So Alasdair, we're talking maps today,
and we're also talking inequality
which is a big word in the election manifestos this year.
But in fact, when we talk about mapping inequality
that's not a new thing.
It's been done before.
So who was the first to do it?
Well, the first person really to do this on a large scale
was Charles Booth in Victorian London.
And his study of life and labour of the people of London is
really the main one people look to as the first.
So people think of him almost as the first social scientist
because of it.
We've got one of his maps here, which
is looking at the area of Whitechapel in London.
And just looking at it, it looks like a really normal sort
of street map except there's colours everywhere.
What do the colours show us?
The colours indicate the social class of the individuals who
live in these different buildings.
So, for example, along Whitechapel Road,
we can see Charles Booth's category
as identifying these people as well-to-do, middle class.
Whereas, if you just turn off to a side street,
all of a sudden you see different categories.
Very poor or poor or even the lowest class on his map,
which he at the time dubbed "vicious, semi-criminal."
These category labels are fascinating because they
say a lot about attitudes towards the impoverished
at the time perhaps.
So, in Victorian London going to talk
about this cheek by jowl index that you've developed later.
But in Victorian London, according to Booth,
prosperity was always just a little turn away
from chronic want and chronic need.
Exactly.
That's what you see.
You don't have to go too far off the main thoroughfares
before you suddenly have these intense areas of poverty.
How did he collect this information?
Well, unlike today, where we'd probably just quickly download
the data and map it, he had to get out and about
and use up a lot of shoe leather, also
a team of researchers with essentially clipboards
and notebooks surveying most of inner London
effectively, speaking to residents, taking notes.
And obviously all this is all online now for us to use,
but very much a data-driven exercise,
but collected through hard work.
So actually given the inequality's
mentioned in all of these political manifestos
for the election, it's actually quite a timely thing
to have delivered this look at inequality
across the whole of England.
Yeah.
I mean, when we started this project about 18 months ago,
of course, we had no idea there would
be an election anytime soon.
But it has coincided with this, and obviously the manifestos
mention inequality.
So yeah, it's quite timely, we think.
So if we fast forward from the Victorian era
and look at the outcomes of your work
at the University of Sheffield, what is this map showing us?
This is a map of the whole of England broken down
into travel to work areas.
So each individual area, like London here,
is effectively a commuter zone.
So people travel within these to work,
and these boundaries contain local labour markets.
Another example would be up in Liverpool,
where you have Liverpool on The Wirral as one local labour
market, or Berwick, where the local labour market area goes
across into Scotland across the border.
So you deliberately didn't use things
like parliamentary constituencies
and local authority areas because they don't necessarily
reflect day-to-day human life in the way that these areas do.
Because if I pick any one of these areas.
So if I pick Hull here, this area
is defined like it is because most of the people who
live here work here.
That's right?
That's exactly right.
It's what we call self-contained.
It's a self-contained labour market area.
So that explains what the areas are.
What do the colours mean?
This particular measure of inequality
relates to how closely packed together
people of the same kind of socio-economic class are.
The darker colours indicate where people who are more
similar live closer together.
And the lighter colours is the opposite.
So in the lighter areas, that's where we're saying
there's a big contrast between the people who live within
those areas - if you like, it could be the haves
and the have-nots?
Yeah, exactly.
Why do we care about this?
I mean, why does this matter, do you think?
There is a number of reasons.
So it could be just to do with the provision of services.
Another good reason for caring about inequality
would be to do with the political fallout right
and how that feeds into the electoral process, which
we've probably seen in the last few years.
OK, does that mean the areas that are dark,
where there's relatively little inequality -
these darker patches here across the north, over in Cornwall
and the southwest over here in Lincolnshire
- are we saying that in those darker areas
that they're not problem areas?
Well, there is a couple of ways of looking at it.
One would be to say inequality here is not a problem.
But the other, and I think more plausible,
explanation would be that inequality is not necessarily
the issue but absolute poverty across the board.
So what we have is relatively equal but quite poor.
There's no inequality because everyone's poor.
That's probably not...
Yeah, it's probably not what we're aiming for.
...what you're aiming for, OK.
So we were fascinated by this map when we first looked at it
because if we look at just the lightest coloured areas
on the map, that's the top 20 most unequal areas in England,
according to this data.
