Premier League Poverty?

The financial health of the English Premier League is a regular topic of discussion. No matter how you look at it, the sums of money involved in the operation of Premier League teams are immense and it looks even more striking when you consider the locations of their stadia - typically in the most deprived areas of England. This is related to a number of factors (e.g. history, land values), but in my work on neighbourhood deprivation and mapping I've noticed a common trend over the years so I decided to look at the location of all 20 current Premier League teams in England and how deprived their local area is, using the Government's official measure of deprivation (the IMD*). The maps below show each team and its area's deprivation rank within England, where 1 = most deprived and 32,482 = least deprived. Shading: red = poorest 20% of areas in England, yellow = next poorest 20%, and so on... Liverpool is most deprived and Fulham least. See below for more.

Arsenal - IMD 4,432 

Aston Villa - IMD 479

Chelsea - IMD 5,483

Everton - 1,070

Fulham - IMD 19,076

Liverpool - IMD 219

Manchester City - IMD 599

Manchester United - IMD 10,235

Newcastle United - 18,570/6,582 (split)

Norwich - IMD 12,253

Reading - IMD 6,843

Southampton - IMD 855

Spurs - IMD 950

Stoke - IMD 2,171

Sunderland - IMD 6,291

Swansea - WIMD 374

West Brom - IMD 1,619

West Ham - IMD 3,593

Wigan - IMD 429

QPR - IMD 7,848

In Newcastle, the stadium is split between two areas, so I have given the deprivation ranks for both areas. The English Indices of Deprivation obviously only cover England so I have included a map for Swansea which uses the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation figure from 2011. More on that in a previous post. Similar patterns exist in Scotland, as you can see from the bottom part of this 2009 post. What does this tell us that we didn't already know? Not much, but it does provide some hard data and an overview of the contrast between the wealth of clubs and the poverty of many local areas they are located in.

* The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 are used here. They rank each of the 32,482 Lower Layer Super Output Areas of England from most deprived (a rank of 1) to least deprived (a rank of 32,482), taking into account such things as income, employment, education and health. There was a similar piece of analysis in Regeneration and Renewal in 2009 but this looked at the local authority areas only and not the specific location of stadia.

London's Daytime Population

A couple of months ago I did a short post on the difference between daytime and night time populations in the North West of England. I've been interested in this for a while but some other recent work from the US got me thinking about it again. More recently, the London Datastore released data on London's daytime population for 2010 so I thought I'd take a closer look at the data and do something with it. The graphic below pulls out the most interesting data - not least of which is the fact that London's daytime population is 9.3 million!

Full size version here

I downloaded the data, explored it and did a little 3D mapping of population density. The daytime population density figures for the City of London are quite staggering (350,000 people per square mile!). During the day, the population of Westminster is nearly 1 million - compared to about 250,000 permanent residents. The City of London only has about 11,700 permanent residents but its daytime population is 390,000. If you're looking for the London Borough with the most prams, then head to Newham - it has the highest number of children aged 0-4. If you're looking for overseas visitors, head to Westminster where you are bound to bump into one of the 65,000 or so who are there. 

The data are very interesting, but also important. If we want to understand cities and how they work (and how to make them work better) then this kind of information is critical. 

That's all for now...

Local Deprivation in England

Rather than leave my English Indices of Deprivation fusion table work on a single blog page, I thought I'd take a minute or two to put it on a separate web page with its own address. A screenshot of the result is shown below. I've just used blogger for this and added a floating key so that no matter where you zoom or pan you can remember the colour scheme. The colour scheme is based on quintiles (i.e. 20% most deprived, 40% most deprived and so on). Click the image below to go to the web page. It's very basic!

Indices of Deprivation 2010

The English Indices of Deprivation 2010 were published this morning. Previous Indices were published in 2000, 2004 and 2007. I've decided to do a few posts on this because I find it very interesting and it does have real implications in relation to policy. In this post, I've done some basic mapping and analysis (click on any map to view it full size).

A quick snapshot first: the most deprived LSOA is in Tendring, Essex. It used to be in Liverpool. Overall, Liverpool, Middlesbrough, Manchester, Knowsley, Hull, Hackney and Tower Hamlets remain the most deprived local authorities. So, no major surprises.

Overview for the whole of England, with a list of top ten most deprived LSOAs.


Overview cartogram for England, with a list of top ten most deprived LSOAs.


Detailed map showing location of the most deprived LSOA in England.


A zoomable google map version of the above, for good measure.

View Tendring 018A in a larger map

A more focused map of Merseyside, showing Liverpool, Sefton and Knowsley.

Note: The Indices of Deprivation 2010 are produced for small areas called LSOAs. These lower layer super output areas are not 'neighbourhoods' in a formal sense but they often have a high degree of internal similarity. The average population of an LSOA is about 1500 and in total there are 32,482 of them in England. The data used in the Indices are mostly from 2008 but you can read more about this in the technical report.

NSNR Final Evaluation

Just over a week ago (4th March 2010), the final evaluations of two major English urban policy initiatives were published by CLG. One of these was the New Deal for Communities (NDC) final assessment - the other was the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (NSNR) final report. This short post is about the latter document, which contains 119 pages in all.

The NSNR was launched in 2001 with the notion that "within 10 to 20 years no-one should be seriously disadvantaged by where they live" - a very noble (unrealistic?) goal. The report itself covers the following, in some detail:

• the nature of deprived neighbourhoods;
• change in deprived areas;
• factors influencing change in deprived neighbourhoods;
• the impact of NSNR on deprived neighbourhoods;
• the effectiveness of NSNR arrangements; and
• lessons for the future.

With all such evaluations, however, the real issue is not the evaluation itself but the wider context within which the programme operates. It has been said that the most effective anti-poverty strategy is economic growth and in many ways this is true, but even in a period of sustained growth (e.g. 1997 to 2007) what we have seen is a deepening of concentrated deprivation in many cities, though there have been some successes. So, on p. 80 we have "overall value for money appeared to be good for the majority of the interventions" and on p. 112 a more engouraging statement: "in terms of value for money, NRF appears to have performed well – demonstrably so with regard to reducing worklessness in particular"

Some earlier work I was involved in at the Centre for Urban Policy Studies is reported from p. 18 to 21 and there are many other interesting results, data and maps. The report also makes a very kind acknowledgement of my input!

Red Road Flats, Glasgow

Since they're not going to be with us much longer, I'm writing a short post about the Red Road Flats in Glasgow - a group of eight high-rise social housing blocks in the north of the city. I used to live just over a mile away from them and it will be strange when they are gone since they have been such a feature of the city's skyline for more than 40 years. There's some really interesting material on the flats on this website, set up specially to document their demolition.

Just to be more precise about where they are, here's a Google streetview:


View Larger Map

There's also a series of Quicktime panoramas here (with further links on the right of this page). There's also a gritty/disturbing 2006 film of the same name which is set there. There are hundreds of other potential links, but the final one here is from a short BBC film of the area. The schedule for demolition is a little unclear, but the first block is supposed to be toppled in spring 2010.

Finally, I edited one of my very own Red Road photos (taken in 2005) to see what the skyline will look like from Petershill Road once they are all gone (the picture below is a small animated gif).