Danny Dorling
Biographic Data
| ID | 263221 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Danny Dorling |
| GIVEN NAMES | Danny |
| FAMILY NAME | Dorling |
| SIGNATURE | DORLING D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9519-0537 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 127 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 708 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 127 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
British children are not shrinking’, but child height is increasing for the wrong reasons
BACKGROUND: News media have reported that the average height of British children is falling, but these reports have been contested. Child Measurement Programmes (CMPs) operate in schools in England, Scotland and Wales, but their height data have been inaccessible, allowing conflicting claims about trends in child height to remain unresolved. Here, we aim to describe and explain trends and socioeconomic inequalities in child height using the best …
Talking geography in the public realm
How can we ensure geographical insights are better known and discussed in the public domain? The question of ‘public geography’ became a topic of interest not long after American sociologist Michael Burawoy published a lecture about ‘public sociology’ back in 2005. That was also the year in which I first wrote a newspaper article that had some impact. The academic project I was working on was explaining how and why the UK had changed from being o…
The Politics of Crime, Punishment and Justice
The life course paradigm brought a focus on continuity and change in offending across the entire life span to criminology. Early research evolved to capture individual-level variation and the events, experiences and opportunities that functioned to spur change and alter behavioural trajectories. Though the notion that ‘lives change in a changing society’ (Elder et al. 1994: 11) is fundamental to the life course paradigm, the principle of historic…
The UK
The UK has not only one of the highest rates of child poverty in the rich world, but also the most rapidly rising rate in this grouping. Within the UK, a higher proportion of children are poor in the South East of England than in Scotland. The huge rise in economic inequality in the 1980s caused the UK to become an international outlier in terms of child poverty. All subsequent UK governments have maintained inequality at high levels – by choice.…
The rise and fall of Britain’s Golden Cohort
The British born between 1925 and 1934 experienced exceptional improvements in their annual mortality; earning them the title ‘the Golden Cohort’. They were the goldilocks generation; almost all too young to fight in WWII, but the right age to benefit from food rationing; too old to be hit by 1980s youth unemployment, and the right age to benefit from increased health and social care spending of the late 1990s and early 2000s. This group has befu…
Visualising the 2020s UK cost‐of‐living crisis
This article is unusual in that it provides a graphical summary of various aspects of the longer‐term crisis that appeared to cumulate in 2022 through to at least early 2024 in terms of especially poor economic and social outcomes for the UK. The article was submitted for consideration in a special issue in the Journal of Social Policy and Administration on diverse perspectives and innovative approaches to addressing the cost of living crisis. Th…
Spatial Inequalities and Wellbeing
Spatial Inequalities and Wellbeing is a carefully brought together collection of nine chapters written by over twenty separate authors from the regional science/studies tradition. The book appears
When we were young
Not very long ago, the world had a different shape. The cities were shaped differently too. Anglophone geographies brought into life theories about what all this meant. Global Urban Studies was a little prince world. A world in which each prince, each scholar, created their own theory. Theories were plentiful. In Le Petit Prince the Geographer is ‘...too important to go wandering about. He never leaves his Study.’ 1 He believes that geography boo…
Where are we heading? The example of generational change in British academic Geography
Between the first two decades of the 21st century, the gentrification of the academic subject of Geography within Britain rose to a new peak. By the mid-2010s, undergraduate geographers had become the least likely group, of all British university students, to have qualified for free school meals while at school. This article reveals that they are now also the most likely group to have grown up in the most affluent parts of Britain and suggests th…
Featured graphics
Why Demography Matters (excerpt)
Demography is not destiny. As Giacomo Casanova explained over two centuries ago: 'There is no such thing as destiny. We ourselves shape our own lives.' Today we are shaping them and our societies more than ever before. Globally, we have never had fewer children per adult: our population is about to stabilize, though we do not know when or at what number, or what will happen after that. It will be the result of billions of very private decisions i…
Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails
Matt Ryan draws on ten years of research to deliver this landmark comparative review of participatory budgeting, or collective decisions on spending and taxation around the world. With examples of both positive change and notable failure, the book shows when and why citizens achieve this, and how policy makers can foster democratic engagement
Spatial and temporal inequalities in mortality in the USA, 1968–2016
Previous UK and European research has highlighted important variations in mortality between populations after adjustment for key determinants such as poverty and deprivation. The aim here was to establish whether similar populations could be identified in the US, and to examine changes over time. We employed Poisson regression models to compare county-level mortality with national rates between 1968 and 2016, adjusting for poverty, education, rac…
Austerity, not influenza, caused the UK’s health to deteriorate. Let’s not make the same mistake again
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, England and Wales had seen stalling life expectancy, rising infant mortality rates, increasing mid-aged mortality (including so-called deaths of despair) and tightening restrictions on access to healthcare.1 Spikes in age-standardised mortality rates have been, by many, attributed almost wholly to influenza, though the evidence does not support this. As we enter winter 2020 with a health and social care service tha…
Growing socio-spatial inequality in neo-liberal times? Comparing Beijing and London
Ruth Fincher, Kurt Iveson, Helga Leitner and Valerie Preston. Everyday equalities
Everything, almost everywhere, is slowing down
In the decades, and especially the years, immediately before the 2020 pandemic swept the world, almost everything that we routinely measured about human lives, worldwide, was already slowing down. Much was still rising, our levels of debt, the information we produced, our numbers on the planet, but it was not rising as fast as it has been rising before. Those few things that were still accelerating worldwide before the pandemic: air flights, poll…
Who still dies young in a rich city? Revisiting the case of Oxford
There are substantial inequalities in mortality and life expectancy in England, strongly linked to levels of deprivation. Mortality rates among those who are homeless are particularly high. Using the city of Oxford (UK) as a case study, we investigate ward-level premature standardised mortality ratios for several three-year and five-year periods between 2002 and 2016, and explore the extent to which the mortality of people who become homeless con…
Changes in population movement make Covid-19 spread differently from Sars
Rule Britannia
Books on Brexit explaining how and why parts of Britain voted to leave the European Union are falling hot off the press. Some promise the full story of the political manoeuvring that got us to this point, others promise to make sense of the vote, with a couple focusing on the supposed evils of immigration and Islam. In Rule Britainnia, Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson tell a different story. They argue that the EU referendum was part of a last g…
Inequality in Advanced Economies
Levels of economic inequality differ extensively when comparisons are made between nation states, although, worldwide, inequalities remain highest in the poorest countries. Yet now even some of the wealthiest nations have markedly high levels of income inequality. This chapter concentrates on illustrating this unprecedented, contemporary transformation in income inequalities towards greater geographical variation between affluent countries. In pa…
Peak Inequality
Why is life expectancy in England and Wales ‘stalling’
Several independent analyses, by both epidemiologists and actuaries, have concluded that the previous rate of improvement of life expectancy in England and Wales has now slowed markedly, and at older ages may even be reversing. However, although these findings have led the pension industry to reduce estimates of future liabilities, they have failed to elicit any significant concern in the Department of Health and Social Care. In this essay, we re…
Testing the validity of value‐added measures of educational progress with genetic data
Value‐added measures of educational progress have been used by education researchers and policy‐makers to assess the performance of teachers and schools, contributing to performance‐related pay and position in school league tables. They are designed to control for all underlying differences between pupils and should therefore provide unbiased measures of school and teacher influence on pupil progress, however, their effectiveness has been questio…
Dying Quietly
The English suburbs are dying. Years of austerity have slowly changed the landscape. Poverty is now common in the suburbs. Since 2014, life expectancy has been falling across most of England, especially in the suburbs. Now infant mortality rates are also rising year on year (unlike anywhere else in Europe). In hindsight it is not surprising that the majority of suburban English people voted Brexit, most noticeably in the Home Counties. Middle Eng…
