Class and Ethnicity in Complex Cities—The Cases of Leicester and Bradford

Abstract

The author is concerned with exploring the relationship between patterns of ethnic residence in ‘complex’ cities and the character of social division in class terms in such cities. Data from the 1991 UK Census are analyzed in order to examine the patterns of social division and ethnic residence in two large manufacturing cities in the United Kingdom—Leicester where the main ethnic minority is of Indian origin, and Bradford where it is Pakistani. Both cities are socially divided and can be considered, at the very least metaphorically, as taking the form of ‘butterfly attractors’, but the relationship between social division and ethnicity is not the same either in both places or for both ethnic groups. Pakistanis in both cities are predominantly located in poorer areas. Indians in Leicester live both in affluent and in poorer areas, and some residential areas which are predominantly Indian are affluent. The author concludes that the residential patterns described are a complex resultant of locality effects and ethnicity effects, and notes that observed ethnic residential patterns in both cities support neither the assertion that the United Kingdom has ethnic ghettos nor any general account of ethnic minorities of South Asian origin as confined to ‘underclass’ positions in the general social order.