The Cleveland of England?

Since my sister lives in England and I visit with some degree of regularity (or at least I ought to), I've been trying to figure out what the Cleveland of England must be. Surely there must be an old industrial town that's been bleeding population for decades, where the people wear permanent frowns and peer suspiciously at the future from behind their rusting chain-link fences.

Maybe it's Liverpool. As I learned from watching Time Team this morning, Liverpool peaked hard, growing from a 7-street town along a muddy riverbank to a seaport city of over 70,000 in just a few short years. (Sounds familiar.) Here's some more from the Shrinking Cities website:

[Manchester and Liverpool] are long-standing rivals. Manchester was a prominent centre of world trade, whilst Liverpool, with its docks, was the logistical centre for the region's textile factories. Later on, they sought to outdo each other with their football teams, their music scenes and their cultural institutions.

With the disintegration of the textile industry in the county of Lancashire, Manchester und Liverpool experienced a severe decline from 1950 onwards. Around 1930, both boasted approximately 850,000 inhabitants; today, only about half as many people live within the city boundaries of each. In both places, extreme de-industrialisation and suburbanisation went arm-in-arm with growing poverty among the working class and an increasing rate of population loss. The nadir of decline was marked by violent riots in Manchester's Moss Side and Liverpool's Toxteth districts in 1981.

Change a few details (and substitute "Cleveland and Pittsburgh" for "Liverpool and Manchester") and the story sounds even more familiar!