Human Geography of the UK

This textbook for introductory courses in human geography provides first- and second-year undergraduates with a comprehensive thematic and regional approach to the changing human geography of the UK at the end of the 20th- and beginning of the 21st-centuries. Covering local, regional, national, European and global issues, it also explores in some detail topics which are part of the lived experience of undergraduates themselves, such as crime, unemployment, social exclusion and AIDS. The concern is not only with broad regional differences, but also the more complex patterns of geographical inequality - within regions and cities and between town and country. The focus is on the 1990s and the dynamic forces that have moulded the geography of the UK since the tumultuous years of Conservative rule. The contemporary condition of the UK is set within a longer period of historical and geographical change. Economic, social, political and cultural forces are given equal attention together with positioning issues like gender and ethnicity, all central to the social and economic transformations of recent years.