So if we base it on just the proximity of the haves
and the have-nots living cheek by jowl,
much in the way that we just looked at with the Charles
Booth map of Whitechapel, these areas
here are the top 20 for inequality in England.
So we have unsurprisingly, I suppose, London is here...
most of these areas are actually Midlands
and to the north of England, with one big exception
being in the south we have the Portsmouth travel
to work area here is showing up as highly unequal.
This particular measure of inequality
generally picks out places in the Midlands
and north of England, which your traditional centres
of manufacturing, your ex-industrial locations are at.
For example, if you look at somewhere
like Barrow-in-Furness travel to work area,
or you look at somewhere like Blackpool or even
Sheffield's travel to work area, or Hull,
these are areas of traditional industry, where worker housing
was packed very tightly together, much like in the way
it was in those Charles Booth maps.
So that's really interesting because, for me
- and I'll have to reveal a personal fact here
- I grew up in the Portsmouth area.
And one of the things when I was growing up
is that people always used to describe the Portsmouth
area as a northern city transplanted
to the south coast.
So it's fascinating to see it coming out here
at the national level.
Let's take a look - and because I'm biased
- we're going to have a look at this Portsmouth travel
to work area and see what's really going on there.
So what we've got here, first of all...
just to show you that we're zooming in... so we've got some
satellite imagery here of the wider Portsmouth area.
So we're zoomed quite in.
Even on this satellite image, we can see roads and so on.
But what we can do is if we take a layer...
effectively this is your map zoomed in...
we can see that actually this Portsmouth travel
to work area, which is this big yellow area here,
it actually extends quite a long way.
And in fact, it's a peculiar shape
because it's quite tall but quite narrow.
And I know that that's actually a good thing,
as far as the commuting patterns are concerned.
Because knowing this area, I know
that there is a motorway going up here,
and that this is actually a commuting corridor
and that there's not as much travel across.
So that validates the geography.
But what we're really interested in doing now is looking
at the neighbourhood level information that allowed you
to make this area bright yellow.
So let's bring in this neighbourhood level information
for the Portsmouth area.
And this is the first time that we really start to capture some
of the neighbourhood level gradients in income deprivation
that allowed you to decide which areas of the country were more
unequal than others.
Again, let's think about the colour.
The colour is now not showing us the inequality, is it?
The colour is now showing us the actual level of deprivation.
That's right.
So the individual areas are these 32,000 areas,
neighbourhood level, about 1,600 people or so.
That's these very small individual pockets of colour.
They're individual neighbourhoods.
They're individual neighbourhoods essentially.
And what we see here is a lighter colour.
So the lighter colours here are areas that score more highly
on the deprivation index.
And at the other end of the scale,
generally you'll find these in the suburban areas;
the darkest colours on the map, the least deprived area.
So they're really usually quite affluent neighbourhoods.
Going back to what you were saying
about the traditional patterns.
So this is Portsmouth city centre over here.
The idea that you've actually got high levels of deprivation
in the city centre, gradually getting a little more affluent
as you spread out into much more affluent rural areas.
That's a repeating pattern across the country.
Exactly.
That's generally what we see everywhere.
OK, one of the things that fascinated me knowing about
this area, though, is that in the Portsmouth travel to work
area you don't just have the city centre area deprived.
You've actually got an area called Paulsgrove up here,
which is also coming out as quite highly deprived
for income, but also this area up here.
Now, this is the area in the north, of Havant-,
the town of Havant, which is part of this commuting
corridor.
This is the Leigh Park Estate.
So there's two points here which are in the most deprived
10 per cent in national terms, which is Leigh Park and then
a part of Leigh Park called Warren Park.
You have these multiple pockets of deprivation surrounded
by much more affluence.
And these areas are not far away from each other.
The thing that struck me when I looked at this data
for the first time was that this darkest colour here suggests
that this is the most affluent 10 per cent,
in nationwide terms, bordering areas that are in the most
deprived percentiles of the country.
That's the essence of your spatial inequality?
That's right.
So traditionally, you'd just expect
to see a geographical gradient, where you don't really
get these extremes next to each other.
There's a number of reasons why you might get that.
Sometimes it's brownfield land where new housing is being put,
and maybe that's more luxury housing, luxury flats.
And we've seen a lot of that over the last 20 years.
But occasionally what you get is a really steep social gradient,
and sometimes it's because of a road like you can see here.
