HookDoreen Massey stood on Kilburn High Road and rethought what a place is
In her 1991 essay A Global Sense of Place, the geographer Doreen Massey described standing on Kilburn High Road in north-west London. Above her, planes banked toward Heathrow carrying people from every continent. In the shop windows sat Irish newspapers and sari fabrics; a hoarding advertised an Indian film; the newsagent sold the same brands as a shop in Nairobi. Kilburn, she argued, could not be understood as a self-contained little world with a single identity. It was a particular knot of connections — a place made by its links to Ireland, to South Asia, to the aviation industry, to the whole planet. Place, she concluded, is not a bounded thing you can wall off; it is a meeting-point of flows, and no two people standing on that pavement experience quite the same Kilburn.
That is the intellectual pivot of Changing places. The everyday view treats a place as a dot on a map with a fixed character. The geographer's view treats it as a process — continually remade by shifting flows of people, money and ideas, and continually re-imagined in the meanings people attach to it and the ways they represent it. So the topic runs on two engines: relationships and connections (the material forces that change a place's demographic, economic, social and cultural make-up) and meaning and representation (how place is perceived, felt and portrayed). Master both, anchor them in your two contrasting place studies, and you can answer anything the examiner throws at you.
ModelThe nature of place — insiders, outsiders and the forces that shape it
AQA distinguishes a location (a set of coordinates) from a place (a location invested with meaning). It asks you to handle several concepts precisely. Places can be near or far, and experienced (lived in directly) or media places (known only through film, news or fiction). A crucial distinction is insider versus outsider perspective: the lifelong resident and the passing tourist stand in the same street and read it utterly differently. This links to sense of place — the emotional attachment and identity a place holds — and its opposite, the geographer Edward Relph's idea of placelessness (1976): the bland, standardised environments of retail parks and airport concourses that could be anywhere. Yi-Fu Tuan's term topophilia names the love of a particular place; think of the fierce local pride of a Cornish fishing village.
The character of any place is produced by two sets of factors, and you must be able to sort them. Endogenous factors come from within: location, topography, physical geography, land use, the built environment and infrastructure, and the demographic and economic profile of the population. Exogenous factors come from outside: a place's relationships with other places and the external forces — investment, migration, government policy — acting on it. Massey's point is that the exogenous is not a minor add-on; the connections a place has to elsewhere are often what most powerfully define it.
MechanismRelationships and connections — how flows rewrite a place
This leaf is about the material drivers of change. AQA asks how shifting flows of people, resources, money and ideas, together with the decisions of governments and transnational corporations, alter a place's demographic, cultural, economic and social characteristics — and how past connections continue to shape the present. Deindustrialisation is the classic mechanism: when a dock, mill or coal mine closes, the loss of jobs triggers out-migration, an ageing and often poorer resident population, boarded-up high streets and a collapse in local identity. Global economic restructuring — a TNC relocating production to a lower-wage country — can hollow out a British town overnight while building a new one in Shenzhen.
Crucially, change is not only decline. Government policy and inward investment can drive regeneration and gentrification, as flows of professional in-migrants and capital transform a formerly working-class district — rising house prices, new bars and studios, and the gradual displacement of the original community. Massey's insistence that places are shaped by their links to elsewhere means you should always trace a change back to its external cause: a Cornish village's housing crisis is driven not by anything internal but by second-home buyers from London; a Welsh valley's decline is rooted in a global collapse in coal demand. Past connections leave a lasting imprint — the grand civic buildings of Liverpool or Glasgow were paid for by an imperial trade (including, unavoidably, the slave economy) whose legacy still shapes those cities' identity and debates today.
CaseA local place study — the Isle of Dogs, remade twice
Your specification requires two contrasting place studies, and it wants more than facts: it wants people's lived experience of place, past and present, and how it is represented. The Isle of Dogs in East London is a textbook local study because it has been remade twice inside two generations. Until 1980 it was a tight-knit working-class dockland community whose identity was built on the West India Docks — hard, dangerous, well-unionised work, terraced streets, an insular but intense sense of place. When the docks closed between 1980 and 1981, unable to take modern container ships, thousands of jobs vanished and the community entered a decade of decline: an exogenous shock (containerisation and global shipping) rewriting an endogenous world.
The London Docklands Development Corporation (1981–1998) then engineered a second transformation. Public money, an Enterprise Zone offering tax breaks, and a wave of private capital produced Canary Wharf — One Canada Square opened in 1991 as Britain's tallest building — turning derelict quays into a global financial district employing well over 100,000 people. For the incoming bankers this is a gleaming, connected, high-value place; for the descendants of the dockers, many priced out or left behind in surrounding social housing, it can feel like an alien enclave dropped onto their home. That gap between the insider and outsider reading — regeneration as renewal versus regeneration as displacement — is exactly the tension a place study should surface.
