People, spaces and places - The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure - page 32

defined your opportunities and altered your destiny. When you felt it you may
easily not have been aware that it was this you were feeling. It could just have
felt normal to have been treated as you were and to learn to behave to others
in particular ways. Looking back you know it was as much about the times and
places you were in (Figure 2.1).
Whether you were male or female, where you went to school you knew (or

now know) it made a difference, but often you did not know quite what difference
it made. More importantly, you could not necessarily easily have known the effect
of the social structure on everybody else. It is the relationship between the gains
of some people, and the losses of others, that would easily escape any single
individual's perception. An individual may be able to imagine some of it, but
not to picture all of it.
It is only by first seeing what you wish to comprehend, that you can begin
to understand why and how it exists. Just to create an image of the simplest
manifestations of the structure of society is a difficult undertaking (Box 2.1).
The story that is told should treat everybody's part in it as equally important,
as all their lives should, at least in the way that their history is told, have equal
value (Figure 2.2).
British society was chosen as the subject of this work because of the practi-
calities of the exercise, since getting digital data in the 1980s was not easy. That
the line chosen around Britain divides land from water is convenient, but not the
reason for its imposition. The line around this country divides the experiences of
most of its people from those outside. 2 The sea may present no great economic
or political barrier any longer, especially with a tunnel now running under it, but
it is still a very strong social and cultural divide.
Some of the sharpest divisions are the closest - those separating Northern
Ireland from Britain, the United Kingdom from Europe - although they are much
less in magnitude than inequalities further afield. Eventually it may be possible
to undertake this kind of study across those lines, although there is still no social
atlas of Europe to view, even today. But extension must not be used as another
excuse for amalgamation - creating the average English, Scottish or Welsh man
and woman (Figure 2.3). Before we can begin to understand world society better,
it is prudent to delve into our own, to see just what we are comparing others with. 3

...

2 I agreed with this: 'It should be noted that Great Britain (England, Wales, and Scotland) is
not the United Kingdom (which includes Northern Ireland as well). But, given the fact that Ireland
as a whole constitutes a separate land mass, that it was historically governed as a colony of Great
Britain, that the division of Northern and Southern Ireland occurred only in 1922, and that Northern
Ireland itself contains but six counties - for these reasons, we restricted the study to the single land
mass of Great Britain for which the requisite data were readily available' (Massey and Stephan,
1977, p. 352).
3 In order to draw transformed maps of societies at a world level with colleagues we did at first
amalgamate statistics to the UK level, but later we broke up the state again and drew maps of the
population of the whole planet by 2010, which showed how many people lived in each small area.
This resulted in a new world map projection upon which other patterns can be drawn (see Hennig
et al ., 2010, pp. 66 - 69).