Whenever I do a potted biography of Danny Dorling, geographer, author, crusader, I miss the late Dawn Foster, thinking of her going through his bibliography in the office ahead of meeting him, saying: “Fuck, I can never read all this.” His first book, published nearly 30 years ago, had the arrestingly dry title Area Cartograms: Their Use and Creation. Then, in 2010, something changed: well, the government changed, austerity was born and Dorling became, in public, the radical geographer that academic colleagues – first at Bristol, then Leeds, then Sheffield, then for the past 10 years at St Peter’s College, Oxford – must have always known him to be. Starting with Injustice: Why Social Inequality Still Persists in 2010, he would write at least one book a year and sometimes as many as three, on justice and equality, until 2018, when he published Peak Inequality. Spoiler: we were not at the peak, but that’s not what he meant.
I meet him in Greenwich, south-east London, where he is between meetings at a conference on inequality. He has a new book, Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of a Failing State. The picture he draws is delineated carefully through appalling statistics: over the first five years of austerity, the poorest fifth of people in England lost, on average, 11% of their income, while the richest fifth lost nothing. There are now twice as many food banks in the UK as there are branches of McDonald’s. “The country [is] moving towards a minarchy, or night-watchman state, with minimal power over the rich and minimal support for the poorer of its citizens,” he writes.