CaseA contrasting place study — St Ives and the second-home question
A strong second study should contrast, and a rural, tourism-driven place throws the urban regeneration story into relief. St Ives, on the north Cornish coast, is a former pilchard-fishing and mining town whose economy and identity have been reshaped by exogenous flows of a very different kind: tourists, artists and second-home buyers. Its extraordinary light drew painters from the early twentieth century, and the opening of Tate St Ives in 1993 rebranded the town as a national arts destination — a deliberate act of representation converting a declining industrial place into a cultural one.
But the same connectedness that brought prosperity brought a crisis of place. By the 2010s a large share of properties in parts of the town were second homes or holiday lets, pricing out local families and leaving whole streets dark in winter — a hollowed-out 'ghost town' effect that erodes the year-round community and its sense of place. In a 2016 referendum, St Ives residents voted overwhelmingly (over 80%) to adopt a Neighbourhood Plan restricting most new-build housing to people who would live in it as their principal residence — a rare local attempt to defend an insider community against outside market forces. Set against the Isle of Dogs, St Ives lets you compare two utterly different places changed by the same underlying process: flows of money and people from a wealthy metropolis remaking a smaller community, for better and worse.
ModelMeaning and representation — the place you are sold
The second engine of the topic is subjective. AQA asks how humans perceive, engage with and form attachments to places, and how places are represented. A representation is any portrayal of a place — a map, a painting, a film, a novel, a song, a tourist brochure, an estate agent's listing, a set of census statistics. None is neutral; each is made by someone, for a purpose, foregrounding some features and hiding others. L.S. Lowry's paintings fixed an image of Salford as smoking chimneys and matchstick figures; a Cornish tourism advert sells surf and sunlight while editing out the winter deprivation. Formal representations (a census, an Ordnance Survey map, a government report) claim objectivity; informal ones (graffiti, blogs, local slang, personal photographs) carry lived, emotional truth. The skill is to read both critically.
Rebranding and place marketing are representation weaponised for economic ends. External agencies — councils, development corporations, corporate bodies — deliberately re-image a place to attract investment, residents and tourists. Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture in 2008 was a conscious attempt to overwrite a media image of decline; Glasgow's 'People Make Glasgow' campaign, and before it 'Glasgow's Miles Better', did the same. Community groups also represent and contest place from below, resisting the version imposed from above. The evaluative point examiners reward: a rebrand changes the representation of a place long before, and sometimes instead of, changing the lived reality for the people already there.
Worked source interpretation. Imagine an exam gives you two representations of the same regenerated waterfront. Source A is a developer's marketing render: cloudless sky, waterfront cafés, smiling professionals, the strapline 'a vibrant new community'. Source B is a resident's photograph of the same street on a grey February morning: shuttered units, a food-bank sign, an estate beyond the glass towers. A weak answer describes each picture in turn. A strong AO3 answer interrogates them. Ask of each: who made it, for whom, and to what end? Source A is produced by the developer to sell flats, so it foregrounds affluence and erases deprivation — it represents an outsider, aspirational place. Source B is an insider representation capturing lived experience the render omits. Then triangulate with quantitative evidence: if the Index of Multiple Deprivation still ranks the surrounding ward in the most deprived 10% nationally while new-build prices exceed half a million pounds, the data confirms that the two representations describe not two moods but two coexisting realities — a gentrified enclave beside a community left behind. That move — reading a representation for its author and purpose, then testing it against hard data — is precisely the skill the place-study questions assess.
VocabularyKey terms the mark scheme pays for
TrapsMisconceptions that cost marks
ExamWhat examiners want
Changing places rewards AO1 (concepts of place and the processes changing it), AO2 (applying those concepts, especially to your place studies and to unseen sources) and AO3 (interpreting the qualitative and quantitative evidence the paper provides). The source-based questions are where AO3 marks live: when handed a photograph, map, advert, poem or census extract, never merely describe it. Interrogate authorship and purpose — who made this representation, for whom, and what does it foreground or hide — and, where you can, triangulate a qualitative source against quantitative data such as the Index of Multiple Deprivation or census figures.
Your two contrasting place studies are your evidence bank; revise them for detail and, above all, for lived experience and representation, not just facts. On the 20-mark essays AQA's top level demands a balanced, well-evidenced argument and a substantiated conclusion, so structure place questions as a genuine evaluation — regeneration as renewal versus displacement, the marketed image versus the resident's reality — and reach a judgement keyed to the command word. Deploy the topic's vocabulary precisely (endogenous and exogenous, insider and outsider, sense of place, placelessness) because using the conceptual language accurately is one of the clearest signals that lifts an answer from the middle band into the top.