Beyond the Metropolis: Who speaks for Britain’s towns?
I like IPPR and it recently published a useful article on the rural economy. Why define these towns as just places that feel like small cities. I was fascinated by the “Start the Week” (Radio 4) discussion about the categorization of people into “Anywhere’s” and “Somewhere’s” in the new book “The Road to Somewhere” by David Goodheart. There’s not room to unpack its analysis in detail here but I think you should definitely read it for some really interesting analysis on the fault lines in our post referendum world. It helps me at least to think about some of the issues surfaced in this article which apply equally in our smaller rural towns. It tells us:
However, these statistics do more than just push social mobility back up the agenda: they also change the way we must think about it. In particular, they highlight that place – meaning where someone is born and brought up – is an increasingly pervasive dynamic in the social mobility story.
This is demonstrated most clearly by analysis from the Social Mobility Commission that ranks every local authority in Britain based on its record on social mobility. This shows that the UK is increasingly divided between social mobility ‘hotspots’, which are overwhelmingly located in a small number of urban areas and their wealthy commuter belts, and ‘coldspots’, largely to be found in (often post-industrial) rural, costal and satellite towns.
People in places like Blackpool, Derby, Great Yarmouth, Middlesbrough and Doncaster increasingly face low-paid and precarious work; poor housing; less effective schools; and, ultimately, shorter lives.
While, the idea that the place in which you are born impacts your ability to get on feels intuitive, there has been a big debate in the academic literature about whether good neighbourhoods nurture success, or whether they just attract those who would succeed anyway (and vice versa).