In response to the crisis of 2008 and deep recession that followed, the UK government assigned key importance to the need to ‘spatially rebalance’ the economy, to reduced its dependence on London and the South East by ‘powering up’ northern cities. This paper argues that the UK’s problem of spatial economic imbalance is in fact a long standing one, the very persistence of which raises key issues for our theories of regional development and policy. It argues that neither the new spatial economics, with its obsession with agglomeration, nor regional studies, with its plethora of concepts and paradigms but lack of integration and synthesis, offers a particularly convincing basis for devising policies capable of redressing the spatial imbalance in the UK’s economic landscape.