Or it might be a river or a railway line,
something like that.
So there'll be some physical separation,
even though they might...
Usually.
...be close to each other.
Now, that takes me again back to Booth because when Booth
carried out his two surveys 10 years apart,
one of the things that he said was that actually neighbourhood
renewal was one of the things that was helping to reinforce
isolation of the deprived, because there was a big railway
building boom in the period and a slum clearance programme.
And his contention was that building railway lines actually
helped to box people in.
We can still see signs of that.
The physical geography is different.
Exactly.
And if you go back maybe 50 years
before Charles Booth's map you have Benjamin Disraeli
talking about people living and being
dwellers in different zones.
And if you go back to antiquity, in Plato's Republic,
we have him talking about different quarters of cities,
some rich and some poor.
So these are not new themes, but what we see in the map
is we see these patterns repeated at the small scale
through time.
But this is the first time we've been
able to see this data using your atlas, if you like,
to identify the places to look at.
So one of the things about looking at the maps
like this, though, is that it looks like this area
is connected to this area and to this area.
But we can see kind of through the satellite imagery,
peeping behind that actually there
is nothing physical connecting those areas
because it looks like that's fields and country.
So one of the things that we can do here
is bring the road network in here.
And that helps us to really see what's going on.
Because going back to this deprived area here
of Leigh Park and the Warren here in Havant,
if you look at the road network, you
can actually see that this area here is pretty isolated.
Although it's very close in geographical terms,
as the crow flies, on three sides,
it looks like Warren Park here is isolated
from these more affluent areas.
So let's just take a little nip into here and see what we find.
What we're talking about, Leigh Park.
Leigh Park used to have a right reputation for roughness
and that.
It is a bit scruffy, but it is what it is.
But I mean, once upon a time, Park Parade,
as we used to call it, used to have the main road
going up the middle of it.
I can remember it.
There used to be a Woolies there.
Do you think there's still a sense
of community in Leigh Park?
Not as much as there used to be, no.
I don't know.
I really don't know.
I mean, look, these shutters...
dammed.
It's either no one's in there, or they
don't open it until halfway through the night.
Did you go to places like Emsworth, or...
No.
No?
OK.
No, because I've only got a bus to catch.
I can't wait for somebody to take me places.
All right.
Yeah, so you tend to stay in the local area for your day-to-day,
that sort of stuff?
Yeah.
OK.
Tell us about growing up in Leigh Park.
What was that like?
Well, I enjoyed it.
I've got three sisters, and we was all, we've all turned out
fine, I think.
So what role does the community centre play for you?
Yeah, it's brilliant.
We used to go to a youth group here.
And now we've obviously both got children.
We try to come at least once a week.
It's mostly cheap, and it's really likeable to us.
Does it feel like a community centre?
Yeah.
Do you feel like there's that sense of neighbourliness?
Yeah, it's lovely.
So do you know places like Rowlands Castle and Emsworth?
Do you go there?
Not really, no.
Do you meet many people from those areas?
Or do they tend to keep themselves to themselves?
Yeah, yeah.
If we go there, you feel a bit like, hmm, where are you from?
Leigh Park... and it sort of makes you feel a bit awful.
But yeah, no, it's nice to have something here for us.
You know, you have a motorway here, fields and a golf
course here, I think.
And you can see that it's connected but only to itself.
I mean, I know that that was a post wolrd war two housing
estate.
Is that a typical pattern from that era of...
We do see a lot of that, so good examples of this
all across the country.
Glasgow's always used as an example.
It's a good way of understanding that,
although people have lives in theory in the same geographical
spaces, they're often living completely different lives,
disconnected from neighbourhoods that are literally right next
door.
So this is why we can call this the cheek by jowl index
because they're co-located almost but living very
different socio-economic...
Exactly.
...lives.
And the other thing is, particularly
with the Leigh Park area, is just how surrounded
it is by affluence.
I mean, what you were saying earlier about a gradient,
that just doesn't exist in any direction.
It's a steep cliff face, if you like,
of deprivation, which is fascinating.
What would Charles Booth make of this stuff today, do you think?
I think he'd be quite surprised at the lack of connections
between these places because at least in his London
maps everywhere was very well-connected.
Here, not so much, and I think he'd probably
question the aims and objectives of 1960s planners perhaps.