Geographies of the agenda
In the 1980s and 1990s, poverty and inequality in Britain increased, yet the discipline of (human) geography was apparently disinterested. This paper poses the question as to why part of the discipline turned its back on public policy and particularly issues of poverty and inequality. The aim of the paper is to encourage students and advocates of geography to think a little about what they are involved in (and to think about the role of academia …
A Nation Still Dividing
This paper presents an analysis of the degree to which the population of Britain has become more or less geographically polarised as compared with 1991 and earlier censuses. We use the Key Statistics for local authorities from the 2001 Census, released on 13 February 2003 by the census authorities. All of the variables from the 26 Key Statistics tables which can be compared over time with the 1991 Census are examined. The analysis is then extende…
Migration and geographical inequalities in health in Britain
Mortality and migration in Britain, first results from the British Household Panel Survey
An Environmental Justice Analysis of British Air Quality
This paper presents the results of the first national study of air quality in Britain to consider the implications of its distribution across over ten thousand local communities in terms of potential environmental injustice. We consider the recent history of the environmental justice debate in Britain, Europe, and the USA and, in the light of this, estimate how one aspect of air pollution, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels, affects different populati…
Analysing the regional geography of poverty, austerity and inequality in Europe
Analysing the regional geography of poverty, austerity and inequality in Europe: a human cartographic perspective. Regional Studies. This paper presents a human cartographic approach to the analysis of the impact of austerity and the economic crisis across Europe’s regions. It reflects on past insights and debates on the analysis and mapping of poverty and wealth, and of the effects of austerity in particular. It then presents a wide range of car…
Black lives matter
Internal migration, area effects and health
Linking censuses through time
This paper reviews the difficulties encountered when attempting to study social change by comparing data from successive censuses, and describes a system designed to provide integrated online access to data from the 1971, 1981 and 1991 Censuses in Great Britain at
Increasing mortality differentials by residential area level of poverty
Geographical Scale, the ‘Feel‐Good Factor’ and Voting at the 1997 General Election in England and Wales
Many analysts associate voting patterns in Great Britain with electors' evaluations of the state of the economy, whereby those who think it has improved recently are likely to vote for the government's return to power, whereas those who think it has worsened are more likely to vote for an opposition party. Most of these studies consider the national economy only, but data derived from the 1997 British Election Study cross–sectional survey show st…
Thinking about Class
Social classes are changing as people move around the world more often, moving more frequently between different class systems, holding different positions in different places, and changing the meanings of class, and social classes are also changing as rising economic insecurity reduces established certainties. The continued worldwide emancipation of women and rising income and wealth inequalities all change how we see ourselves and treat others.…
Suicide
In this paper we show that, by accounting for the varying influence of just three area indicators of social isolation, it is possible to predict the number of deaths due to suicide and undetermined injuries (most of which are suicides) across a great many areas remarkably closely. The exceptions to this model suggest that in a few unique areas of the country other local, often historical and cultural or intrinsically geographical factors matter a…
Life and death of the people of London
Social locations, spatial locations and voting at the 1997 British general election
Why is life expectancy in England and Wales ‘stalling’
Several independent analyses, by both epidemiologists and actuaries, have concluded that the previous rate of improvement of life expectancy in England and Wales has now slowed markedly, and at older ages may even be reversing. However, although these findings have led the pension industry to reduce estimates of future liabilities, they have failed to elicit any significant concern in the Department of Health and Social Care. In this essay, we re…
SimBritain
In this paper we present an account of a 3‐year research project that is aimed at dynamically simulating urban and regional populations in Britain. In the context of this project we are using data from the 1991 UK Census Small Area Statistics (SAS) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), in order to dynamically simulate the entire population of Britain into 2021 at the small area level. This paper discusses the structure, aims and objectiv…
