The Entrepreneurial City: The Role of Local Government and City-Centre Redevelopment in Post-War Industrial English Cities

This article will look at one of the key aspects in the role of local government in post-war Britain by considering how local authorities adopted broadly entrepreneurial strategies, working in partnership with the private sector, to attract investment and redevelop large sections of Britain’s major city centres from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Focusing on some of the traditional industrial cities, it will examine the idea of the entrepreneurial city and how, while it has come to partially define the role of local government from the 1980s onwards, broadly similar approaches and attitudes to city-centre development were a marked feature of the role of local government policies from a much earlier period.