My mother was born in the North East of England in the 1950s. She spent her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, where her father worked at a shipyard. She moved to the West Midlands city of Coventry, by way of Australia (as a ‘Ten Pound Pom’), in the 1970s. This was where she met my father – born and raised in Kent, where his father owned a chain of butcher shops, before he, too, made his way to Coventry as a student. My brother and I were also born in Kent but spent most of our school years in the East Anglian fens of Lincolnshire. My undergraduate years were spent in Birmingham before working across the North in Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Durham. So this book on health divides is in part inspired by this personal experience of England’s ‘North–South divide’. But it is also a product of my work as a university researcher, based in the North of England, having examined international, national, regional and local inequalities in health for well over a decade.

This book examines geographical health divides between highincome countries (with a focus on the US health disadvantage), between the countries of the UK (particularly the ‘Scottish health effect’), between the English regions (the North–South divide) and between deprived and affluent areas of the towns and cities of high-income countries (with a case study of the town of Stockton-on- Tees in the North East of England). The book examines the historical and contemporary nature of these health divides: when they emerged and how they have developed over time, what they are like today, what explains them and what the future might hold. It shows that these geographical inequalities in health are longstanding and universal – present to a greater or lesser extent across both space and time. It examines the multiple causes of these health inequalities and argues that the fundamental drivers are the political and economic choices we make as a society, and the way they shape the places in which we live, work and play. This book places inequalities in health and examines how geography is a matter of life and death – where you live can kill you.