Honeycomb structure - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 119

A further consideration here is that the kind of work people do affects the
sort of home they will have. Price can indicate the quality of a house, the social
status of the neighbours, as well as, perhaps, the inflated and depressed states
of local markets. During the 1980s it became more obvious that price was more
about place than the quality of bricks and mortar, and housing price speculation
became more closely associated with gambling. This was most evident when
housing prices crashed towards the end of 1989.
It must be remembered that in examining housing, what are being considered
in terms of price are the prices only for homes that are for sale. The prices shown
here thus illustrate the distribution of privately owned homes being bought with
loans. 13 Average housing price has been estimated and plotted for wards from a
sample of building societies' records (Figure 4.15). The geographic patterns of
local housing price structures are investigated later in Chapters 5 and 8. For now,
the close correspondence, and important differences, between this picture and the
others are all presented together to illustrate the closeness of the connections. 14
4.6 How people vote
You can no more take politics out of government than you can keep
sex out of procreation.
(Gyford, Leach and Game, 1989, p. 1)
The British state regularly asks its inhabitants for their opinion on its gov-
ernment, through elections of candidates representing political parties standing
for particular issues. As the choice is usually only between two or three regular
parties this expression of choice is extremely limited. During the 1980s most
people's choices were, respectively, the Conservative, Labour and Liberal par-
ties, which respectively adopted the colours blue, red and yellow to represent
themselves.
In the early 1980s the Liberal party allied with a newly created Social
Democratic party. Following 1990, mostly merged, they took the label Liberal
Democrats. The term Liberal is used wherever possible in this work to avoid
confusion. Other parties, such as the Nationalists, Unionists and Greens, showed
13 'Social class, in the sense of status of individuals in the labour market, may today be as well
reflected by position in the housing market as by necessarily imprecise occupational labels' ( Buck
et al ., 1986, p. 101).
14 The distribution of housing is intricately connected to many of the other patterns shown here:
'The results of this study strongly support the argument (Cheshire, 1979) that inner-city unemploy-
ment is not so much a problem of the performance of the city labour market as a whole, but a feature
of the other sifting mechanisms in society, mainly the housing market, that concentrate people who
are at a competitive disadvantage in society into relatively restricted areas' (Frost and Spence, 1981,
p. 100).