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With the rapid spiralling of engineering development, Leeds rapidly changed from a wool-trade town into "the city that makes everything". The 1801 census gives the population of Leeds as 30,000. By 1851 it was over 100,000. It took the cholera outbreak of 1832 to bring about the basics of sanitation. But a further outbreak of cholera in 1849 killed over 2000 people. As elsewhere, the city fathers were slow to apply their engineering capital and expertise to improve the life of the (largely) miserable workforce.

Most readers will be able to pick up the story from here. Some commentators date our industrial decline from the early 1900s with the beginnings of globalisation (including global war). Around 1950, almost broken by a defensive war against another would-be empire, Britain began quietly to change its Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations, and introduce the Welfare State at home. Neither would contribute to maintaining free-market industrial wealth-creation, but now we found oil and gas in the North Sea, so we still had some time to work out what to do …...