Transforming the mosaic - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 137

Unravelling the effects of migration is difficult. However, 'no obvious pattern'
can be an important image to show, especially when a pattern is thought to exist.
The next chapter examines it in detail. For now, it is worth noting that even
pictures that show no structure are showing something. Until you look at a
picture you can only guess what you may or may not be able to see. However,
if you look and see no pattern, you need not include the image, even if the fact
of no pattern is interesting.
The last chapter included a short introduction to the major theme of migration
by looking at where people in Britain were born. Now we look at how those
pictures are changing (Figure 5.2). This could be done by seeing where those
migrants have moved to, or from, but here we show how the proportion of lifetime
migrants has altered in areas over the ten years between censuses. High levels
of colour in the image indicate either that the proportion of lifetime migrants in
that area has risen or that it has not declined as much as elsewhere.
Of those born in Britain, what is most striking is the return of the Welsh
to the Valleys or, much more likely, their relative unwillingness to leave them.
Less obviously, the image highlights an infusion of English born into the rest
of Wales and into highland Scotland. The decline of all three national birthplace
groups generally occurs in areas where people originally born overseas have been
moving in or moving to.
The picture of change in the proportions of those born in (all of) Ireland, Asia
and Africa depicts some interesting features (Figure 5.3). The rings of movement
of lifetime international migrants out of the centre of London are distinctive. 8 This
group of people had a major impact upon the changing social landscape of Britain
in the 1970s as their moving out influenced many other distributions and made
space that other overseas migrants were both attracted to and encouraged into.
5.4 Variable employment
Analysis of trends over the 1980s points to a continuation of wide dif-
ferences between the least and most privileged wards. Unemployment
differentials have widened, even in the most recent period when the
average level has fallen.
(Congdon, 1989, pp. 489-490)
One of the most variable attributes of our social landscape is employment,
or the lack of it. The obvious extension of the above methods is to divide
8 Before the 1981 census results were released, and long before any questions were asked on
ethnicity, which first occurred in the 1991 census, it was assumed polarisation would occur: 'The
Black population of Britain is locked into an allocative system that seems bound to produce an
increased polarization of native and immigrant populations. The forces that drew them into the
economy are the same forces that are producing an increased isolation of the Black population. They
came to fill gaps created by an upward mobility of the White population in the employment structure
and they settled in gaps left in the urban structure by the outward geographical mobility of the White
population' (Peach, 1982, p. 40). The later censuses showed this not to be occurring.