Gardiner V., Matthews H. The changing geography of the United Kingdom
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chains, Post Office Counters, etc., as well as by those in the local authorities who try to
coordinate transport provision and ‘outlet location’ decisions in a variety of strategic and
local planning exercises.
Indeed a new word is entering the lexicon of those who study the changing rural
scene. It is ‘governance’:
The concept of ‘governance’ is broader than that of ‘government’ because it
encapsulates not just the formal agencies of elected local political institutions, but
also central government, a range of non elected organisations of the state at both
central and local levels, as well as institutional and individual actors from outside the
formal political arena, such as voluntary organisations, private businesses and
corporations, the mass media and increasingly, supra national institutions such as the
European Union.
(Ward and McNicholas 1997:1)
The point is twofold. First, only by trying to untangle how all these agencies interrelate can
we really get a handle on how rural Britain is changing. Second, given that the decision-
making arena is so crowded, attempts are increasingly being made to pull them together at
the local or area level into formal or informal partnership arrangements. Two of this chapter’s
three briefcase-studies of Britain’s rural areas—those of the Scottish Western Isles and of
England’s Forest of Dean—demonstrate examples of local partnerships, or, to put it
differently, attempts at ‘governance’.
One other key development in ‘rural decision-making’ warrants mention, touching as
it does all of the issues raised in this chapter—that of increased ‘local community
involvement’. More and more ordinary people living in our small towns and villages are
demanding a say in the decisions that affect them and often have a role in actually delivering
services at the very local level. Equally striking, local and national government is increasingly
encouraging this trend, troublesome though on occasions it might prove to be.
There are various reasons for this official encouragement of community action. First,
better decision-making: rural people are an increasingly sophisticated source of information
and of ideas for addressing local concerns that it would be folly to ignore. Second, if a local
authority policy—relating, for example, to a school reorganisation programme or to the
designation of land for different kinds of development—can be firmly based upon a local
consensus then it is less likely to be ‘ambushed’ when it comes to implementation. Third,
self-help can obviously save money—especially in those smaller or remoter settlements
where public and private sector agencies are increasingly concerned at the costs of service
delivery. And local people are frequently ready to give freely of their time, expertise and
money, not to mention spare seats in their cars and underused space in their buildings if it is
for the good of their immediate local community. Fourth, involving the community can
enhance what is now called ‘capacity building’, meaning the building up of the human
resource, the social networks and the informal institutions of an area which can all bear fruit
in the longer term.
One increasingly popular way of stimulating community involvement is the ‘village
appraisal’ —over 2,000 of which have been carried out in British parishes, villages and
small towns over the past fifteen years. These are social surveys ‘of the people, by the
people, for the people’, with the words ‘by’ and ‘for’ being the crucial ones. Data amassed
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BOX 11.3 Goring and Streatley: a slice of ‘middle England’
Goring and Streatley lie on the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border, astride the River
Thames, ten miles upstream from Reading, forty miles from London, and well
and truly in the relatively prosperous ‘South’. In 1991 a group of volunteers,
helped by the two parish councils and the local amenity association, decided to
carry out a ‘village appraisal’, delivering a long questionnaire to all 1,700
households and achieving a 70 per cent response. The idea was to ‘provide an
accurate picture of the villages as they are now…for information and interest…and
to help villages and organisations interested in the future’.
The attractive 62-page report that emerged, Goring and Streatley: A Portrait,
is one of a thousand or more produced up and down the country in the last decade
and it is the very ‘ordinariness’ of the picture revealed which is of interest. This is
not a former coal-mining area with run-down colliery villages or a collection of
crofting communities on remote islands 600 miles from London (see Boxes and
11.1 and 11.2). It is a slice of middle class, middle aged, south midland, ‘middle
England’ beloved by millions of semi-rural/semi-urban (does it matter which?)
people spread across broad swathes of our country.
Car ownership in the two villages is high. Even in 1991 43 per cent of
households had one car, 33 per cent had two and 9 per cent had three or
more. By the same token, 15 per cent did not have a car at all. And this is
‘commuter land’, with half of those employed travelling daily to Reading or
London and with most of the rest working in a broad swathe of Oxfordshire,
Berkshire and neighbouring counties. Unemployment hardly gets a mention
in the report, but there is concern that strikingly few adults aged 20–40 live
in the two parishes, and thereby few young children. Housing is expensive
and most lower-income families cannot afford to buy in this part of the
Thames valley.
