British Ports and Their Export Hinterlands

British Ports and Their Export Hinterlands: A Rapidly Changing Geography Anthony G. Hoare Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, Vol. 68, No. 1. (1986), pp. 29-40. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0435-3684%281986%2968%3A1%3C29%3ABPATEH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0 Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography is currently published by Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/swedish.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Thu Jul 5 12:02:46 2007 ~ ~ ~ : l ' ~ -- BRITISH PORTS AND THEIR EXPORT HINTERLANDS: A RAPIDLY CHANGING GEOGRAPHY BY ANTHONY G. HOARE* ABSTRACT. The unhappy experience of the port of Bristol in establishing a new deep-water port raises wider issues concerning the geographical nature of the export-generating hinterland of exporting ports in advanced countries. A variety of consider- at ionssu~yest that these willnot beasgeographically constrained as in the past. and from these a model of hinterland change is suggested from which. in turn, three testable hypotheses of changes to ports-hinterland relationships emerge. When tested against two official surveys of the regional-scale association be- tween hinterlands and ports within Britain, support for all three .. is found, carrying the general conclusion that the geographical constraints upon export port hinterlands have weakened in the recent past. Some implications of this finding are suggested. Introduction: Bristol - a particular case of a general problem At the start of the Eighteenth century, by common consent, Bristol was second only to London in its populations and the activity of its port within the ranks of Britain's towns. The export of woollens and the import of wines in medieval times had given way to the triangular trade from which the city thrived through the wealth accumulated from the slave trade and the processing of imported tro- pical produce. Some of this, such as cotton and sugar importing, no longer features in the econo- mic activity of present-day Bristol but the modern city still maintains a strong maritime tradition, not least in its contemporary industrial geography. To- bacco manufacture, formerly centred on the W.D. and H.O. Wills firm but now part of the operation of the Imperial Group of companies, was demen- dent upon triangular trade imported tobacco. So was cocoa and chocolate processing, first located in the city centre under the Fry's trade-name but now some five miles outside under the banner of another corporate giant, Cadbury Schweppes. And downstream the quays that a century ago re- placed Bristol city's centre docks, where the tobac- co and cocoa were originally off-loaded, now have their own 20th century patina of import-processing * Dr. Anthony G . Hoare, Department of Geography, University of Bristol. Univers~ty Road, Bristol. BS8 ISS. England. GEOGRAFlSKA ANNALER . 68 B (1986). 1 factories like those of Nor& Hydro's fertilizer plant, ~i~ l-into metals smelter, and I , c , I ' ~ pharmaceutical and agricultural divisions. Municipal disquiet built up in Bristol after the last war with these 'new' port facilities as, in their turn, they began to show iigns oftheir age, leading the city's venture in the 1960sof a new deep water port On the Severn just below the Avon's confluence. at Portburv. In scale it was to rival ~~~d~~ and ~ i ~ ~and so maintain ~ ~ i ~~ ~ ~~ proud heritage as a port of international signific- ance. The outcome has been the most tortuous and best documented saga of any modern port propo- sal in Britain (see Mills, 1971; Heggie, 1969; Se- nior, 1983; Bassett and Hoare, 1984), and one that refocussed public debate on overseas trade infra- structure from imports, from which the port indu- stries of Bristol and Britain's other maritime cities almost exclusively sprang, to exports. Of course, a resurgence of national exporting is also seen by many as the salvation of Britain's post-war econo- mic life, and a much respected, widely referenced literature exists on the spin-off effects of exporting upon differential regional growth (see North, (1955) for the classic statement, and Armstrong and Taylor (1978) for a modern review). But the more precise ways in which the geographies of ex- porting and economic growth at the scale of a par- ticular port city hang together had never been brought into such sharp focus as in the period fol- lowing Bristol's first floating its Portbury plans upon an unenthusiastic Whitehall. lvlore specirlcally. the city's initial proposals were challenged and, ultimately, sunk by the most comprehensive analysis of a single port project ever undertaken by the British government, as made public in the Ministry of Transport's White Paper of 1966 (MOT, 1966) (hereafter 'the White Paper'). The nub of the argument this raised against the dreams of Bristol's City Fathers was that their scheme was non-viable since it had no hope of achieving its targetted export trade (see below). This was founded on two beliefs. One was that Bristol's then-existing export-attracting hin- 29 HOARE terland within Britain was insufficiently 'growth- ful' to produce the required volumes of trade. (Long term government plans for population growth on Severnside among other major estu- aries was then still a runner, but would not reach fruition sufficiently soon to help pay off the invest- ment in Portbury). Secondly, the geographically constrained nature of these same hinterlands of Britain's export ports supposedly allowed little real hope of widening the city's export catchment area. Certainly, an extensive survey of Britain's internal expoit origins (see below) had shown that, as of 1964, some 40% of national exports originated within twenty-five miles of their port of export, and two-thirds within 75 miles. Admitted- ly, Bristol's own 1964 hinterland was slightly wider than this but, even so, the Ministry's constrained hinterland' view of national exporting geography tolled the death knell of the city's plans so far as Whitehall was concerned, at least for the time being. Bristol, though, took a more