Introduction

If childhood encompassed the years in which we grow, larva-like, in our neighbourhoods, the nine years from 16-24 are a metamorphosis.

At these ages, most move from the security/insecurity of their families through a series of usually more insecure tenures, relationships and occupations. A few years spent doing this and then a few spent doing that. Aside from those who are mothers (but not fathers) very few can say with much certainty at 18 what they will be doing by age 21. These are the ages at which original family background appears, superficially at least, less vital.

Teenagers’ and young adults’ lives are steered by more than that which makes younger children’s environments so much more predictable. Later, by area at least, we will see that most revert to form and begin to live lives and, for the majority, bring up children not unlike the way they were brought up, albeit with the difference a generation makes. But doing that is so far from the minds of most 18- to 24-year-olds that in some cases it is almost an anathema. Ask first-year university students in an elite university, a group conforming more than most of their cohort, what they expect to be doing in their late twenties or even late thirties and suburbia, the office job and the family are not what they tend to reel off. So what is on the minds of this age group? Well you might have your suspicions and so we will begin by feeding your expectations with two maps of sex.

First, however, for you to have a balanced understanding of the rest of this chapter we need to show (see the map below left) the extreme clustering of those in young adulthood who can account for anything between not quite a twentieth and almost a half of the population of neighbourhoods at the most extreme. It is almost as if our youngest adults desire to live together in clusters. Alternatively, it may well be that the rest of us do not want to live with them. Whatever it is, and universities play a large part now, this age group, almost more than any other, clusters. The map left shows clearly where those clusters are most acute.