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.