the Sir Thomas Sharp
lecture, in Newcastle in May 2014.
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