Population, land use and travel - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 28

Box 2.1 Local geography and spatial polarisation
The UK has become a country where local geography has structured society more
than at any point in its recent past. In the 1950s and 1960s almost all areas of the
country had more similar populations.
Fifty years ago older people lived alongside young people. Men and women
were more equitably distributed in each local area. In each area were found similar
proportions of people who were rich and poor, who had received a good education
or almost no education at all, who were living in comfortable housing or who were
dealing with very poor housing conditions.
There were variations, but most of the variations were to be found within local
areas rather than between them. Particular industries did dominate particular areas
but there was near full employment of men everywhere and everywhere required the
services of professionals to very similar degrees, who tended to live locally.
That country is now no more. It was no utopia but it was a place where local
geography mattered less. Ironically it is the increased movement between places
that has led to places now mattering more. Rapid road-building and growth in car
ownership has allowed people who can to live much further from their workplace
than before. Long distance migration has become more common, breaking up
families and creating places which cater more specifically for people of different ages
than was the case in the past …
People's choices over where to live are constrained and made increasingly by
changing markets. Individually we may feel that we made the choices we thought we
had. Collectively we are acting in ways that the censuses reveal to be the product of
wider underlying influences and which are leading to a country more divided by its
geography than ever before.
Source: Dorling and Thomas 2004
between the inner eastern borough of Tower Hamlets and the suburban borough of
Bromley.
A critical factor influencing personal travel and accessibility is the way these
employment rates are translated into the characteristics of households. Since 1992
increasing employment has resulted in there being 2 million additional households
in which all members of working age are in work. (Currently 57% of all households
containing at least one person of working age are in this category.) However the
number of wholly workless households (that is households with at least one person
of working age but no one in work) has not fallen to the same extent. Sixteen per
cent of all working age households - 3 million in total - fall into this category. The
concentration of such households in many poorer inner city areas is a recognised
social and economic problem. More easily overlooked is the plight of individual
disadvantaged households in other types of area (particularly rural ones) where the
norm is affluence and extensive car-based mobility.