Within the context of theoretical and policy debates about the new economic geography and an urban renaissance, this paper examines how far and in what way ‘Our cities are back’, as claimed by England’s Core Cities Group. It focuses on 1984–2007 employment changes for the eight Core Cities and their city-regions: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield. These provincial city-regions are found to have suffered from the early 1990s recession relatively less than London, but then recovered more slowly. While they continued to gain jobs until 2007, their growth rate relative to the national average peaked in 1998–2002, which was also the only time that Core Cities themselves outpaced the rest of their city-regions.
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