Welsh Journals

BOOK REVIEW 'The State of the Nation An Atlas of Britain in the Eighties', S. Fothergill and J. Vincent, Heinemann, Price £ 12.95 (hardback), 128pp. ISBN 0-435-352881 1985 saw the publication of two social atlases of the United Kingdom, both attempting to fill what had been a long standing vacuum in both the general and geographical literature. Fothergill and Vincent's book is the title under review here but it can only really be assessed in relation to Faber and Faber's The Facts of Everyday Life by Tony Osman. The style and format of these two books are very similar. In each case the authors have selected topics which they feel are important symptoms or causes of critical elements of British society, and its style and quality of life. They have then presented appropriate data on each topic in a cartographic form usually in the shape of a national map with its various spatial subdivisions. Further data are then provided to supplement this overview either as brief tables, charts, or as inset maps showing local or regional detail. Both books also contain notes relating to each set of maps. These attempt to describe the spatial patterns illustrated in the maps and they also contain relatively limited attempts to explain the processes which are thought to lie behind spatial patterns. Given that these two books share a common approach and format it is surprising to find that they are so different in every other respect. The two sets of authors, for example, have selected very different diacritical markers to judge the health of our nation. Osman treads the well-worn path by selecting as his first four maps the pattern of wealth, home-ownership, house prices and personal income. He goes on to consider types of employment car ownership accident black spots air pollution school class sizes and examination performance relative rates of bronchitis, heart disease, lung and breast cancer and other diseases suicide hospital waiting lists and patterns of crime and policing. In short one might think of his book as an Egon Ronay Guide to the Capitalist Society, subtitled 'Where to live in Britain to get the best and the most'. The contrast with the diacritical markers selected by Fothergill and Vincent could not be sharper, and their choice could even be predicted given the knowledge that the book is a Pluto Press project. They too tread a well-worn path by opting for the new and fashionable orthodoxy of the left. They consequently provide data on Britain's black population the poverty trap and one parent families sex and class discrimination in elite jobs inheritance and private wealth control of the media and overseas ownership of 'British' companies job loss, new technology, and deindustrialisation trade unions ratecapping council housing spending on school meals hospital closures availability of abortion women's refuges special police unit equipment and manpower nuclear free local authorities and environmental degradation. It is not only the topics which the authors have selected for coverage which differ between the two books. The cartographic style is also markedly different. Osman opts for the pseudo-computer look with exaggerated coastlines and cross-hatched graph paper shading. Different colour sequences are adopted for the shading of each map which reduces the immediate visual impact of the data. And the spatial units chosen to