Introduction

It is commonplace to anyone that has ever lived in or seen a large city that you have to travel to do almost anything. Going to work, to the shops, to the cinema, a restaurant, to the hospital, school, community centre – then back home – are just a few of the daily activities that involve some form of travel. The journeys themselves could be made in different ways: by walking, by cycle or car; or by some form of public transport, like the bus or train. And as you travel around a city, it is equally obvious that, to varying degrees, activities are functionally clustered. The city centre has offices and the principal shops; there are factory districts; warehousing centres; residential areas separated by social status and date of construction; an entertainments district; out-of-town megastores, and so on. Once you look in detail at these broad, functional spatial separations, even closer specialisations emerge. The City of London, for example, is often just regarded as the financial centre, but within it there is a myriad of specialist centres: legal, printing, jewellery, insurance, banking, stock dealing, shipping and commodities dealing. Once such spatial specializations emerge, they have a remarkable tendency to survive for a long time. Yet they are not immutable, as the waves of deindustrialization that have hit Britain have shown.