optimistic view, emphasising the new port's chances of tapping more trade by expanding its geographical hinter- land into territory previously the preserve of other . . .A export ports. Thus, in the next phase of the Port- bury story, with its proposals in 1968 for what was then known asWest Dock Mark I scheme (see Bas- sett and Hoare, 1984), the city's promotional mate- rial provided its own answer to the White Paper of two years before: Q: Is the a real likehood that Bristol will be- come a leading port for Midlands exports? A: This is a real possibility, largely attributable to the growth of the motorway network. A route map of the M5 and M6 motorways, the former passing within half-a-mile of the West Dock site and due for completion next year, illustrates Bristol's geographical advantages as a port for the Midlands. The journey from the docks to the heart of this huge industrial complex will take a few hours only, making Bristol highly compe- tive with the other ports serving the Mid- lands. Old fashioned ideas on the extent of a port's hinterland put it at 25 miles. Now, because of vastly improved transport com- munications, the limits of the hinterland are said to extend to a radius of 100 miles o r more. This means that now the most inland sections of the country are open to the influ- ences of the most efficient port. Bristol could be that port, if we move quickly in increasing our capacity and modernising our cargo handling facilities. (PBA, no date) This same argument runs as a constant thread in the city's support for its new port schemes, in- cluding its contemporary publicity for the third and final 'Portbury' version eventually opened in 1976, and entirely financed by Bristol and its rate- payers. . . In a unique position for distribution -Bris- to1 was recently singled out in a British Road Federation report as having the best road communications of any U.K. port - cargo leaving the dock can be on the M5 motorway within minutes, London, the Midlands and South Wales can all be reach- ed within a few hours without meeting a single red light or halt sign. The north of England, too, is easily accessible with the motorways connecting the dock right through to Scotland. (PBA, 1983, p. 18) Here, in this one example, lies the crux of the more general geographical problem explored in the rest of this paper. To what extent has the 'con- strained hypothesis' model of export origin - ex- port port relationships held true since the White Paper's prediction, and to what extent, instead, has it been unravelled and rewoven into a different pattern of inland export flows, owing little or no- thing to the geography of the mid-1960s. Changing export origin - export port relation- ships: the theory On the face of it, there have continually been changes afoot over this period which we might ex- pect to influence the geographical redirection of export cargoes within Britain. Three are particu- larly important: I Notwithstanding the contrary views of the Mi- nistry of Transport's White Paper (which saw little chance of an upstart Bristol challenging the estab- lished port giants of London and Liverpool, for example), few aspects of Britain's economy geo- graphy have been as volatile post-war as that of its hierarchy o f shipping ports. In the fourteen years between the two surveys to be used later, for example, dramatic changes took place in the res- GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER .68 B (1986) . 1 1 BRITISH PORTS FALLING SHARE RISING SHARE 96 G.B. EXPORTS Figure la. The changing hierarchy of Britain's exporting ports, 19641978. pective fortunes of the nation's leading twenty-one exporting ports, identified separately in these surveys, with decline at the top and growth at the bottom leading to a general squashing of the pre- existing hierarchy (Figure l a ) . And, although not exactly set on its head, some important changes took place in the rank position of individual ports, with the dramatic rise of Southampton (from ninth to fifth), Dover (from tenth to third), Felixstowe (fifteenth to seventh) and Ipswich (twentieth to thirteenth), showing something of the rising tide of south and east coast ports. Not surprisingly, when aggregated regionally (Figure lb ) , the domi- nant swings favoured exporting through the South East, YorkshireIHumberside and East Anglia. The last experienced a rise from handling 2.7% of Britain's export tonnage in 1964 to 11.4% in 1978, while in the South East growing smaller ports so counteracted the decline of London that the regio- nal share of national exports rose from 36% to 41%. The detailed reasons for these turn-arounds are not our central concern. What is are the ways in which these export handling changes do or do not reflect similar trends in the geography of export origins. I1 Increased concentration of ownership among shipping companies represents a specific instance of a general economic trend for relatively more and more economic activity in advanced countries THROUGH REGIONAL PORTS V $ N o exporting ports recorded both in 1964 and 1978 surveys Figure lb . to be concentrated in relatively fewer and fewer hands (Chrzanowski, 1974; Prais, 1976). The gene- ral reasons behind this are to be found in the in- creased capital requirements of technological changes in shipping and handling under conditions of free competition, which squeezes out the ship- per unable to offer the highest quality of service. In Britain, this concentration is part of a long term trend spanning much of the present century: such figures as are available show that in 1953 the ten largest shipping companies controlled 22% of Britain's merchant tonnage and, by 1966, 44% (Chrzanowski, 1974). One important consequence of this concentra- tion of ownership is a parallel rationalisation of the geography of shipping operations. As well as the obvious administrative convenience of channel- ling all one's traffic through a small number of port GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER . 6 8 B (1986). 