Map in this section

The patterns to people’s lives in the UK, when mapped, can appear as layer after layer of a complex changing mosaic. Each place is unique in many ways; each map of these places is a collective snapshot of life histories that suggests particular places tend towards one group of collective trajectories rather than another. A census atlas is at best the crudest of summaries of a tiny number of facets of millions upon millions of photo albums, shared memories and collective experiences. Within each place, each tile of the mosaic, another mosaic may be drawn of the difference that a few streets’ separation makes, of parts of town on the rise, of villages that are changing slowly, of the edges of cities beginning to decay, of homes being repopulated by new kinds of people. Moreover, each of those specks on the map appears woven from dozens of unique events in the passage of the hundreds or thousands of the lives that have passed through there.

The business of stereotyping such detail, of summarising what is common from what is peculiar, is speculative, and the result is often unique to those who try to interpret the changing picture. However, through drawing map after map, common patterns begin to form in the mind. After a time, when plotting something new, you are unsurprised to see the colours turning out as they are. The same things are happening in the same places enough, and often similarly enough, to the previous decade you drew these maps, such that you begin to imagine that something quite simple is at work beneath all the subtle differences you see between people and places. We bring the atlas to an end by giving one take on what this pattern to the processes might be: what it is that we are looking at.

At the start of the 21st century, the human geography of the UK can be most simply summarised as a tale of one metropolis and its provincial hinterland. These two areas cover the whole of the nation and divide it along an ancient boundary. In the past this boundary was thought of as the North–South divide, separating one group of cities, towns and villages from another.