Honeycomb structure - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 108

As the indigenous population was divided into three, so too can people born
overseas be subdivided into three broad geographical categories (Figure 4.10).
Here we use red for those born in Asia, blue for those born in Ireland and yellow
for African and Caribbean born. This image is dominated by black areas, places
with high proportions of all three overseas immigrant groups. Black represents
the mixing on paper of all three colours, just as white represents the relative
absence of people born overseas.
Tints, tinges and trends of colour in the image graphically show how the
mixing varies. 7 The East side of the West Midlands is more Asian, the West
more Irish in the backgrounds of its people. Those from Africa and the Caribbean
settled in greater numbers in the South than the North of Britain, and so on. These
are simple pictures; each block of streets (forming an enumeration district) is just
a coloured dot, but already the combination of dots reveals, in a picture, details
of the diversity of our society, which a search of the literature (see References)
and conventional images failed to find.

4.4 Lost opportunities

Although the percentage officially unemployed in Greater London is
a little smaller than average for Britain the city holds the largest con-
centration of unemployed in the industrialised world, and the real total
is at least 150,000 larger than the total of over 400,000 admitted by
the Government.
(Townsend with Corrigan and Kowarzik, 1987, p. 29)

Much of the most basic geographical nature of employment is largely deter-
mined by the first two questions addressed above: age and sex. Children do
not (officially) work full-time and the elderly are usually retired. Traditionally,
men get more paid work than women and what end up often called immigrant
areas have often become (if they were not already) those places with the worst
prospects of work. Therefore pattern builds upon pattern and we have to dissect
the body of information we have with various statistical cuts and then rebuild it
to a better understood whole.
The simple distribution of the proportion of the population unemployed
shows strong connections with aspects of those distributions already mentioned
above. 1980s employment and unemployment is another major theme that will
run through this topic. If we delve further we can compare the proportions

7 The less aggregation the better: 'Further shortcomings exist in census data relating to ethnicity.
Dissimilar birthplace groups are frequently aggregated into a single category: for example, all those
born in the American New Commonwealth (chiefly the Caribbean) are usually grouped together in the
published statistics. More seriously, several cross-tabulations in both 1971 and 1981 SAS group all
New Commonwealth-born together. Prandy has demonstrated that the “social distance” between

Asian and West Indian groups living in Britain can be as great as that between either of these groups
and the British-born' (Ballard and Norris, 1983, p. 105).

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