Although the inner city has traditionally been regarded as a 'nursery' for the birth and growth of new manufacturing firms, recent research has tended to refute this 'incubator' hypothesis. In this paper it is argued that such research has been based on an unsatisfactory methodology. An alternative approach is adopted in a case study of the location of new industrial companies in Greater Leicester between 1957 and 1970. The results provide considerable support for the incubator hypothesis, while indicating that pockets of nineteenth-century development within the present urban periphery also perform a nursery function.
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