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Showing posts from April, 2017

Seeing how the other half lives

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..or why we should all leave our ivory towers once in a while. Last week I found myself in Sunderland with time to kill. As you do. I decided to resist the usual temptation to linger in my hotel room staring at a screen, dealing with emails, reading articles, or generally wasting time on social media. Instead, I decided to leave all technology behind and get to know my temporary location a little better. I’d never been to Sunderland before and have to confess that I knew very little about it before this trip. I did know that it had a long history of shipbuilding, is the location for a Nissan car manufacturing plant and is also home to a struggling Premier League football team. I also knew that it is typically the first electorate in the country to declare its results in general elections and as such is considered something of a Bellwether town. In last year’s EU referendum, it voted 61% in favour of Brexit and was thus a portent of the result that was to follow natio