1 outlets, the gradual reduction in the role of casual dock labour, hired by the day, and its replacement by a workforce of dockers with guaranteed wages, heightened pressure on shipping companies to direct their trade consignments through a more limited set of ports than before, to ensure that guaranteed pay is matched by permanent work. This was one factor in 1967, for example, behind the decision of Elders and Fyffes to concentrate its banana business at Southamton to the detri- ment of Bristol. which had shared some of this traf- fic hitherto. As applied to exports, this consolidation of trade at a particular port gives shipping companies other 'scale' advantages. And to achieve these it may well be worth their while, time and money, to offer highly attractive, subsidised. rates on the in- land legs between origin and port. or, indeed, to absorb part or all of the exporting company's in- land transport cost (Wilder and Pender. 1979). This allows carriers to attract trade as long as their rates cover the marginal costs involved (Garrett and Wingfield. 1981). and this in turn is made possible through economies thus achieved in admi- nistrative overheads. maximum utilisation of handling equipment. and the ability to ensure a constant level of demand for particular sailings. so enabling block-bookings or cheaper consolidated freight rates to be negotiated. One consequence of this second trend is that: 'the individual port is often affected by abrupt all o r nothing location decisions by individual shipping lines, some of which are large enough for an individual decision to have considerable impact on the port as a whole'. (Mills. 1971. 137) Thus switches of port allegiance, like Hellenic Lines' wholesale transfer of trade from Tilbury to the much more commerecially-minded Felixstowe (Freight News, 16 July 1982) ended its previous di- vision of its trade between the two ports. This ra- tionalisation at one port, however, was seen by the shipping company as an 'inevitable consequence of past growth and future expansion'. 111 A particularly important stimulus to rationali- sation of services has come about from containeri- satiotz (Gilman and Williams, 1976). The world's first purpose-built container ship was launched in the year of the first of two official surveys used below (1964). and in 1977, one year before the se- cond survey, there were 507 afloat, while between 1968 and the same year. the world's container- borne sea tonnage increased by a factor of 6.25 (Alderton, 1980). Significant economies are offered through con- tainerisation in a number of facets of surface ship- ping (Goss, 1967; O'Loughlin, 1967). and these in turn have important geographical implications. Their high capital costs place a premium on the maximum utilisation of large container ships. Maintaining the same frequency of service from origin to destination, therefore, predisposes ship- pers to concentrate trade and services to particular overseas destinations at particular ports. Before containerisation differences in freight rates to a given overseas destination were small among Uni- ted Kingdom ports in relation to inland transport costs, so encouraging exporters in the use of near- by ports. This has changed through containeriza- tion where the overall cost saving compared to 'conventional' shipping methods has more than compensated for any increase in the inland trans- port leg in using ports other than the most proxi- mate to shipment origins. thanks to the overall ;avings through speed of flow and handling costs. i ou t e operators thus began to offer a through door-to-door) service for a through price. And his was often based upon the cheapest pre-con- tainer inland port route for a given origin point. io the customer was put at no cost disadvantage. ~ h i l e his cargoes were, in practice. redirected to that port of consolidation for his particular desti- nation. The widespread use of freight agents as in- termediaries between exporters and shipping com- panies further relieved the former of the often onerous task of cutting their way through a range of freight schedules and route options (Highsted, 1980a). And as these agents prefer to deal with just one or two shipping lines (from whom they reap favourable rates proportionate to the business they deliver) the locking-in of particular export origin areas to a limited set of often non-local ports was reinforced further (Highsted. 1980b). All the- se arguments gnaw away at the 'constrained hinter- land' view of the relationship between a regional origin and its regional port, leading The Econo- mist (29 October, 1966) to argue, in criticism of the Portbury White Paper, ' . . . the point about the container revolution [is that] hinterlands no longer matter'. Hence the economics of the now highly capi- talised sea freight industry have stimulated the concentration of export container traffic at one port for a particular route, but at no penalty to the customer. Inland container terminals for assemb- GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER 68 B (1986) 32 1 BRITISH PORTS Figure 2. A model of the dynamics of port-hinterland relationships for export shipments ling and disbursing container loads, the British Rail freight-liner network and the spreading ten- tacles of the motorway network are all willing ac- complices in this realignment. Much of this con- centrated traffic has favoured the newer, smaller ports (as we have seen), where the lack of a large local labour supply is no great disadvantage and can be a positive boon if it also means a lack of militant dock labour to protest at the introduction of new and job-endangering technology. Indeed, the dockers' register fell from about 60,000 to just over 40,000 between 1967 and 1982, largely conse- quent upon containerisation, while estimates for 1985 of only 14,000 have been quoted (The Times, 5 August 1982). A model of change By interweaving all these connected economic threads, we might argue that the geography of ex- port origins and ports will show changes remini- scent of Figure 2. We see here a simultaneous in- crease with time in the complexity of origin-port links in Britain and a decrease in complexity of those between the British ports and overseas des- tinations. Three related and testable hypothese