Daniel Dorling - So You Think You Know about Britain?

This book concerns eight big questions about Britain. In trying to answer them we often find that the bigger picture , the macro scale, reveals a very different story to the one that perhaps we tend to assume at ground level, the one often reported in newspaper headlines. For instance, at ground level it sometimes looks as if there might be too many people to fit on this island; but at macro level we discover that it is the areas with declining population that are finding it hardest to cope, economically and socially. Our country is in need of more young people, and compared to the world level we find that our share of global population is about to halve, and that other parts of the globe are more densely populated.

How can it feel so crowded in Britain when there is, in fact, so much empty land on this island? This is one of the eight big questions about life in Britain today. The other seven concern whether Britain is irreconcilably divided between North and South; how the balance of the sexes is altering and whether the shortage of young men is increasing; just how many immigrants there are, and their effect, or lack thereof; whether we are becoming more ethnically segregated; why town and country are separating even further; how the aging population might tax our resources, and, finally, what hope is there for the future?

The geography you may have been taught late on a Thursday afternoon at school is not the geography that is taught in universities today. When I was at school I was told that an Ice Age was coming. I was taught things I might need to know if I were to rule West Africa: what crops grew there; what languages the people spoke; and how to dress to survive life in a desert (do not wear nylon in the Sahara, else the fabric will melt and stick to you). My teachers were enthusiastic and friendly but I cannot remember much more than that. Geography then was about tea from Ceylon and rubber-tapping in the Amazon, about who we, the British, could exploit, about what they had, where they were, and how to rule them. The younger teachers told us that the textbooks were wrong but that we had to repeat such things to get good marks at A level.

Geography today is taught differently; for example, the main concerns are how human life might be ending with climate catastrophe and the impact of the extinction of so many plant and animal species, and of how growing worldwide inequalities of resources unfairly shape all human life across the planet. We now know, and teach routinely, that no one starves due to bad harvests in the world but because of the greed, poor organisation and a lack of understanding by those in power. Today there are always warehouses full of grain located very near to people who are hungry.

What is being taught about Britain in schools and universities is changing too; however, some teachers may well be getting it wrong, as a few of my teachers did, even if they were right about no longer referring to the rest of the world as some kind of resource that we British could exploit. Maybe climate change wont be as abrupt as we think; maybe those in power are getting better at getting the grain out of those warehouses. Yet maybe there is still too much rhetoric about us having to fight our way in the world in order to compete ever more fiercely with our economic rivals.

Nevertheless, when it comes to Britain, those who teach and study and profess to try to understand the human geography of this island now think we are living somewhere very different to where we were before. The human geography of Britain has changed in terms of peoples lives being less strictly ordered, but even more in terms of how we understand our population to be spaced geographically as compared to when I was (and probably when you were) at school.

You may know some of your neighbours, but access to new kinds of data means we can get to know far more about people online than we find out by living next door to them! You may watch television or read the papers but, remember, many of the people who make television programmes or edit the papers were taught in a pre-Internet age. Our media is also incredibly focused in and around southern England. The BBC has a North of England correspondent , but no South of England one, because for the BBC to report from the Home Counties is to report from home, from where the elite sleep at night before driving in along the M40. Likewise for those reporting on behalf of Sky, who often seem to think that Britain is in some ways just the London office of an American corporation.

Our national newspapers are little better: all are based in the capital. This, and the often select education of those who tell much of Britains news stories, means that an unrepresentative account is often told to the rest of us. It is not the fault of the elite: if you were at school in the 1970s, were lucky enough to attend university in the 1980s, made your career in London in the 1990s, and settled in or near Surrey within the last ten years then you also would need a North of England correspondent to explain to you what happens in the provinces and the other nations and regions.

This book uses contemporary news stories as launching points to talk about Britain; however, it is not a book about the news. It is a book about where we really live, who is really around us, how things are actually changing , what you find when you count and survey and ask people and what you see when you do this across the whole country and consider all walks of life. It is a book about a place that roughly sixty-one million people call home, not including the other millions who live abroad but who also call this country home. It is a book not only for the British but also for ex-pats, for tourists, for students, and for anyone who wants a different guide to some of the key issues affecting the human geography of this island today.

Britain is not an easy island to understand and we are living in the curse and possibly the promise of especially interesting times; however, it is at just such a time that we most need to question the assumptions often held about Britain and the British. These are the commonly accepted assumptions held by policymakers whose decisions form the bedrock of much of our everyday news. But how much of what we think we know about Britain is true?