Depression - 'Two Britians'

According to the historian Bryn O’Callaghan there were really two Britain's in the 1930s:

• There was the Britain which depended for its living on the old, staple industries such as coal and shipbuilding.
• The other Britain was built on new industries making new products – motor vehicles, electrical goods, man-made fibres.

Certainly, the prosperous south-east of England was a world away from depressed south-east Wales and the north of England. New investment, new housing, better roads and efficient rail transport transformed London and the surrounding Home Counties. Businessmen and industrialists found it cheaper and easier to set up a factory in somewhere like Slough than in somewhere like Merthyr Tydfil. Slough had better road and rail links and it was nearer London, a city of nearly 6 million people. London and the densely populated south-east could provide a skilled workforce and a ready market for buying goods. 80 per cent of the new factories built and 65 per cent of the new jobs created between 1931 and 1937 were located in London and the south-east of England. There was little outward sign of poverty in these areas. In fact, it was in these areas that the building boom occurred which, according to historian A. J. P. Taylor, ‘was the outstanding cause of the recovery of the thirties.'

To speak of an economic recovery in the 1930s might appear premature if not insensitive especially for the thousands of unemployed living in the so-called special areas, but the fact is that between 1932 and 1935 some three million houses had been built and nearly a quarter of a million slum houses had been demolished. This activity accounted for over 30 per cent of the increase in employment by 1939. However, it must be remembered that this economic boom and the jobs…