The civic pride and freedoms of Britain's great regional cities have been "brutally gutted" during the past 100 years and power must be given back to them, the Guardian Hay book festival was told on its opening day.
Their 19th century piazzas had been turned into roundabouts, Tristram Hunt said. Motorways had ploughed through their centres and their ability to help the destinies of their citizens or control their finances had been neutered.
In a 4,000-word lecture, Dr Hunt, a specialist urban historian, declared: "Until government ministers learn to let go, to stop rate-capping, target-setting, and action-zone establishing, we will get nowhere. Councils must be given the freedom of the city."
He called for more elected mayors, and for architectural competitions involving whole communities, on the lines of the New York twin towers contest, to win back the young, and for radical thinking about tax breaks for businesses which back local artistic and civic ventures. But one of the most proven successful strategies was an active cultural policy. "Events such as the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, the bidding process for the Capital of Culture and the victory of Liverpool, the new galleries and warehouse developments in Newcastle-Gateshead, have all helped to lift those cities from their post-industrial malaise.
"The international competitiveness of cities is increasingly dependent upon attracting young professionals and knowledge-based industries. And what they like are cities with inviting public spaces, high quality retail opportunities, and a strong sporting and culture infrastructure.
"Britain's more forward looking Victorian cities - Birmingham, Manchester, now Liverpool - have all realised this and built regeneration strategies around it."
But councillors were still condemned to "wait anxiously for a ministerial visit and spend the day shuffling a parliamentary under secretary around crumbling city no-go areas in the hope of garnering some beneficence from Whitehall departments". Even if they succeeded, their hands would be tied by agreements dictated by the Treasury.
Dr Hunt, who teaches modern history at Queen Mary College, London, worked in two election campaigns as special adviser to the science minister, Lord Sainsbury, and contributed to the BBC television series Great Britons, set out to evoke the magic as well as the squalor of the past and future of cities in the most ambitiously chosen event of the festival's early days.
He said the early 19th century industrial revolution sucked millions from the countryside into cities, shat tered the human bonds of rural life and caused intolerable squalor.
Unpaved streets ran with sewage, rickets and deficiency diseases were rife. The life chances of a slum dweller in early Victorian Glasgow or Liverpool were the lowest since the Black Death.
But the cities also forced through religious tolerance, a wider franchise, and repeal of the corn laws. Gradually their nonconformist business elites improved public health and evolved traditions of voluntary activity, local pride and artistic patronage.
The amazing Victorian Gothic of Manchester town hall and magnificent buildings elsewhere celebrated a modern renaissance city state. Later, cities also bred the spirit of municipal socialism, which ran gas, water and electricity more cheaply than private companies, Dr Hunt said.
But in the 20th century, state uniformity, instead of civic strength, became the vogue. State authoritarianism undermined civic initiative. Two Tory prime ministers, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, vandalised city councils with rationalisations and privatisations. Quangos hijacked democratic provision of services.
"Architects and planners decided to finish off those parts of the Victorian civic fabric which the Luftwaffe had missed. "By the mid-1990s, local government expenditure counted for under a quarter of total government expenditure while over threequarters of council funds were controlled by Whitehall," Dr Hunt said.
"The challenge is to find new methods of generating pride. What successful modern cities have also appreciated is the extraordinary civic architecture of the Victorian city. They have turned warehouses into penthouse flats, royal exchanges into restaurants, and chapels into community centres.
"It is this re-appropriation, this re-engagement with the Victorian urban past which allows us finally to shed the shadow of [Victorian slums]."