The concerns expressed by a majority of the households surveyed were
far from being narrowly self-interested. Most households are themselves well
housed and car owning, but a need for affordable housing for rent, and for
better public transport, was widely appreciated. High on the list of concerns
were two almost universal bêtes noires of middle-class, semi-rural, outer-
metropolitan England. First, traffic—congestion, road safety, the long mooted
but still awaited bypass. Second, ‘planning’ —the sense of having to be
constantly vigilant lest ‘the planners’ foist on the community ‘unwanted
development’ —in this case a shopping and office development on a vacant
site in the village centre.
And the responses of the people of Goring and Streatley also neatly exemplify
the widely held sentiments of village and small town communities across the country:
an affection for ‘the village atmosphere and environment’ and a concern for very
local environmental nuisances—in this case traffic intrusion and car parking, a few
eyesores and derelict buildings, litter and dog dirt in the park.
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at local level on people’s hopes and fears, likes and dislikes, pulled together by volunteer
teams into reports on ‘our village and where it’s going’ and debated in village hall and
parish council meetings, have proved to be a powerful spur to action. Such action may be by
outside agencies who feel empowered or cajoled into re-routing the bus service or part-
funding a play scheme; and/or by local people themselves who feel encouraged to set up
‘good neighbour schemes’ or community shops, say, by the local mandate for action and
the freshly replenished reservoir of community spirit.
The danger, of course, is that ‘do it yourself’ will come to be seen as the
panacea for the ills of our rural communities. Certainly there was a whiff of this in
the Rural White Paper (DoE and MAFF 1995), which set as a key objective
‘encouraging active communities which are keen to take the initiative to improve
their quality of life’. It would be a tragedy if the growth of community involvement
were to become the state’s mandate to abdicate as far as rural Britain is concerned.
Rather, the fortunes of Britain’s rural communities in the twenty-first century may
better lie in the notion of ‘partnership’ and in ever seeking a judicious balance
between the benefits of orchestrating integrated strategies and programmes at area
or regional level on the one hand, and on the other of fostering grass roots initiative
and entrepreneurship. Certainly the old notion of ‘state decides, state provides’
seems gone for ever.
Conclusion
At the end of the twentieth century, rural Britain continues to undergo rapid social and
economic change, driven by forces emanating largely from outside the rural areas themselves.
The next century will see a further erosion in the economic distinctiveness of rural areas,
although socially they may increasingly be home to the more privileged members of our
society who will strive to preserve, indeed to ‘manicure’, the idyllic character of their
environment even if that imposes hardship on their less fortunate neighbours.
Listing a few overarching concepts provides a convenient way of summarising some
of the challenges that lie ahead:
¿ sustainability—managing the inevitable change so that it minimises the erosion of the
inherited ‘capital’ of rural Britain—the word ‘capital’ embracing the natural and human-
made environment as well as traditional culture and social support mechanisms in the
widest sense;
¿ social balance and social justice—ensuring that we do not drift towards a polarised
society in which our countryside, villages and attractive small towns become just a haven
or playground for the middle classes while the cities deteriorate in quality and social
acceptability;
¿ governance, partnership and community involvement—all terms that imply a need to
galvanise the full range of local people and of relevant agencies, from parish councils to
Regional Development Agencies, in resolving these key issues.
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References
Cloke, P., Milbourne, P. and Thomas, C. (1994) Lifestyles in Rural England, Salisbury: Rural
Development Commission.
Department of Environment and Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (1995) Rural England, a
Nation Committed to a Living Countryside (‘The Rural White Paper’), CM3016, London: HMSO.
(Note: Parallel documents were produced simultaneously by the Scottish and Welsh Offices.)
Moseley, M.J. (1997) ‘Parish Appraisals as a tool of rural community development: an assessment of
the British Experience’, Planning, Practice and Research 12(3): 197–212.
Rogers, A. (1993) English Rural Communities: an Assessment and Prospect for the 1990s, Salisbury:
Rural Development Commission.
Rural Development Commission (1995) Rural Economic Activity, Salisbury: Rural Development
Commission.
Rural Development Commission (1998) 1997 Survey of Rural Services, Salisbury: Rural Development
Commission.
Ward, N. and McNicholas, K. (1997) Reconfiguring Rural Development in the UK: Objective 5b and
the New Rural Governance, Newcastle upon Tyne: Centre for Rural Economy, University of
Newcastle upon Tyne.
