Research published on food deserts

Research published on food deserts

Concerns about the quality of British food, especially that consumed by the poor and its effects on their health, go back at least as far as the Boer War, around 1900. At that time, recruits from London’s East End appearing for military service were found to be in poor health, possibly even unfit for active service, and middle-class women from wealthier parts of the capital, so called ‘pudding ladies’, went to East End homes to teach cooking skills.

During the 1970s, concern grew in Britain concerning the loss of small village shops; coupled with a decline in rural bus services this was leaving some elderly villagers bereft of access to shops. Small food shops have been in decline since the 1950s, in both urban and rural areas, but research interest concerning this decline began in the 1970s, and largely looked at rural rather than urban shopping venues. There were several reasons why interest in rural shop closures preceded interest in urban shop closures.

A) Urban grocery shop closures in the 1950s or 60s might have had little effect on accessibility for those of limited mobility because there would probably still have been another grocery shop close by. However in a village, even with ten shops, the closure of one would be more noticeable.

B) The 1960s and 70s saw major motorway development in Britain, and car ownership rose rapidly from the 1950s. This meant village homes were more open to occupation by commuters and as second, holiday, homes, beginning the process of erosion of trade of the village shops that continues today.

C) Early UK supermarkets were often in more inner urban areas, rather than on the edge of town as today. So as small shops gave way to supermarkets, access to groceries would initially have been preserved.

D) Research tends to follow the concerns of the day, not least because research funding is then easier to obtain. The loss of village shopping facilities for women in villages, perhaps widowed, without a car and facing declining public transport too, was a concern, e.g. of local Women’s’ Institutes, long before concerns about urban poverty and social exclusion.

The election of New Labour to power in Britain in 1997 created new research interest in social exclusion and urban poverty, and this led to more research on social exclusion in the large cities. One of the first acts of Tony Blair’s government was to set up a Social Exclusion Unit within the Cabinet office. By September 1998 the Social Exclusion Unit had presented its report, ‘Bringing Britain Together: A National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal’ to Parliament. Since 1998 a number of large scale studies of retail exclusion and related topics such as health, diet, and transport poverty have been carried out in a number of large cities, including Cardiff, Coventry, Glasgow, Leeds, London, and Newcastle on Tyne. A major study was carried out regarding a new Tesco superstore built in Seacroft, a poor area of north east Leeds. More details on this research can be found by consulting the references below. See also ‘current trends in supermarkets – employment’ page.

Details of past and present food research are given on the Excel table on this site (see ‘Table of Food Research’, main page, this site).