Danny Dorling is a professor of geography who has dedicated his career to exposing the deep social costs of inequality. This book is his first for a general readership, coming a year after Injustice, a detailed distillation of 20 years' research into the effects of neo-liberal economic policy on Britain's social fabric.
What is most valuable about his writing is that it is angry, rather than indignant. You are asked not to wring your hands but to examine the relationship between your place in society and the place in which you live, and in so doing to recognise that there are winners and losers, rather than the deserving and undeserving.
The richer the area you live in, the easier your path through life will be; the poorer it is, the harder it will be. No longer can a majority of areas in Britain be described as "average" that is, with a broad mix of people doing different jobs and earning a range of incomes. Areas are diverging in character, both socially and economically. Divorcees, for instance, tend to move to the coast, for cheaper housing.
The only significant way in which we are becoming less ghettoised is by race: black and Asian people are now less likely to be concentrated in cities or in poor areas of towns than they once were. Otherwise, we are more trammelled by postcode than ever, which leads to "nicer" areas becoming even more desirable, and therefore more attractive to people who can shell out to get away from undesirable people and areas.
In Dorling's view, our understandable desire to make our lives easier, wherever possible, leads us collectively to place greater pressure on parts of our social and geographical infrastructure than is necessary. "We now only have a shortage of housing in Britain," he writes, "because we share out our stock so badly we have never had as many bedrooms per person as we have now."
The shortage of suitable housing for all the people who need it causes prices to rise in the private sector, which in turn leads to waiting lists increasing in the public sector. Successive governments have restricted the building of new social housing for essentially political reasons, forcing many people into owner-occupation when they can't really afford it.
A lack of suitable housing near to suitable jobs, at a time when government policy has undermined public transport and promoted the car, has caused us to clog up the roads by commuting to jobs that will pay our higher mortgages. What we need to start doing, Dorling argues, is to "point out repeatedly how precarious we have made our lives" and to ask "if there were not a better way we could arrange our affairs".
That would require all of us to start demanding more of our governments than to tell us things they think we want to hear while doing things we didn't vote for. For us all to be equally equipped to do so would require each of us to have a voice that will be heard, whether we're piping up from above the fourth floor of a tower block (one instance where you are more likely to be ghettoised by race) or from rich rural Oxfordshire.
For our towns, cities and villages to become as socially mixed as they were back in the mid-1970s, from when all markers of inequality in Britain began to rise, nearly 2.5 million of us would have to move poorer people to richer areas, and richer people to poorer ones. This shows how many people have won or lost, more dramatically than was possible before 1979, under the new rules of the "property-owning democracy".
Dorling believes that knowledge is power: that if we have the facts, then we will act on our unease and seek to live lives that are a little less pressured and fearful. "For this country to change for the better," he concludes, "we must all get to know it better." If you need to be persuaded of such a case, there is no better book to read.
Lynsey Hanley's Estates: An Intimate History is published by Granta Books.