Further reading
LEADER Magazine (LEADER Observatory AEIDL, Chaussee St Pierre 260, B1040,
Brussels). This tri-annual magazine is available free of charge from the Observatory.
Three excellent ongoing series of reports on aspects of rural development in the UK are
worth noting, namely those by:
1 the Scottish National Rural Partnership on ‘Good Practice in Rural Development’ (contact
the Scottish Office);
2 the Centre for Rural Economy, University of Newcastle upon Tyne;
3 the Rural Development Commission, London and Salisbury (now subsumed into the
Countryside Agency).
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Chapter 12
Life chances and lifestyles
Daniel Dorling and Mary Shaw
Introduction
This chapter considers some of the most simple of life chances in Britain. It shows how
they are affected by social influences on lifestyle at the individual and geographical level.
People’s chances of dying young in the 1990s are used as an indicator of misfortune.
These are compared with their chances in the 1950s and the two geographies are mapped
for different age groups to show the changing regional patterns of mortality. Normally
medical explanations are made for premature mortality, but this chapter focuses solely on
social and behavioural factors as explanations for mortality rates for particular groups of
people in Britain. The chapter begins by illustrating the changing regional geography of
mortality in Britain through a series of maps for different age groups at two points in
time. We then show how geographical inequalities in mortality can be measured. Since
the 1950s, and particularly during the 1980s, geographical inequalities in mortality and
life chances in general have grown in Britain. The factors which may underlie this rise
are then discussed. The chapter then shows the reader how they can estimate their life
expectancy, or, rather, the life expectancy of someone of their age, sex and
characteristics. The categories of factors considered are basic demographics (age and
sex), social class background (father’s social class, own social class, height and
unemployment), geography (country of birth, region of residence, housing tenure),
behavioural factors (smoking, alcohol, diet, exercise, weight and injecting illegal drug
use) and relationships (sexual activity and marital status). The purpose of this exercise is
to show how life chances in contemporary Britain have both social and spatial
dimensions. The geography of society influences the behaviour and opportunities of its
members which, in turn, alters the geography of the outcomes of their actions—in this
case, death.
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The changing geography of death in Britain
There is a geography to premature death in Britain. This geography is largely the mirror
image of the geography of good health. The concept of health is very difficult to define, and
even more difficult to measure. For example, the World Health Organisation (1948) defined
health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the
absence of disease’. Because good health is so difficult to define and measure, geographers
often use the map of premature death—a much more easily definable and measurable
outcome—as a proxy for a map of ill health. In this chapter we shall introduce you to the
geography of good and poor health and how health can be counted and the factors behind
health measured. We shall show you maps of areas of good and poor health for different
groups of the population and describe how and why these maps have changed over the last
fifty years. We shall also explain how the geography of health in Britain has been changing
over recent decades. These patterns and changes will be illustrated by showing you how
you can estimate your own life expectancy.
We start our description of the geography of mortality in Britain by looking at the
differences in people’s chances of dying fifty years ago. Here, for simplicity, we concentrate
on the ten places for males and females which had the highest and lowest mortality rates for
each of six age groups. Males and females are considered separately because different factors
have differing influences on their lives and they often die from different causes of death.
The obvious differences are biological; for example, no men die giving birth to a child or of
ovarian cancer. More importantly men and women, in general, tend to suffer differently as
a result of the social changes which underlie the geography of health. For instance, when
the shipyards and mines were closed it was almost all men who lost their jobs and who were
subsequently more likely to suffer from ill health. Women are, in general, more likely to
suffer from the effects of insecurity of employment which have been shown to be health
damaging, but are less likely to suffer, for example, from accidents in adolescence as they
are brought up to be more careful than boys. We separate the six different age groups described
here for much the same reasons, both biological and social.
Our data are based on the Registrar General’s Decennial Report on Mortality in England
and Wales for 1950–3 and the Scottish General Registrar Office Reports of Mortality for
these same years. The geographical areas we use are the 292 London Boroughs, Metropolitan
Boroughs and Urban and Rural Remainders of Counties used in these reports. We have also
used a Geographical Information System to produce equivalent statistics for mortality in
the period 1990–2 so that changes in the patterns can be evaluated for these same areas.
This was the most recent period which could be compared with the past as we are reliant
upon the 1991 Census to provide the population estimates to calculate mortality rates for
these areas.
