Here are some big industries we have lost since the 80s, many of which I have worked and were big concerns, can you add to the list

Rigbys Dairy
Co-op Dairy
Lee Bright Bars
British Aluminium
Thames Board
Sterling Cable
Rylands Wire
Greenings
Lockers
Firth Wire
Wilkinson Tools
Greenhalls
Tetley Walker
Memory lane cakes
Richmonds gas cookers New World
Monks Hall steel
British steel Dallam Lane
Winwick Hospital
Rubery Owens
Cambells Chemicals
Mersey White Lead
Thames Case
Alliance Box

but we do have loads of call centres,fast food outlets and car washes.what recession??

Industries...Winwick Hospital....What did they make there?

U.K.A.E.A ...Risley
Benny Weir's grocers shop at Culcheth

But overall employment has gone up since the 1980s, average wages have grown above inflation and the average worker is much better off than they were in the 1980s. Which would not have been the case if we hadn't had these sectoral shifts.

There was an influential Austrian economist called Schumpeter in the 1930s who said capitalism was 'creative destruction'. It's all about the search for new ideas, to find better ways of making things and doing things, which make the old ways of making things and doing things obsolete. Some people will make this out to be a sign of society going backwards but its why living standards improve. It's also why the old predictions of Malthus, that the world would never be able to feed itself as the population grew because there wouldn't be enough to go round so starvation would bring the population back down, ended up being false.

I worked for 3 months at Mersey White Lead in the mid-seventies through a student summer break (probably 1974). It was one of the few places in town that didn't have a works cat......because nothing could live there. The conditions were awful, almost victorian. You were given two free pints of milk each day to keep the lead content in your body down. I don't suppose it worked as the works apparently had very few pensioners. You also had to have a blood test every couple of months. I was on a whole 57p an hour.

Redpath Dorman Long (now Stobarts)
Jason Racing (back of James Lee House)
Nestles

The dog and dart
The black bear
Cards n candy
Sherlocks

I think the loss of the Dog and Dart isn't mourned by too many people...

no doubt about that....

black bear is though

The bus stop there is still called the Dog and Dart...

...and some of the regulars seem to have just transferred across...

haha... i drank in the little manor when i was 16-21 then they turned it into a food pup... terrible loss...that was an amazing pub..... D&D was always full of pretty bad chavs... most of them i went school with.

People better

My Dad used to work there and me when I was in my teens, the memories of getting up at 2.30am on a Saturday morning to help deliver the milk in return for a fiver that would be used to save up for the latest mega drive game

A Monk & Co in Woolston (for me dad Len Beswick)

Norstrum Fluid Handling (for me Neil, apprenticed to Barry Williams who was a full back for Wigan in the early 80's)

Thatchers Bloody Britain.....................................

You know bit of a disscussion in the pub the other night people who use to come down your road well depending where you live?
Milkman.
Breadman.
Coalman.
popman. Usually wanted to screw ya sister!)
Meatman.(DON T ASK!!)
Ice cream man!!!!!!Ernie i think his name was pushed a bike thingy full of ice cream!!
rag and Bone man.
Or People just knocking on your door asking did you have any old newspapers!!!

oh one more the school board man who use to try and chase you with a limp!!!

Parkside Colliery
Ohh.....and does the burger kiosk at Wilderspool count as well?

Warrington Timber,
Naylors Timber,
Ferous Light Castings,
Atlas Express,
Warrington Tube Works,
Pierpoint & Bryant,
Alpine Refrigeration,
Sankey Green Wire.

Electrohydraulics,
Polycell Tiles,
Vulcan works,
Conveyancer,

.... so remind me once again Margaret T, how does this country pay its way anymore?

if all these places were still open where would the workers come from ?

Poland

Metro Cutanics (Grappenhall)
BT Depot Ireland st
Castle Rubber
Cappers
Orford Meat Co
Wrights of Lymm

If these industries were paying their way then why did they end up closing down?

The argument seems to be that the government should have subsidised them to keep them open, which doesn't sound like the country paying its way, it sounds more like other businesses were having to pay their way for them.

The harsh fact was the UK manufacturing sector was not as competitive as its foreign counterparts, ie when you take into account productivity against wages at home compared to abroad, other countries were producing things at better value for money. So it makes sense that the UK focuses on things where it is more productive than other countries (ie the financial services sector) and exports these services and imports manufactured goods from abroad.

Of course the UK being heavily based on the financial services sector meant we were more exposed than most others when the global crash came in 2008, given that that was a crash of the financial services sector. Taking that into account, the UK has come out of it not as badly off as it could have done, when you see the disasters that have befallen places like Greece, Ireland, and the looming problems in Portugal, Spain etc, the UK has ridden out the storm fairly well, so all these people who think the UK economy is a basketcase are well off the mark.

Also our manufacturing sector is not completely dead, certain things like pharmaceuticals the UK is still a world leader.

I think people overestimate manufacturing and producing things - in the era when we had more of a manufacturing economy (in the 1960s and 1970s) were things great back then? No we had massive problems with inflation, unemployment, strikes, industrial unrest, worse than we do today. If we wanted to reorient our economy back to being a manufacturing economy then we would need to compete with China, Germany etc, which would mean we would need to start cutting wages and the overall standard of living significantly until we had got our productivity levels back to theirs. Remember as well that in China, where the government artificially pushes down the value of their currency to make their exports cheap to the rest of the world, their domestic citizens suffer in terms of cripplingly high prices for anything that is imported, so their standards of living are much lower than in Europe/USA.

.............and wilderspool manufactured so many memories not all of them good.

whittle brothers leather factory were dfs is top place to work that was.