David Frost, head of the British Chambers of Commerce, recalls the particularly harsh toll that the UK’s worst recession of recent times took on the manufacturing heartland around the central English city of Birmingham. “When I was working in the west Midlands in 1981, there were closures in the region almost every week,” he says. “It was 4,000 jobs here, 5,000 there.”

Indeed, as industries such as shipbuilding and steelmaking closed plants there and to the north, the early 1980s saw more than 100,000 jobs disappear each month across Britain. In the 1991 recession, another 1m manufacturing jobs went – with central and northern England again taking the brunt. But now, with the country again confronting a severe downturn, the impact will be felt differently, Mr Frost adds. “This time, it’s spread across the economy.”