The need for physical distancing in the midst of COVID-19 has laid bare the absurdities of transport in our public realm. With people confined to their homes the roads, which have dominated urban planning thinking, lie empty. Simultaneously the same people, allowed out of their homes to exercise, find that the space given to sidewalks, and near non-existent cycle ways, are not nearly enough to maintain physical distancing. In our piece we ask: Is COVID-19 a turning point for our urban transport systems and where the arguments made in favour of sustainable transport finally break through? ARTICLE HISTORY

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In the aftermath of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, a number of dominant narratives and spatial imaginaries of ‘Brexit’ have come to the fore including the notion of a revolt of a ‘Left Behind Britain’, and of a generational splintering manifested in different political attitudes. Informed by this context, this paper considers some of these issues at the micro-scale, using voting data from two contiguous local authority districts within the same city region. It presents data from wards that have similar socio-economic conditions and which are highly ranked in the Index of Multiple Deprivation but which voted differently in the referendum. The data reinforce the arguments of those who have claimed that the phenomenon of Brexit is powerfully contextual and that general socio-economic analyses of its causes do not fully explain why some areas and populations voted to leave the EU and others with comparable profiles voted to remain. With poorer regions predicted to be the biggest economic losers of ‘Brexit’, an understanding of such issues is of material consequence and might inform progressive responses to such populist phenomena.