ABSTRACT
The residents of any town or city have a well formed awareness of the status of any area reflecting the types of housing and their occupants. The nomenclature may vary but posh, mixed, up and coming, downmarket, exclusive and desirable are just some of the many adjectives used to denote social status and social stratification. Within mainstream sociology and geography considerable attention has been given to the division of residential space into stratified territories and, to a lesser extent, to the impact that these have had on local social relations. By extension, housing and homes are implicated in the process. Within sociology there has been a tendency to present residential segregation as a simple manifestation of stratified societies. Thus inequality in work, gender relations and class manifest by work, are stamped upon the social landscape in terms of where people live and how they live.
