Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005

by Danny Dorling, Bethan Thomas, Jan Rigby

This is the first detailed study of the recent geographical distribution of poverty and wealth in Britain. It presents the most comprehensive estimates of the changing levels of poverty and wealth from the late 1960s. A wide range of secondary data is used, beginning with the first national Poverty in the UK survey of Peter Townsend and colleagues, and ending with data released during the middle of the current decade. The authors extend concepts of social exclusion to establish 5 household groupings: the 'exclusive wealthy' - able to exclude themselves from the norms of society; those who are rich but not exclusively so; those who are neither rich nor poor; the 'breadline poor'; and the 'core poor' - who experience a combination of severe income poverty, material deprivation and subjective poverty. Poverty and wealth statistics are mapped in detail to explore geographical patterns over the last four decades, and analysed to determine whether poverty and wealth have become more or less polarised.

128 pages, Paperback

First published July 17, 2007

About the author

Danny Dorling is a British social geographer researching inequality and human geography. He is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford.

Danny Dorling has lived all his life in England. To try to counter his myopic world view, in 2006, Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world (www.worldmapper.org).
He has published with many colleagues more than a dozen books on issues related to social inequalities in Britain and several hundred journal papers. Much of this work is available open access and will be added to this website soon.

His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty. Danny was employed as a play-worker in children’s summer play-schemes. He learnt the ethos of pre-school education where the underlying rationale was that playing is learning for living. He tries not to forget this. He is an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, Honorary President of the Society of Cartographers and a patron of Roadpeace, the national charity for road crash victims.