The social geography of Oxford: A desperately divided city – Professor Danny Dorling

What effect does the UK's growing inequality and poverty have on Oxford, asks Professor Danny Dorling; "on a place that's winning? This isn't a northern town. This isn't a poorer southern town, or an inner borough of London. And it's possibly the most expensive city between here and San Francisco going in one direction – and here and San Francisco going in the other direction.”

One of the most visible signs, he tells an audience at Iffley Church Hall, Oxford on 6 February 2024, is the disappearance of children from the city; fewer than 1000 children took GCSEs in state schools in Oxford in 2019. In a city full of private schools, what is happening to the state schools, the children who attend them and those who work in them?

In his talk, Professor Dorling, who is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and author of a number of acclaimed books, looks at the statistics and numbers behind what is, he says, a very unusual city – and not for the reasons typically given. Could it be that Oxford the way it is, and becoming even more odd, he quips toward the end, because so many senior Conservative politicians lost their virginity here?

One thing worth noting, he says, is that it has become a city of very few children and young adults, other than high fee-paying foreign students. Has some Pied Piper of Hamelin taken them away? Or is it low wages and a vast divide between the city's privileged, and the rest? A century ago the most common job for working-class women in the UK was working in service, Professor Dorling says; one of the reasons they hated it was that they were not allowed to have children. Today, many people in Oxford are working in the equivalent of service now – and can't afford to have children. And primary and secondary school teachers who work here certainly can't afford to live here.

Although Oxford remains an unusual city, what it tells us, Professor Dorling concludes, is about the cost the entire country pays for a rising tide of austerity, inequality and injustice.

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Read about his latest book "Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State"

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