Honeycomb structure - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 122

Newspapers put up interactive cartograms on their websites to show the results
of those same elections and to try to lure in more readers. The next step will
be to see the same kinds of cartogram being used to map less obvious measures
than votes.
4.7 The social landscape
The Victorians were more concerned with patterns found at a smaller
spatial scale, and this is also reviving today: as we will see, despite the
interest in the north-south divide, some writers see spatial differenti-
ation taking place on a much smaller spatial scale between localities.
(Savage, 1989, p. 248)
A particular representation of the social landscape of 1980s Britain has been
built up and presented through a dozen colour images. This is the landscape
that is made up of, and to varying extents determines, many aspects of peoples'
lives. It is the landscape of neighbourhoods, communities, blocks, streets, groups,
villages, suburbs, housing estates, life chances and constraints. It is the landscape
of age, work, class, immigration and race. It is the landscape of social existence,
political power and economic opportunity - the human geography of Britain.
There is, however, much more that could be studied using these methods
than has been shown so far, all adding to the montage of a social landscape. The
geography of health is one area - of people's life expectancies, of disease and
disability; the geography of welfare - the payment of benefits, the provision of
services; the geography of privilege - the distribution of power in the workplace;
the ownership of property; shares in industry; the geography of income and
wealth. 17
We know where most ill-health is to be found (among the old and poor),
where the most social security benefits would be paid, where the rich would be
found and where the owners of industry concentrated. As you draw more and
more of these pictures, you begin to recognise the same familiar features over
and over again in the social landscape. So much is so strongly inter-related that
17 Some of the patterns found here were previously gleaned from more conventional maps of
Local Labour Market Areas (LLMAs): 'Most notable is the ring of most privileged LLMAs around
London, extending to the South Coast and forming a virtually complete arc on the other flank; the
only exception being along both sides of the Thames estuary. There are also significant clusters
of better-off LLMAs further westwards along the South Coast and in southern parts of the West
Midlands. The prosperity of the South Coast can be gauged in terms of the fact that south of a
line between the Severn Estuary and Lincolnshire there are only three representatives of the lowest
quintile on this indicator, namely Corby, Spalding and Wisbech, and, of Britain's bottom 112 places,
the South accounts for only 11, all but one of which are located on the margins of the region in
East Anglia and the East Midlands (Figure 7.1A)' (Champion et al ., 1987, pp. 91 - 93).