and we're also talking inequality

which is a big word in the election manifestos this year.

But in fact, when we talk about mapping inequality

that's not a new thing.

It's been done before.

So who was the first to do it?

Well, the first person really to do this on a large scale

was Charles Booth in Victorian London.

And his study of life and labour of the people of London is

really the main one people look to as the first.

So people think of him almost as the first social scientist

because of it.

We've got one of his maps here, which

is looking at the area of Whitechapel in London.

And just looking at it, it looks like a really normal sort

of street map except there's colours everywhere.

What do the colours show us?

The colours indicate the social class of the individuals who

live in these different buildings.

So, for example, along Whitechapel Road,

we can see Charles Booth's category

as identifying these people as well-to-do, middle class.

Whereas, if you just turn off to a side street,

all of a sudden you see different categories.

Very poor or poor or even the lowest class on his map,

which he at the time dubbed "vicious, semi-criminal."

These category labels are fascinating because they

say a lot about attitudes towards the impoverished

at the time perhaps.

So, in Victorian London going to talk

about this cheek by jowl index that you've developed later.

But in Victorian London, according to Booth,

prosperity was always just a little turn away

from chronic want and chronic need.

Exactly.

That's what you see.

You don't have to go too far off the main thoroughfares

before you suddenly have these intense areas of poverty.

How did he collect this information?

Well, unlike today, where we'd probably just quickly download

the data and map it, he had to get out and about

and use up a lot of shoe leather, also

a team of researchers with essentially clipboards

and notebooks surveying most of inner London

effectively, speaking to residents, taking notes.

And obviously all this is all online now for us to use,

but very much a data-driven exercise,

but collected through hard work.

So actually given the inequality's

mentioned in all of these political manifestos

for the election, it's actually quite a timely thing

to have delivered this look at inequality

across the whole of England.

Yeah.

I mean, when we started this project about 18 months ago,

of course, we had no idea there would

be an election anytime soon.

But it has coincided with this, and obviously the manifestos

mention inequality.

So yeah, it's quite timely, we think.

So if we fast forward from the Victorian era

and look at the outcomes of your work

at the University of Sheffield, what is this map showing us?

This is a map of the whole of England broken down

into travel to work areas.

So each individual area, like London here,

is effectively a commuter zone.

So people travel within these to work,

and these boundaries contain local labour markets.

Another example would be up in Liverpool,

where you have Liverpool on The Wirral as one local labour

market, or Berwick, where the local labour market area goes

across into Scotland across the border.

So you deliberately didn't use things

like parliamentary constituencies

and local authority areas because they don't necessarily

reflect day-to-day human life in the way that these areas do.

Because if I pick any one of these areas.

So if I pick Hull here, this area

is defined like it is because most of the people who

live here work here.

That's right?

That's exactly right.

It's what we call self-contained.

It's a self-contained labour market area.

So that explains what the areas are.

What do the colours mean?

This particular measure of inequality

relates to how closely packed together

people of the same kind of socio-economic class are.

The darker colours indicate where people who are more

similar live closer together.

And the lighter colours is the opposite.

So in the lighter areas, that's where we're saying

there's a big contrast between the people who live within

those areas - if you like, it could be the haves

and the have-nots?

Yeah, exactly.

Why do we care about this?

I mean, why does this matter, do you think?

There is a number of reasons.

So it could be just to do with the provision of services.

Another good reason for caring about inequality

would be to do with the political fallout right

and how that feeds into the electoral process, which

we've probably seen in the last few years.

OK, does that mean the areas that are dark,

where there's relatively little inequality -

these darker patches here across the north, over in Cornwall

and the southwest over here in Lincolnshire

- are we saying that in those darker areas

that they're not problem areas?

Well, there is a couple of ways of looking at it.

One would be to say inequality here is not a problem.

But the other, and I think more plausible,

explanation would be that inequality is not necessarily

the issue but absolute poverty across the board.

So what we have is relatively equal but quite poor.

There's no inequality because everyone's poor.

That's probably not...

Yeah, it's probably not what we're aiming for.

...what you're aiming for, OK.

So we were fascinated by this map when we first looked at it

because if we look at just the lightest coloured areas

on the map, that's the top 20 most unequal areas in England,

according to this data.

So if we base it on just the proximity of the haves

and the have-nots living cheek by jowl,

much in the way that we just looked at with the Charles

Booth map of Whitechapel, these areas

here are the top 20 for inequality in England.

So we have unsurprisingly, I suppose, London is here...

most of these areas are actually Midlands

and to the north of England, with one big exception

being in the south we have the Portsmouth travel

to work area here is showing up as highly unequal.

This particular measure of inequality

generally picks out places in the Midlands

and north of England, which your traditional centres

of manufacturing, your ex-industrial locations are at.

For example, if you look at somewhere

like Barrow-in-Furness travel to work area,

or you look at somewhere like Blackpool or even

Sheffield's travel to work area, or Hull,

these are areas of traditional industry, where worker housing

was packed very tightly together, much like in the way

it was in those Charles Booth maps.

So that's really interesting because, for me

- and I'll have to reveal a personal fact here

- I grew up in the Portsmouth area.

And one of the things when I was growing up

is that people always used to describe the Portsmouth

area as a northern city transplanted

to the south coast.

So it's fascinating to see it coming out here

at the national level.

Let's take a look - and because I'm biased

- we're going to have a look at this Portsmouth travel

to work area and see what's really going on there.

So what we've got here, first of all...

just to show you that we're zooming in... so we've got some

satellite imagery here of the wider Portsmouth area.

So we're zoomed quite in.

Even on this satellite image, we can see roads and so on.

But what we can do is if we take a layer...

effectively this is your map zoomed in...

we can see that actually this Portsmouth travel

to work area, which is this big yellow area here,

it actually extends quite a long way.

And in fact, it's a peculiar shape

because it's quite tall but quite narrow.

And I know that that's actually a good thing,