The locals call this area the Warren
because of this network of streets
that are inward looking.
But it scores very poorly on connectedness
to everywhere else.
Excuse me?
We're doing a little bit of filming about Leigh Park.
I wonder if we could have a word or two with you
about it, if we parked up the car and had a quick chat.
Yeah.
Is that all right?
So what brought you to Leigh Park in the first place?
I got married.
I was living in Selsey at the time.
Oh, OK.
And I married a Leigh Park girl.
So you've stayed on the estate ever since?
Yes.
Do you think that because it is geographically
so separate from the rest of Havant,
that that actually helps with the community spirit,
do you think?
Yes, I think so.
Yes.
We're a little bit isolated from Havant,
but I've never seen much trouble up here in 30 years.
Do you feel, compared to when you were in Selsey,
that people are more likely to stay in Leigh Park in the sense
that it is that community space that people don't...
Yeah, I think so.
Yes.
Not many people know each other in Selsey.
Where you would get to know people...
you get to know people in here.
So we're saying that actually, it's not
like it's even stayed the same.
In some cases, because of post world war two planning,
some of these areas are actually even worse than they were back
in Booth's day.
The old first law of geography tells us
that everywhere is connected to everywhere else.
And in theory, near places should be more connected.
But what you see sometimes is that's not the case.
Near places are sometimes very disconnected and very much not
like each other.
On the basis that it's unlikely that anyone from one of these
more affluent areas nearby is going to accidentally wander
through the deprived areas because you have to make
the effort to get there, and there is not a natural flow...
No, exactly.
...across those areas.
One of the things I felt while we
were doing this whole exercise and looking at these maps
is just what Booth would have made
of our cartography, the fact that we are
letting these areas run out.
If I take the road network off, these areas,
they do run into each other.
They're kind of space-filling, aren't they?
Yeah.
Although it looks like this is one big area full of people,
actually it's a rural area, and there's not much going on here.
So one of the things that we wanted to do in the spirit
of Booth was that with this sort of mapping we're showing that
everywhere is filled with colour,
and that's not really that representative of what
we're showing.
No, and one of the things, with these neighbourhood areas that
we're using, there are about 32,000 of them,
and they're designed so that each one should have a roughly
similar amount of people.
But in less dense areas like here,
where population density is very low,
these areas are very, very big.
But of course, not many people actually
live in the whole area.
So one of the things that we did then
was to cut through this map with a street and road network that
would allow us to get something that looks a lot more
like the maps that Booth was making.
So let's take those away and replace it
with a view of that cut road network.
And so here we go.
Now I feel a bit more comfortable because it's what
Booth would recognise as a map that's very similar to his own.
So we've retained the colours.
So the light colours are still the most deprived areas.
There's the Leigh Park Estate and the Warren.
Here's the city centre of Portsmouth.
This is the more affluent areas.
Emsworth is here.
We're no longer in the Warren Park Estate.
We're clearly somewhere more affluent.
Let's see what we can find.
Does it surprise you when I said that this area came out
very high for inequality relative to the rest
of the country?
That's not been my experience, no.
Have you been in Emsworth for a long time?
15 years.
15 years?
15, 16 years.
Did you come to it from somewhere close by or from...
From Bognor Regis.
Do you know any of the areas that I just mentioned...
Rowlands Castle, Havant, Leigh Park?
Do any of those areas...
Yeah.
What's your impressions of those areas?
Rowlands Castle, pretty nice, pretty steepy.
Leigh Park, it's had it's day as it is.
Far too big...
it was the largest in Europe at the time it was built, I think.
Havant, that's fine, good shopping centre in there,
good area.
The biggest effect is the amount of building
that's going on at the present moment and the stretching
of our services.
I live in the square anyway.
You live in the square, and you've been in Emsworth
since you were three, you say?
Three.
OK, so how has Emsworth changed during that time?
Hugely.
Across the other side of the Bell Pond,
there are houses there which 50 years ago were selling
for about £35,000 Now they're a half million.
Wow.
So it's a big, big change in the housing situation,
which doesn't help people who have just moved into Emsworth.
Younger people can't really find affordable housing,
like a lot of places.
But Emsworth used to be on the par with Havant
in terms of property prices.
It's not bad for us that live here.
But on the other hand, it's not very good for younger people.
