Abstract. Within a context of public policy debate in the United Kingdom on social exclusion, health inequalities, and food poverty, the metaphor of the`food desert' caught the imagination of those involved in policy development. Drawing from a major cross-disciplinary investigation of food access and food poverty in British cities, the authors report in this paper findings from the first`before/after' study of food consumption in a highly deprived area of a British city experiencing a sudden and significant change in its food-retail access. The study has been viewed as the first opportunity in the United Kingdom to assess the impact of a non-healthcare intervention (specifically a retail-provision intervention) on food-consumption patterns, and by extension diet-related health, in such a deprived, previously poor-retail-access community. The paper offers evidence of a positive but modest impact of the retail intervention on diet, and the authors discuss the ways in which their findings are potentially significant in the context of policy debate.

There has been much debate about the usefulness of human geography for public and private sector planning. In this paper we make the case in terms of quantitative analysis in geography. We provide a wealth of applications of applied research from the perspective of one team of quantitative geographers -based in the School of Geography at the University of Leeds. This research is rooted in spatial interaction modelling, microsimulation, spatial optimisation and geodemographics. A number of applications are explored and their benefits articulated -for end-users. i.e. planners in the broadest sense of the word, the University and the School, for students and, more broadly, for the research environment within applied spatial analysis.

If poor food retail access in deprived areas of British cities is linked, as suggested in many of the policy debates of the late 1990s, via compromised diets/undernutrition to poor health and widening health inequalities, what is the impact of a sudden and significant improvement in food retail access likely to be on the food consumption patterns of residents? In this paper, we describe and provide preliminary results from the first-ever UK study of a major retail provision on diet in a 'food desert'—a 'before/after' study of food consumption patterns in the highly deprived, previously poor food retail access area of Seacroft, Leeds, experiencing a sudden and significant change in its food retail access as a result of the opening of a large superstore by the UK's leading food retailer. We suggest that this study has the potential to provide some of the missing links between poor food retail access, compromised diets/undernutrition, poor health and compound social exclusion that characterised statements on the topic of 'food deserts' in the health inequalities and social exclusion debates of the late 1990s, and that its findings may have significant implications for policy debate.

This paper forms part of the 'Food Deserts in British Cities' project. It reports on the findings of a series of focus groups conducted with residents in the Seacroft 'food desert' (in Leeds) in the period prior to a major improvement in their food retail accessibility. The paper explores individual food shopping behaviour, consumption patterns and attitudes towards a healthy diet and, in so doing, begins to develop an understanding of how different demographic groups adapt to living within a 'food desert'. The focus is on the perceived economic and physical constraints of residents in the area, but interwoven with this are other considerations such as motivation to consider health, family responsibilities and individual smoking status.

I Introduction There is now a growing, but long overdue, recognition in economic geography that the rapid rise of retail transnational corporations (TNCs) since the mid-1990s is a phenomenon which merits urgent attention in both theoretical and empirical terms (Wrigley, 2000; Coe, 2004a). While the ever-expanding globalization literature has had remarkably little to say about retail TNCs (although see

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At a time of increasing government concern with the economic health of UK town centres and high streets, and with an independent inquiry (led by Mary Portas) on Revitalising the High Street to report by the end of 2011, this paper seeks to make four contributions. First, to inject into an available evidence base, currently notable for its sparseness, new descriptive evidence on the differential performance of a sample of over 250 town centres/high streets in four regions of the UK as those centres adjusted to the shock wave of global economic crisis. Second, to address the task of theorisirtg the nature of the complex adjustments underway by positioning the policy-significant findings provided in the paper within conceptualisations of 'resilienee' in economic systems-particularly those which stress the anticipatory or reactive capacity of systems to minimise the impacts of a destabilising shock and which focus on resilience as a dynamic and evolutionary process. Third, to offer findings from theory-driven statistical modelling of the determinants of the differential resilience or fragility exhibited by that sample of centres. Fourth, to assess what the implications of those findings and a focus on 'adaptive resilience' might mean for the design of policy proposals and instruments aimed at revitalising UK town centres and high streets. Although some of the paper's empirical findings parallel those suggested by specialist commercial researeh companies which have emerged to fill the need to chart the posteconomic crisis malaise of UK retail centres, they also significantly extend available knowledge. In particular, they offer novel insight into the impact of two factors-'diversity' of a centre's preexisting retail structure and 'town-centres-first' policy-compliant 'in-centre' or 'edge-of-centre' corporate-foodstore entry. Although conventionally portrayed as polar opposites within popular debate in terms of attempts to protect and/or enhance the vitality and viability of town centres and high streets, our analysis suggests that this may not be the ease. Indeed, the retail centres in our sample which proved most resilient to the shock wave of global economic crisis were characterised by both diversity and corporate-food-store entry.

Complementing the rise of ethical trading initiatives there has been a parallel growth in the number of academic studies tracking their origins and evolution, and assessing the implementation and success of social auditing practices. Despite this, the consequences and responses to the implementation of codes of conduct relating to labour standards at sites of production remains an understudied topic. This article focuses on those issues in the context of the global apparel industry using evidence from interviews with managers in the Sri Lankan garment manufacturing sector. In particular, it focuses on the contradictions and tensions inherent in compliance, and the anxieties management face during a period of global economic crisis, in a country which is generally considered to be in the vanguard of promoting and protecting ethical labour standards.