Maps and Postcodes
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Maps and postcodes. Is there such a thing as a predictive postcode? Can it reveal more about us than our bank account, ethnicity or social class? Laurie Taylor poses the question to Roger Burrows, Professor of Cities at Newcastle University. Also, Mapping Society - Laura Vaughan, Professor of Urban Form and Society at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, examines how maps not only serve as historical records of social enquiry, but also reveal the ways in which difference and inequality are etched deeply on the surface of our towns, villages and cities.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Take some time for yourself with soothing classical music from the mindful mix, the Science of |
| 0:07.0 | Happiness Podcast. |
| 0:08.0 | For the last 20 years I've dedicated my career to exploring the science of living a happier more meaningful life and I want |
| 0:14.4 | to share that science with you. |
| 0:16.1 | And just one thing, deep calm with Michael Mosley. |
| 0:19.4 | I want to help you tap in to your hidden relaxation response system and open the door to that |
| 0:25.5 | calmer place within. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. Hello, I'm Laurie Taylor and this is Thinking |
| 0:39.0 | aloud from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:41.0 | Now that I know where you live, I know all about you. Find out why. I remember the admirable Scottish Jewish comedian Arnold Brown one saying there were so many pictures of the king in his childhood |
| 1:05.0 | Glasgow home that he grew up thinking he must be a member of the royal family. |
| 1:09.7 | And my own childhood misapprehension was also home-based. After the trauma of the Second World |
| 1:15.8 | War children were thought to need very special protection, so much so that my mother |
| 1:20.0 | made me wrote, learned my particulars particulars so meticulously indeed that I came to think of them as |
| 1:25.5 | my real name. |
| 1:27.4 | Who are you, sunny? |
| 1:28.4 | I'm Lawrence Taylor 23 Elms Road. Well that isn't the only past address of mine that still resonates. |
| 1:36.8 | Our distinctive biographies are somehow rooted in mundane addresses in 35 Regent Road, 21 Manor Road, 76 Huntington Road. |
| 1:47.4 | And all those addresses in proper structurist fashion gained their meaning from what they were not. Region Road was better than Princess Avenue, |
| 1:54.4 | but in all honesty, couldn't hold a candle to Myers Road West. And it was only as I grew up that I realized how much my address said about me, how |
| 2:09.6 | Regent Road labeled me to others as white, lower, middle-class suburban. |
| 2:14.7 | I came to realize a sociologist Eric Clinenburg explained to me two weeks ago how a simple |
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