Bringing the Missing Million Home
The 1991 UK Decennial Census missed about 1.2 million people. These missing individuals present a serious challenge to any census user interested in measuring intercensal change, particularly amongst the most marginalised groups in society who were prominent amongst the missing population. Recently, a web-based system for accessing census data from the 1971, 1981, and 1991 censuses was launched ( www.census.ac.uk/cdu/lct ). The 'LCT' package also…
Housing tenure, local context, scale and voting in England and Wales, 1997
Labour electoral landslides and the changing efficiency of voting distributions
The translation of votes into seats under first–past–the–post electoral systems with single–member constituencies invariably results in disproportional allocations of seats relative to votes among the main two parties. It also tends to produce biased outcomes, with one party getting a more disproportionate share of the seats with a given share of the votes than does its opponent. In Great Britain, these biases favoured the Conservative party unti…
Changing Biases in the Operation of the UK's Electoral System, 1950–97
The biased outcomes of recent British general elections, whereby the two main parties (Conservative and Labour) would have achieved different percentages of the seats in the House of Commons for the same percentages of the votes cast, are explored, using a method of bias decomposition developed by a New Zealand political scientist. Overall, the situation changed markedly between 1950 and 1997: the biases in the system strongly favoured the Conser…
Poverty and Place in Britain, 1968-99
To date, analyses of long-term trends in the spatial distribution of poverty in Britain have been frustrated by a lack of consistency in definitions, data sources and measures, as well as by changes over time in census and administrative geographies. This paper draws upon a series of national poverty surveys in order to derive methodologically consistent estimates of breadline and core poverty. These models are then applied to census data in orde…
All connected? Geographies of race, death, wealth, votes and births
In January 2010 we learnt that within London the best-off 10th of the population each had recourse to 273 times the wealth of the worse-off 10th of that population (Hills et al. 2010, An anatomy of economic inequality in the UK Report of the National Equality Panel, Government Equalities Office, London). It is hard to find any city in an affluent country that is more unequal. This wealth gap did not include the assets of the UK super-rich, who mo…
Is economic adversity always a killer? Disadvantaged areas with relatively low mortality rates
Objectives: To identify areas of Britain whose residents have relatively low age specific mortality, despite experiencing long-term economic adversity. Methods: Longitudinal, ecological study of all residents of Britain from 1971 to 2001. Results: 54 of Britain’s 641 parliamentary constituencies were identified as having been persistently economically disadvantaged in the period 1971–2001. Within this group, there was marked variation in age grou…
Where not to live
How only some rich countries recently set out to become more unequal
There is a widespread perception that income inequalities have grown across the rich world in recent decades. This is not the case. In many countries inequalities have been stable and in a few they have fallen. Different measures of inequality result in different trends being observed. Here the income share of the best-off 1% is tracked for some 11 countries out of the world’s richest 26 large nation states to illustrate that far from it being no…
Visualizing Changing Social Structure from a Census
In this paper it is shown how new visualization techniques are being used to analyze the first results of the British 1991 Census and other large data sets. Of interest here are questions about how localities have developed over time; which neighbourhoods have experienced gentrification and in which places have the recessions of the previous decades had their worst effects? Overall, do we see a picture of polarization or a levelling out of social…
Electoral Registration, Population Mobility and the Democratic Franchise
A core concern of population geography is with the size, location and movement of groups of people. Most census analysis concentrates on various types of ‘residents’ of an area; many studies concentrate on ‘households’ while the population subgroups receiving considerable attention include children, the elderly, refugees, and ethnic minorities. The size, location and movement of one (very large and significant) group has received little attention…
New Labour, new geography? The electoral geography of the 1997 British General Election
T h e British General Election of 1997 had geography written all over it, not only empirically, but also metaphorically.The result was a genuine landslide.In every sense, this was a record-breaking election.After 18 unbroken years in office, the Conservatives went down to one of their worst ever defeats.With only 165 seats in the new House of Commons, they have fewer MPs than at any time since 1906.Their share of the popular vote (32 per cent) wa…