So given that change actually, that you've just
said between Havant and Emsworth on the prices,
does it surprise you when I have mentioned to somebody
else just a minute ago, that this area has been identified
as one of the most economically unequal areas in the country,
if you take the whole Portsmouth region?
That would surprise me because I think
property prices vary on a much smaller basis
than they did 25, 30 years ago.
Leigh Park, you may or may not know that Leigh Park was built
after the second world war, when all the houses in Portsmouth
were...
not all of them... were bombed.
So the council bought Leigh Park, which is a big country
house, and they built, it was the biggest council
estate in the whole of the UK at one stage.
We picked up a lot of the very similar thoughts,
actually, in terms of strength of sentiment
about local community.
But for the first time, I think, we also
picked up some really interesting things
about the way that some places close to each other
can have knock-on effects of each other.
So the discussion in there about how property prices have
ballooned here in Emsworth at the expense of Havant,
and in fact, the interplay between Portsmouth
and Leigh Park with Havant being bypassed,
these ideas that although these are separate places,
they are economically interlinked,
and what happens in one place can cascade into another,
it's very, very interesting.
Having a map like this, the previous map we had
is something we would a choropleth map,
whereas here it just shows you where the buildings are.
It shows you where people live, effectively,
in a way that allows us to unpick the urban fabric
and get a better understanding of the potential
for interaction but also where the break points are,
where you can see, particularly here,
a slight geographical separation between areas that
are very close together but possibly not in terms
of their social interactions.
For me, finally, knowing this area,
you really can start to see this Leigh Park
area for the relatively isolated area that it is.
And that they're actually, although they
are very close to each other, there
are these gaps appearing across major segments
right across the whole commuting area.
Suddenly starting to see much more subtle decisions which,
like you say, are long-term consequences
of urban planning decisions.
The other thing this shows for me is how pioneering Charles
Booth was in his representation of poverty
and the urban fabric.
These kind of things are very difficult to do
well, to do simply, and to tell the story of places.
And I think this does a much better job
than the previous map in doing that.
Where do you hope that this new Booth map, if we can
call it that, is going to go.
Yeah, it's really, for us, about providing better spatial
intelligence.
This is what people maybe know intuitively from their own
neighbourhoods, but do they understand it at a national
level?
So what we wanted to do is provide a national map
at a local level that would allow policymakers,
politicians, members of the public
- anyone who's interested in this kind of thing
- to understand local inequalities.
When I talked to people about what
we've been looking at with this map, a lot of people
are saying exactly this.
They said, well, of course, there
are rich areas and poor areas within cities.
Everyone knows them.
But I think the thing that surprised me with this was that
the colours we're using here are not just for the local area.
These areas place us in the national rankings.
So when we say the difference between a bright yellow
and a black colour here, that's the full spectrum
of the national range in income deprivation.
So let's have a look.
Let's zoom back out again and look at what all of those
neighbourhoods look like.
And so here it is.
This is our national view of localised deprivation patterns.
So just to clarify with you, Alasdair,
this is all of those 32,000 areas that you were talking
about earlier, all of those neighbourhoods.
This is all 32,000 on one map?
Yeah.
What sort of patterns are we seeing
when we zoom this out to the national level?
The highest areas of deprivation are
to be found - so in the West Midlands or Merseyside or West
Yorkshire or the northeast of England or Humberside.
But one of the things people don't often
pay so much attention to is a kind
of string of deprived seaside locations.
And it might not be entire towns,
sometimes it's just little pockets.
So we have this in Lincolnshire.
Or we may have that in Essex.
Or we may have that on the south coast of Kent.
So some of those aren't immediately obvious.
But again, we have that all over.
Now, we do say, there's rich and poor everywhere,
but they're disproportionately clustered in those places
and also in London.
And actually, one of the other things that I think I spotted
when we first loaded this up was that those areas that we were
talking about right at the start that don't have much
inequality, you can almost see them on here
because of the more consistent colour patterns.
The southwestern, the Cornwall area,
there's much less of this alternating bright and dark
colour.
It's more uniformly purple, middling...
Yeah, that's right.
...in terms of deprivation.
And finally, I think looking at it in these terms,
you've finally got a map that really
would take the attention of Charles Booth
because this is the sort of map he wasn't able
to produce, simply because of the restrictions
that he was working with back in the Victorian time.
Great.
Thank you very much.