Post-Industrial Place, Multicultural Space: The Transformation of Leicester, c. 1970–1990

Later twentieth-century Britain experienced two fundamental historical shifts: the collapse of manufacturing industry and the emergence of a multicultural society. Taking the city of Leicester as a case-study, this article explores the interconnected histories of these two processes. In the 1970s and 1980s Leicester witnessed simultaneously the sharp contraction of its manufacturing base and the creation of a large, permanent Asian community. While Leicester’s manufacturing economy and industrial neighbourhoods provided both employment and places of settlement for migrant Asian populations, these populations in turn helped to mitigate the effects of rapid industrial collapse. What the example of Leicester graphically shows is how global historical processes played out in unanticipated ways in a particular urban locale.