How we got where we are........

 North-east England has been a major centre of migration in modern periods: between 1880 and 1920, the region was a major centre of migration from Scotland and Ireland. We estimate that as many as 37 per cent of the 1911 population of the north-east was foreign-born, or the children of migrants.

Migrants joined a changing region. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, people travelled to the north-east in search of high wages. It was a centre for mining and shipbuilding, iron, steel and chemicals. The region was host to some of the country's best paid engineers: only in London were wages higher. After 1945, the north-east still regarded itself as a bastion of industry. There were still more than 20,000 shipbuilding and engineering workers living in Newcastle. As late as 1951, the north-east produced one sixth of the world's merchant shipping fleet. Yet in the twenty years alone between the 1971 census and the 1991 census, the number of industrial jobs in Tyne and Wear County fell from 320,000 to 146,000, a decline of more than half. Male full-time employment fell from 305,000 to 200,000

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