'Older people have pulled up the ladder': inside England's oldest and youngest towns

[T_i_B]

Certainly my experience is that old and young people are increasingly leading their lives segregated from each other, which is not a healthy situation.

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/dec/09/ladder-england-oldest-youngest-towns-manchester-minehead

Are millennials Generation Rent or Generation Whinge? Dr Albert Sabater, a geographer at the University of St Andrews and a member of the ESRC Centre for Population Change, believes these conflicts are just a taste of things to come. According to Sabater, such divisions are exacerbated by the fact that the old and the young now live more physically separate lives. “The population of the UK is ageing fast,” he says, “and that ageing is occurring unevenly across the country. British society has been slowly segregating in many ways, and one of these is where the old and young live.” This is, in part, for the reasons Young identifies: people in their 20s and 30s can’t afford to live in areas where house prices have rocketed since the baby boomers bought in the 1970s and 80s. So we are creating ghettoes of young and old, renters and homeowners.

Sabater worries that this will prove damaging for society; both last year’s Brexit referendum and the general election in June showed clear evidence of a division in attitude and political orientation between the two groups. The old and the young appear to be arm-wrestling over the future of the UK: witness the recent Momentum meme attacking wealthy homeowners, painting them as smug and self-interested. Physical segregation is likely to make that confrontation worse.

This segregation can be seen within parts of the country – Sabater says central Bedfordshire shows the most marked separation between old (65-plus) and young (25-40) districts – and also between parts of the country. The place with the most elderly population is west Somerset, where the median age is 53.9; the area with the youngest population is central Manchester, where the median is 30.1 (statisticians consider median age to be a more reliable measure than average age, which tends to be distorted by numbers at the extremes)