Industrial Futures for the UKAuthor(s): Colin MasonSource: Area, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1983), p. 74Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20001882 .

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74 Annual Conference

even if after the Presidential Address of the preceding evening, they are not the 'soul'of transport geography. Their publication by TGSG in 1983 is eagerly awaited.

David A. Halsall Edge Hill College of Higher Education

Industrial futures for the UK

The Industrial Activity and Area Development Study Group used the 50th anniversary of the IBG to organise a forward looking session on Industrialfutures for the UK. J. Goddard (Newcastle) opened the session with a paper on New information technology and regional development in Britain which summarised the results of study undertaken by CURDS for the Regional Policy Directorate of the EEC. He argued that any re-industralisation of Britain on the basis of new information technology would be to the detriment of peripheral regions because of their low share of information technology manufacturing capacity, the concentration of the computer services industry in south east England and the low rates of process and particularly product innovation amongst manufacturing establishments in peripheral areas. In his paper New manufac turing firms in northern England, D. J. Storey (CURDS, Newcastle) challenged the view that new businesses offer a realistic method of alleviating unemployment in Britain's depressed industrial regions. He pointed to the small number of jobs that new firms create, the large proportion of such jobs that are generated by just a handful of firms, the lack of significant job creation after the first four or five years of a new company's life, and the significant proportion of new enterprises that fail within the first six years of operation. P. W. Daniels (Liverpool), in his paper Service industries: supporting role or centre stage? suggested that there were grounds for arguing that industrial geographers should devote considerably more attention to the service sector. He noted that the service sector has frequently been regarded as simply passively responding to manufacturing growth or decline, a view which is now demonstrably incorrect. Finally, P. J. Damesick (Birkbeck), who is rapporteur to the panel set up by the Regional Studies Association to undertake an inquiry into the future of regional policy, presented a personal interpretation of some of the issues to have emerged in his paper Prospects for the future of regional

policy in the UK. He suggested that the case for regional policy currently rests on social and political arguments rather than on economic grounds as formerly. Damesick considered that the scope for an effective regional policy was very limited given that different strategic views of the prospects of the UK economy each forecast a continuation in the decline of manufacturing employment and in the light of the lost opportunities for the dispersal of service sector activities to peripheral regions.

Colin Mason

University of Southampton

Geography and literature at the IBG

In tune with the presidential theme to the conference, the fifth annual meeting of this informal group was devoted to the general interplay of literature and language as interpreted by geogra phers. David Lowenthal (UCL) wove his customary spell with Fact, fition and faction. In the beginning fact and fiction, history and literature, were fused, and although separation began in the seventeenth century each has since become more like the other. History, as well as literature, deforms, while recent fusing has produced an identity crisis in the form of faction; television confirms the veracity of this new genre. A really fictitious story would not be

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