SOUTH YORKSHIRE - Geography and history
South Yorkshire has an area of nearly 1,600 km2 and is a predominantly urban county. It comprises the four Metropolitan Boroughs of Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield. Sheffield is the largest, with a population of 512,000 in 2002. Contiguous with the Sheffield urban area is Rotherham to the east, while further east is Doncaster, and to the north, Barnsley. To the west lie the Pennine hills and a small part of the Peak District National Park is included within the county's border.
The far east of the county is less densely populated and here agriculture is practised, principally dairy farming and some arable crops.
Historically the county was dominated by coal-mining, engineering and iron and steel-making ? Sheffield is famous for specialist steels manufacturing ? but employment in these traditional industries has fallen steeply since the mid-1980s. Sheffield and Rotherham lie close to the M1 motorway, which is the principal road route from London to Scotland and the A1(M) motorway also traverses the county, passing close by Doncaster. These two roads are joined east to west by the M18 which continues east as the M180 to Scunthorpe and the east coast. Doncaster is linked to London by electric intercity rail services, and the route continues north via the east coast main line to Edinburgh, and there are connections to Sheffield and across the Pennines to Manchester and Merseyside.
The South Yorkshire economy has suffered severely since the mid-1980s because of its unusually high dependence on coal and steel and other traditional heavy industries facing structural decline. The local economy has had difficulty adjusting and the decline of traditional industries resulted in large areas of derelict land, which are still undergoing long-term regeneration. Despite large job losses the steel industry still dominates the local manufacturing base, particularly in Sheffield and Rotherham, but the coal industry has declined dramatically and there are now, as at December 2003, only two working mines in South Yorkshire. In recent years a substantial number of jobs have been created in new call centres and the financial services sector has grown significantly, particularly in Sheffield. The weakness of the South Yorkshire economy was acknowledged by the granting of European Structural Funds Objective 1 status in January 2000. For many years unemployment rates in South Yorkshire have been well above regional and national averages. However, in the last five years the overall unemployment rate in South Yorkshire has fallen considerably and although still above regional and nation averages the gap has narrowed significantly. In 2001/02 the unemployment rate of South Yorkshire was 5.5 per cent, compared to a UK rate of 5.0 per cent.
Sheffield, a densely populated regional centre
The population of South Yorkshire, of around 1.3 million in 2002, has fallen by over 3 per cent since 1982. The population density is of 820 inhabitants per km2, well above the regional average of 320.
South Yorkshire is administratively divided into four districts, centred on Sheffield, Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley. Sheffield has the largest population and also the highest population density (almost 1,400 inhabitants per km2 in 2002), but variations in the population size of the districts are not very great. In 2002, each district had a population of over 200,000, and Doncaster which is the least densely populated had over 500 inhabitants per km2. At a more localised level, the variations are of course greater, so that for example the extreme west of the county, part of the Peak District, is virtually uninhabited.
Sheffield's population decreased by 6 per cent between 1982 and 2002. Over this period the population of Doncaster remained fairly unchanged.
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