Spatial mobility in later twentieth-century Britain

Abstract

What difference did increasing spatial mobility make to British society between the 1950s and the 1980s? This article represents an historical response to the challenge of the ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences. It brings together the study of migration, personal mobility and transport to reflect on the ‘high-speed mobile society’ emerging in parts of Britain by the 1960s. The article analyses the very different forms of mobility evident in the period: flows of international and internal migration, patterns of residential mobility and commuting, the relationship between spatial and social mobility. It charts the changes to urban form stemming from mass automobility and the emergence by the 1970s of immobility as a focus of policy concern, located above all in the ‘inner city’. Integrating an awareness of movement (and, as its obverse, fixity) into contemporary British history, the article suggests, has the potential to throw new light on the categories of class, race and gender and debates about ‘affluence’, individualism and inequality which have characterised recent historiography.

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