New labour landslide ‐ same old electoral geography
(1998). New labour landslide ‐ same old electoral geography? British Elections & Parties Review: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 35-64
Anatomy of Labour Landslide
Journal Article Anatomy of Labour Landslide: The Constituency System and the 1997 General Election Get access RON JOHNSTON, RON JOHNSTON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar CHARLES PATTIE, CHARLES PATTIE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar DAVID ROSSITER, DAVID ROSSITER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar DANNY DORLING, DANNY DORLING Sea…
Human Cartography
In recent years quantitative geography and cartography have been devalued within human geography. This process has often been led by writers who have questioned the extent to which researchers who analyse numbers about people ignore other ways of studying society. Often examples of the 'unsympathetic' mapping of people's lives or the conspiratorial creation of particular statistical social landscapes are given as reasons to avoid quantitative res…
Changing the Map
It is accepted that within Britain there are persistent and growing inequalities in mortality between groups of people as defined by their social class. This paper shows that similar persistent and growing inequalities prevail between groups of people defined by district of residence. Although there is some confusion between these two ways of grouping people - there is a slight tendency for people of the same class to live in the same district.Th…
The widening health gap
Throughout the long 18 years of Conservative government the Labour party referred to the issue of increasing social inequalities in health as an area of particular concern. Before the May 1997 election Labour announced that it would launch an Independent Inquiry into inequalities in health. The Inquiry
Changing Biases in the Operation of the UK's Electoral System, 1950–97
The biased outcomes of recent British general elections, whereby the two main parties (Conservative and Labour) would have achieved different percentages of the seats in the House of Commons for the same percentages of the votes cast, are explored, using a method of bias decomposition developed by a New Zealand political scientist. Overall, the situation changed markedly between 1950 and 1997: the biases in the system strongly favoured the Conser…
New Labour's landslide and electoral bias
Life Chances in Britain by Housing Wealth and for the Homeless and Vulnerably Housed
In this paper new findings on the average life expectancy of the population of Britain arc reported according to housing wealth. In addition, estimates of mortality rates for rough sleepers, hostel residents, and bed and breakfast residents are presented. The results indicate that the death rates of bed and breakfast residents are four to five times those of the housed population, death rates for hostel residents are seven times greater, and deat…
Mortality and migration in Britain, first results from the British Household Panel Survey
Who's Afraid of Income Inequality
The neighbourhood effect and voting in England and wales
(2000). The neighbourhood effect and voting in England and wales: Real or imagined? British Elections & Parties Review: Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 47-63
Geographical Scale, the ‘Feel‐Good Factor’ and Voting at the 1997 General Election in England and Wales
Many analysts associate voting patterns in Great Britain with electors' evaluations of the state of the economy, whereby those who think it has improved recently are likely to vote for the government's return to power, whereas those who think it has worsened are more likely to vote for an opposition party. Most of these studies consider the national economy only, but data derived from the 1997 British Election Study cross–sectional survey show st…
Increasing mortality differentials by residential area level of poverty
Migration and geographical inequalities in health in Britain
Locating the Altruistic Voter
Egocentric economic voting models are widely used in studies of voting behaviour in Great Britain: they suggest that people whose standard of living has risen recently as a perceived consequence of government policies are more likely to vote for the government's return to office than are those who blame government policies for a decline in their living standards. But many people whose living standards have increased vote against the government. A…
The Human Geography of Human Geography
Social locations, spatial locations and voting at the 1997 British general election
Health and Society in Britain Since 1939
Housing tenure, local context, scale and voting in England and Wales, 1997
Distortion magnified
Life and death of the people of London
Sociology (77 works) · Geography (64 works) · Political science (59 works) · Demography (53 works) · Economics (51 works) · Population (45 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (39 works) · Inequality (35 works) · Law (35 works) · Demographic economics (30 works)