East end boys and west end girls

The Pet Shop Boys had a massive hit in the 1980s with their song about west end girls from affluent neighbourhoods dating rough, working-class east end boys. I always thought that this was a reference to the west end and east end of London, where the working-class neighbourhoods were located around the docklands in the east of the city, while the rich neighbourhoods were in the west and southwest.

But if you look at maps of different cities in the northern hemisphere, you will almost invariably find that the east side is the more working-class area while the west side is the more middle class and affluent area. Why is that?

It turns out it is mostly due to wind. Across the northern hemisphere, wind predominantly blows from the west and southwest to the east and northeast, which is why the French have carefully located many of their nuclear power plants on their eastern border with Germany. In case of a nuclear accident, the wind will blow the radioactive fallout straight to the Germans…

But I digress.

Because the wind predominantly blows from the west, all kinds of pollution will be blown to the northeast and east of the pollution source. That wasn’t a problem for most of human history because pollution was limited. But with the industrial revolution came increased use of coal. Chimneys were fired up all day and all night emitting all kinds of pollutants. The result was that areas northeast and east of the factories suffered more than areas to the west and southwest of these factories. The maps below show the location of factory chimneys in Manchester during its industrial heyday from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century and the air pollution created by these factories. People who lived in the northeast of the city and towards Oldham suffered the most from air pollution.

Chimney location and air pollution in Manchester

Source: Heblich et al. (2021)

The people who could afford to move moved. The people who couldn’t stayed. Let that process run for a couple of decades and people will sort themselves into middle-class people who bid up the prices of houses in the west and southwest of a city and working-class people who can no longer afford these houses and have to live in the east and northeast. The chart below is taken from a study of pollution in cities and the location of working-class neighbourhoods. In 1817, before the industrial revolution accelerated and coal power became ubiquitous, working-class people lived everywhere in the city independent of the degree of pollution. Once pollution became a real problem (1881 in the chart below), working-class people increasingly lived in highly polluted neighbourhoods which had cheaper housing.

Degree of pollution and share of low-skilled workers in cities

Source: Hebling et al. (2021)

Of course, today, we no longer heat our homes with coal, nor do we have massive factories in city centres. Factories have moved to the countryside and into industrial parks in the suburbs. And as the former polluted neighbourhoods cleaned themselves up, real estate developers moved in to buy cheap housing stocks and gentrify the area. And this is why you can find most men with beards and man-buns as well as art museums, music clubs, and the best coffee shops in the east end of major cities these days, while the west end is full of lawyers, bankers, doctors, and other middle-aged professionals as well as their teenage girls looking for a date with a boy from the east end.