TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHESTER 1914-2000
Central government became increasingly
involved in the administration of Chester after 1914.
Its involvement was the creative force which determined the direction and level of social and environmental change. Small towns such as Chester tended to
suffer from the 'politics of the rates', which meant that
local politics were reactive, not dynamic. Most ratepayers were concerned primarily with keeping rates
low, with the result that local government alone was
unable to fund the creation of a healthy, beautiful, or
culturally stimulating urban environment. In particular, the problems and opportunities associated with
Chester's special status as a historic city would not have
been addressed without funding from central government. It was difficult at first to persuade Chester city
council of the need to preserve the city's historic
environment, because conservation cost money, and
the preservation of old buildings or archaeological sites
could interfere with more obviously profitable commercial developments. For many years the dilemma
was presented to Cestrains as a choice between incompatible opposites rather than as a unique opportunity.
They were asked whether Chester was to become 'a
dead museum piece rather than a living, dynamic city',
not how they could capitalize on the survival of the
physical evidence of its past. The prevailing attitude
before the 1960s can be summed up by the mayor's
declaration in 1955 that 'we are not a lot of old fogies
living on our traditions'. (fn. 1)
The difficulty in nurturing civic pride was compounded because many Cestrians lived in suburbs
outside the county borough; although they were provided with services by the city council they paid rates to
the county. The city within the walls alone retained
some coherence, but the dominance of retailing interests there made it difficult to provide an effective
cultural focus for the urban area as a whole. The
problem was highlighted after 1974, when the county
borough was merged with the outlying suburbs and an
extensive rural area as one local authority. By then,
however, Chester had begun to benefit from reconciling environmental enhancement with economic selfinterest, through a growing recognition at all levels that
the location of new businesses and the encouragement
of tourists and shoppers depended on the attractiveness
of the built environment.
Meanwhile the city's economic base had been
transformed, in part through the development of its
long-standing role as a regional centre. (fn. 2) In 1914
Chester was an old-fashioned and declining county
town, with a stagnant population, moribund traditional craft industries, and some mid-Victorian heavy
engineering. Although it attracted a few modern
factories between the First and Second World Wars,
the rising prosperity and growing suburbs of that
period depended as much on industrial employment
elsewhere in the region and on the provision of
services, including high-quality shopping, for people
living beyond the city. Those developments were
qualified by severe national economic difficulties and
by the fact that until the 1950s the city centre was
disfigured by slum housing and semi-derelict areas
such as Lower Bridge Street and Watergate Street.
From the 1960s, however, Chester's economic fortunes and physical appearance were revived in tandem
by the consolidation and then the massive extension
of the city's importance as a shopping centre, by the
accumulation of other types of service jobs, especially
in the public and financial sectors, and by the rise of
tourism. Economic growth was accompanied by a
pioneering and highly successful conservation of the
city centre's historic fabric in the wake of the Insall
Report of 1968. Although parts of the city, notably the
largest council estate, Blacon, were blighted by all the
characteristics of late 20th-century social deprivation,
Chester as a whole was very prosperous. By the 1980s
it was widely regarded as 'the Surrey of the North', (fn. 3)
and it was symptomatic of Chester's image at the end
of the 20th century that in 1995 a glamorous new
television soap opera, Hollyoaks, was set in a fictional
suburb modelled on Handbridge and filmed in and
around the city. (fn. 4)
Chester, 2000