London's 100 Poorest Areas

The theme for this post follows on from some work I did recently which looked at the increasing level of deprivation in Outer London, as reported in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago - see also the maps on the Guardian datablog. It's true that housing market pressures (among other things) are helping to push poverty away from Inner London but the majority of London's poorest are still within the inner city, and Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham in particular. In order to provide a clearer picture of where exactly the very poorest (most deprived) areas are, I produced a map and animation of London's 100 most deprived areas. 

Animated version

The results are not at all surprising. Of the 100 most deprived LSOAs in London, according to the 2010 Indices of Deprivation, the Borough with the most areas is Tower Hamlets (18), followed by Hackney (17), Newham (13), Haringey (12) and Brent (10). Deprivation is increasing in Outer London relative to the past and I was particularly taken today by the news that Newham Council were looking to re-house poorer residents in Stoke (more than 150 miles away). That's taking the suburbanisation of poverty a bit far! 

Some work I did with Ed Ferrari last year looked at residential mobility patterns amongst the richest and poorest sectors of the population in England. What we found surprised us at the time. Our analysis showed that it was often the poorest areas which were associated with the longest residential moves. We didn't have enough fine-grained data to make more of this but it was an interesting insight into what might be happening more broadly.

Taking the 100 most deprived locations is of course arbitrary but the point here is that despite debates about whether 'the poor' should live in 'rich areas' the fact is that many of the poorest people living in London are in areas which in recent years have changed considerably so that they are now experiencing very high demand, inflated rents and severe socio-economic inequalities. This represents an intensification of existing processes rather than something entirely new but it does mean that policy makers need to think carefully about what to do about it...

The Domains of the IMD

What most people look at when they see the Indices of Deprivation is the combined Index of Deprivation score and rank for each area. I do this too, but it's always interesting to examine the individual domains to see how areas rank and what the spatial patterns look like. So, time for a map on all of this... (click to enlarge)

In the above image, you'll see that I've produced a raster map for each of the different domains of the English IMD 2010 and that each is sized according to the percentage weighting it gets in the final IMD. There are some interesting differences between domains which, by the way, are covered in Chapter 3 of the technical report.

Income and employment account for nearly half of the weighting for the final IMD score so these maps look pretty similar to the overall IMD map but there are interesting differences with other domains, in particular Barriers to Housing and Services. This picks up a lot of rural areas but also many in London and some other urban locations. Health deprivation and disability also differs from the final IMD map with a more obvious north-south / coalfield pattern. Finally, the most deprived LSOA on each domain is as follows...

• Income: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Employment: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Health and Disability: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Education, Skills and Training: E01013640 in the Braunstone Park ward of Leicester
• Barriers to Housing and Services: E01000604 in the Stonebridge ward of Brent
• Crime: E01005454 in the Waterhead ward of Oldham
• Living Environment: E01001780 in the Hoxton ward of Hackney

The fact that these domains are in different spreadsheets makes mapping it all a bit more time-consuming but since I combined them all anyway I decided to create raster versions just to provide a more fluid overview of the patterns across England. I'm sure I'll keep milking this data for a while!