I became every familiar with the bus map of Greater Manchester in the days when I was travelling around local archives. When it became obvious that travelling these old routes could add valuable insights to my research I started to sometimes choose a route because it looked interesting, or would fill a gap in my knowledge of local geography, rather than just provide the simplest, quickest way from A to B.
The bus map is a schematic one, stripping out irrelevant detail – basically it shows just the route, leaving out all other roads, & the names of towns or villages, plus perhaps some other popular features such as parks.
Since the buses, to a surprising extent, still follow the old routes established in the days of horse-drawn omnibuses or stage coaches, they are generally fairly straight & direct, spokes in the wheel, all leading to the centre of town.
I was initially puzzled by the way the map showeed some routes diverting round a loop, very nearly describing a circle, returning to the main road at a point often not too far distant from the start. I soon learned that this almost certainly indicated a diversion round & through a large housing estate, one built by the council in most cases after WWII but in some cases dating back to the inter-war period.
Boringly irrelevant, from my point of view, but such journeys did serve to emphasise the relative isolation of the people who had to live there, the difficulties of getting out & about for those without transport of their own.
So, in one way, it came as no surprise, to read that research by Tim Stonor of Space Syntax, an architectural consultancy which uses graph theory to study why some streets are more crowded & popular than others, found that 85% and 96% of riots last August in north and south London respectively took place within a five-minute walk of a post-war housing estate.
Not just because such estates provide homes for the kind of people who are more likely to commit crime wherever they live, but because tendencies to anti-social behaviour are reinforced by the lack of observers & the fear bred in those law-abiding residents who feel exposed even as they walk the street on their way out to safer destinations & pastimes.
For those residents whose family & personal resources are not rich in any sense of that word, the estate really does become the only known world, their territory, to be defended from outside intruders just as we would defend the country. Beyond the boundary, there be dragons.
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