The Japanese hotel I’m staying at includes breakfast. They have a good choice of breads, cereals, salads, fruits, rice and some Japanese dishes. Today I enjoyed the Marmite I bought yesterday. Then I headed for Les Docks Village, which is within walking distance of the hotel.
The docks are now the home of offices, shops and restaurants. The buildings date back to 1856 when the decision was made to build new docks. The Old Port, as it’s called now, couldn’t accommodate all the ships arriving. When completed (1864), they were Europe’s largest dock complex. For over a 100 years, until 1988, the docks were massive warehouses, storing goods shipped in from around the world. Eventually, they specialised in storing paper. Like many European docks, they declined because of alternatives, such as the emergence of containerisation and air transport. As with many other docks around the world, they’ve been converted. This took about 10 years, finishing in 2001. In 2015, the space was redesigned.
As I walked around the fine looking interior, imagining what the docks used to be, I thought of the different types of industry that the docks must have seen. This, in turn, reminded me of studying Economics at school. I remembered learning about the three types of industry:
- Primary industry extracts raw materials from nature, including agriculture, mining, forestry, and fishing.
- Secondary industry focuses on manufacturing and construction, transforming these raw materials into finished goods, such as clothing, cars, and electronics.
- Tertiary industry provides services to consumers and businesses, such as retail, education, banking, and healthcare.
Generally, as countries develop, their focus shifts from primary to secondary to tertiary. Taiwan, for example, was an agricultural country until the 1970s/1980s. It then shifted to manufacturing. Like China now, it was mocked. People spoke about “cheap Taiwanese goods”. Now Taiwan has the most sophisticated computer chip manufacturer (TSMC) in the world. If anything were to happen to TSMC, the whole world would come to standstill since their electronic components are used in just about everything.
Taiwan’s manufacturing crown was challenged by China. China shifted from agriculture to manufacturing. Now, China is the manufacturing centre of the world.
Developed countries, such as the UK, are at the tertiary stage. The UK still has an agriculture sector, but it’s small and, increasingly, food is imported. Similarly, in the 1980s, manufacturing started to decline. That sector in the UK is a fraction of the size it was during the Industrial Revolution. Other developed countries, such as Germany, still have a manufacturing sector.
The sequence from primary to secondary to tertiary isn’t always followed. India has a big agricultural sector. Unlike China, India didn’t develop a large manufacturing sector. Instead, it has a large service sector, focusing on IT services to the world. In one of the books I read whilst in India last year (India is Broken by Ashoka Mody), the author said that this was a mistake. Manufacturing can be labour-intensive and therefore can provide many jobs, something desperately required in a country with over a billion people. Every year, in India, millions of people become available for work, many for the first time. The service sector can’t create the jobs required. There is also a real concern for India’s IT sector now that AI is a reality.
Unlike India, China realised that when your biggest asset is people, you have to find a way of using it — even if it’s providing “cheap Chinese goods” to the world.
As primary and secondary industries decline, I wondered what happens to the old infrastructure. The answer, of course, is that it’s torn down or re-purposed, as Les Docks were.
In London’s Docklands, a similar thing happened. Much of the old docks are gone but you can see some of the old buildings still standing. In years to come, people will wonder why the area is called The Docklands when there’s no movement of goods on the water.
Other famous repurposing of old infrastructure in London include the development of Battersea Power Station (housing and shops) and the Bankside Power Station (Tate Modern art museum and gallery). Although these sorts of developments can be successful, sometimes the buildings can remain unused for many years, as both of these power stations were. The Bankside Power Station, for example, generated electricity from 1891 to 1981. Tate Modern opened in 2000, nearly 20 years after the power station sent its last wave of electrons around London.
Urbanisation is another form of change as agriculture diminishes. In France, years ago, I remember talking to someone who told me that young French people didn’t want to work on the farm as their parents and grandparents did. They wanted to move to a city.
London used to have pig farming, for example, in Notting Hill! There were more pigs in London than people at one time. It seems strange to think London was once rural. But looking at an old map says otherwise.
When the London Underground was first built, some of the lines went to nowhere! Or rather they went to a rural area where few, if any, people lived, such as Cockfosters at the northern end of the Piccadilly line. The view at the time was that once the tube was built, housing would be developed and people would move there. And once they moved to these former rural areas, they’d need transport. That is what happened. The planners got it right.