Introduction

‘This is a story about people and place’ begins The Patch, a BBC Radio 4 series about ‘untold tales’ dug up using a random postcode generator and journalism, on location. This is also true of ‘Changing Places’ one of the newer topics added to A level Geography, also a popular topic for independent investigations at A level. The episode of The Patch about Camborne in Cornwall (broadcast August 2020) may be of particular interest to students investigating sense of place and inequality.

Place attachment and identity

The programme focuses on locals’ lived experience of the coast, specifically ‘the beach’. It uncovers the variety of what geographers call place attachment, the topophobia (fear of place) or topophilia (love of place) felt by ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ as they stand with the sand between their toes; and the stories they tell about this place. Interviews with local service providers, such as taxi drivers, as well as residents illustrate the differences between sense of place gained by tourists and residents who, of course, have taken very different journeys to reach the same beach location.

Further, the programme evidences the fact that some families who live in Camborne never, in fact, visit a beach; a detour which would have taken them as little as three miles out of town. It reveals the way in which socio-economic inequality shapes unequal access to the natural world and open spaces, even those which are relatively local. Wealth, levels of education and access to transport in turn affect the way in which the coast is regarded as a location for leisure or, instead, as a place which is ‘risky’ and dangerous; in other words, the way the same location is bound up with very different place identities.

‘…[The beach], a scene I’d always thought of as free and universal … didn’t look universal anymore’ comments the producer on concluding her interviews, undertaken both at the coast as well as in Camborne itself.

The programme makers don’t make the mistake of implying that everyone from the area’s less well off, socio-economic groups lacks access or an affinity for the seaside, but instead provide an in-depth study of the, perhaps, unexpected variety of lived experience within the local community.

In the classroom

In the classroom, it might stimulate a discussion about issues associated with smaller sample sizes and the value of different sampling methods when investigating human populations, as well as the pros and cons of qualitative fieldwork techniques more generally.

The programme may help students to formulate their own fieldwork questions to investigate, in southwest locations. Other learners more focused on a desk-based study, might like to compare the programme’s findings to quantitative data about the town’s population and that of the wider region, presented as part of the Governments’ English index of multiple deprivation online.  Three of Camborne’s neighbourhoods - small areas with a population of about 1600 (also called LSOAs) - were ‘amongst the 10% most deprived neighbourhoods in the country in 2019’ (English indices of deprivation 2019 explorer website).