Chapter 2 - North and South: Spatial Divisions in A Life Lived Geographically

Summary

TWO PLACES

The oft-repeated insistence by Doreen that “place matters” was as true of her life as her academic and political work. She lived the contradiction and inequalities of the UK’s north–south divide in her everyday life: two diverse regions connected by the northwest train line between London and Manchester and onto the Lake District. Doreen was a frequent passenger, often seen on the train, learning Spanish verbs, checking birds that she might see on the way or reading papers, journals or novels. I travelled the same route – sometimes with Doreen, on the way to give a joint talk in Liverpool or Manchester, for example, as well as alone. I too was brought up in the northwest of England, just over the Mersey from where Doreen was born. She grew up in Wythenshawe, a local authority estate in Cheshire that was moved into Manchester in the 1930s, and I grew up in Stockport, an industrial town just in Cheshire, each place about seven miles from Manchester’s city centre. Our joint origins were a source of common pleasure, as well as a basis for our joint interest in the changing UK economy, transformations in the landscape of labour and, in particular, the position of women in the workplace.

What further united us was our educational trajectory, in which social and spatial mobility combined to shift us across the class structure and into the southeast. We both moved from state schools into the elite spaces of Oxbridge, into charitable research organizations where for a time we both worked in London for the sociologist Peter Willmott, and then we both worked at the Open University, committed to increasing opportunities for people who had missed out on a university education when younger or who wanted a second chance at educational achievement. Here, however, we parted company in 1992, after 12 years as colleagues, when I left for Cambridge, seduced (in Doreen’s view) by the fleshpots of a well-endowed institution. She never quite let go of her view that I had betrayed the cause of widening access, despite my frequent protests and insistence that Oxbridge too had a diversity agenda, and of course, we both owed a good deal of our own success as academics to Oxbridge accepting two northern state-schooled girls.