First identified in the late 1970s and early 1980s
by writers such as Fothergill & Gudgin (1979)
and Keeble (1980), this urban-rural manufacturing
shift has accompanied all of the economic
downturns and relative recoveries of the
last two decades, and represents the single most
powerful trend in manufacturing location since
the Second World War (North 1998). Finally,
both of these trends have reflected the tendency
for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
to play an increasingly prominent role in local
economic development: a tendency which arguably
says as much about the decline of large
firms in successive tides of deindustrialisation
as it does about the income and employmentgenerating
potential of SMEs themselves (Curran
& Storey 1993; Cosh & Hughes 1998).