Honeycomb structure - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 110

of economically inactive people, mostly housewives, the retired, students 8
and children - sometimes somewhat prejudicially called dependant - with
the unemployed and working populations, again using a three-colour scheme
(Figure 4.11).
Red is used now for the unemployed, blue for those working and yellow for
the dependants. These colour choices are important; they change the immediate
impression gained from any image, if not any of the actual information in it. If
there are not obvious colour matches, such as with England, Scotland and Wales,
or with political parties, then it can help to match other variables on to some of
those previous matches.
Areas where people are unlikely to find it hard to find work tend to more
often vote Conservative, so matching high rates of 'employment' to blue colours
makes some sense. Similarly, where work is scarce, 'unemployment' is high and
Labour voting higher, so red is an obvious choice. Once two colours are assigned
there are no more choices to make, the 'inactive' end up coloured yellow.
The picture of how the three labels of economic status combine shows much
variation and a complex geographical pattern. Orange areas are those with high
proportions of both unemployed and dependant people (such as in the Welsh
valleys), green indicates many working and dependant people living in the same
places (the Home Counties) and purple shows blocks where high numbers of
people are working while many others are simultaneously unemployed (parts of
London, for instance, where there are relatively few dependants).
Without some sophistication in colouring we might not have realised that
often areas of simultaneously high employment and high unemployment could
exist, how they coalesce geographically into clumps and how those clumps of
many people who are working and unemployed, but with few people who are
old or young or otherwise dependent, surround the Capital more than any other
area of Britain.
Traditional maps entirely fail to portray distributions such as unemployment
in any way that can be described as meaningful (Figure 4.12). They suggest a
massive divide between the periphery and core by emphasising the fate of those
living in rural areas - Scottish crofters as against London stockbrokers. In fact
there are more unemployed people, and stronger concentrations of them, in the
South than people living in the whole of the North East of England. 9
8 'A third factor contributing to the large inflow into the South East is that students make up
about 15 per cent of all immigrants and London is popular with overseas students as a place of
study. The first and third of these factors go some way to explaining the larger than average outflow
from the region. Outside the South East, the West Midlands and East Anglia were the most attractive
areas for immigrants, relative to their populations. The relatively least attractive place for immigrants
were the North of England and Northern Ireland (though it must be remembered that the figures
take no account of immigrants from the Republic of Ireland)' (Davis and Walker, 1975, p. 5).
9 Inequality is the crucial ingredient of deprivation: 'We shall hold that the most severe deprivation
exists where the scores of disadvantage are high, where they affect the largest number of people,
and where there is the most crass contrast between these areas and the advantaged periphery' (Begg
and Eversley, 1986, p. 55).