Every town has its own particular layout. I don’t mean an architectural layout, with a defined centre where the town hall goes, and the library and shops or the Car Dealers. Or where the park goes, or how the roads are arranged around it. No, I am talking instead about something a little harder to define, something that you could never prove and which is actually quite hard to put your finger on. The social layout of a town.
This means the ways that the people in a town arrange themselves. The seemingly random behaviour of each and every town’s thousands (if not millions) of inhabitants, and the ways certain types of people seem to migrate to different areas. You have all seen cases of this sort of phenomena in action – the pubs that everyone avoids because they are full of the roughest regulars; the restaurants that house the intellectuals and the areas of the part where the year 13s hang out. It is a part of life that is very much ingrained in everyone, a fact that makes it rather difficult to take a step back and see what sort of layout your personal town has.
I recently started thinking about how my town works –and about the subtle ins and outs that make up its own totally individual layout. I noticed, first off, that a lot of areas were dominated by people from certain industries, and that the clientele who dominated that area kept the routine of who used what and who went where fairly consistent. Take, for example, the line of three bars that are situated in the town centre, near the high street. Whilst they are all quite similar, one is a student bar, a fact that can probably be attributed to the cheap drinks and late opening hours. The other two, however, have the same range of drinks and opening hours, but one is where the car dealers like to hang out, and one is where the construction workers tend to go.
I don’t know how something like this starts, but it is definitely there, and I doubt it can be changed all that easily. After all, it is even the case that some areas of town are inhabited by certain social classifications of people, whilst other areas boast a completely different social set up. There are, of course, always exceptions, but the majority of people tend to fall neatly into the social grouping that you would assume.
If you were to take a step back from your town, what sort of things would you notice about its social layout? What would you learn from seeing the sorts of prejudices and habits that evolve over time? Maybe you will realise that actually you avoid some very good establishments purely because they aren’t the place your social network goes to – and not even because the current customers are scary or rough. It could be quite an eye opening experience, and could teach you a lot about the place in which you live.