Figure 12.1 shows the geography of infant mortality across Britain between 1950 and
1953 and can be compared with Figure 12.2 which shows the same distribution forty years
later. Figure 12.2 highlights the ten areas with the highest and lowest rates of infant mortality
for both boys and girls. Usually these areas coincide, areas with high rates for boys also
have high rates for girls and in these cases the figure splits the two symbols in half and the
combined symbol is placed over the area being indicated. There was a clear regional divide
in infant mortality in the 1950s with the highest rates found in large cities in the North of
England, Scotland, South Wales and the Potteries while the lowest rates were all south of a
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line between the Severn and the Wash, with the exception of Edinburgh for infant girls. This
divide reflected the living standards of the parents of infants across Britain at that time, their
levels of nutrition, whether their homes were damp, levels of overcrowding, and so on.
Forty years later, as Figure 12.2 shows, the map has not altered greatly, despite huge
reductions in the national rates of infant mortality and great improvements in general levels
of nutrition, housing conditions and overcrowding. This is because the relative differences
between the standards of living in the North and South have not narrowed. There has been
a concentration of the areas with the highest rates of infant mortality into northern English
cities, and two affluent places in the north (small towns in Cheshire and parts of Rural
Derbyshire) now have some of the lowest rates.
Figure 12.3 shows mortality rates for boys and girls aged 1 to 4 between 1950 and
1953 with Figure 12.4 showing these same rates forty years later. Again the North—South
divide is evident, although slightly less clear cut. Part of the reason for this is that, particularly
in the later period, this is the age group in which mortality is least common and so a few
extra deaths occurring in any one year can alter the overall picture. The congenital conditions
which lead to the majority of infant deaths are no longer so vital for this age group and low
rates can now be seen west of the Penines as well as in the South and in Edinburgh, as
before. However, by 1990–2 rates in two of the poorer London Boroughs come to be within
the top ten areas for boys aged 1 to 4, while in the North rates are generally only low outside
of the larger towns. The relative deterioration of infant health in London will be seen later to
be reflected by a new concentration of ill health for adults in the capital city by 1992.
Figures 12.5 and 12.6 show the rates for the next age group of children aged 5 to 14
in 1950–3 and 1990–2. Again the North-South divide is evident, although rates are low in
the 1950s in small towns in Durham, the West Riding, Lancashire and Cheshire. All high
rates are again north of a line between the Severn and the Wash. Fifty years on the pattern is
similar, although rates in the small towns of Wiltshire (principally Swindon) and in the old
London Borough of Deptford are now in the top ten. Accidental death is a major factor for
this age group, often including road traffic accidents. But again this is not a random toll. A
child’s chances of being killed by a car are strongly related to their social advantages and
disadvantages, as we discuss later.
For young adults Figures 12.7 and 12.8 also show an extremely strong North-South
divide for both the 1950s and 1990s. Initially, only in the rural districts of the West Riding
and Lancashire were young adult mortality rates low in the North. Forty years later the
greatest change has been the sudden concentration of areas of high mortality into six London
Boroughs. Of all the age-sex groups we are examining here, men aged 15–44 have seen the
worst improvement in their overall chances in recent years, with their death rates now actually
rising in many areas. This rise has followed the pattern of high unemployment in Britain—
the relatively new concentration of mass unemployment and poverty within London has led
to this geographical concentration.
For older adults aged 45–64 the story is quite different, as Figures 12.9 and 12.10
show. The North-South divide is almost as clear as for infants in the 1950s, with only the
rural districts of the West Riding bucking this trend. However, by the early 1990s this anomaly
has disappeared and the country is clearly divided between northern cities where the old die
young and the generally rural areas of the south where they are more likely to live to healthy
old age. Compare Figures 12.1 and 12.10, infant mortality in the 1950s and older adult
mortality in the early 1990s. Notice any similarities? In general, the children who were least
FIGURE 12.2 Infant mortality rates for males and females, 1990–2
FIGURE 12.1 Infant mortality rates for males and females, 1950–3
FIGURE 12.4 Mortality rates for males and females aged 1–4, 1990–2FIGURE 12.3 Mortality rates for males and females aged 1–4, 1950–3
FIGURE 12.6 Mortality rates for males and females aged 5–14, 1990–2
FIGURE 12.5 Mortality rates for males and females aged 5–14, 1950–3