Child poverty in the United Kingdom - for small areas

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm currently doing some work on child poverty and social mobility. I did this for English parliamentary constituency areas in 2011 but the problem I had then was that I didn't have a dataset that covered the entire UK at the small area level. Since then, however, I've been looking more into the HMRC's child poverty statistics and their revised local child poverty measure (linked to the Child Poverty Act 2010). To cut a long story short... I've mapped child poverty at the small area level for the whole UK - for those areas where child poverty is at 33.3% or higher (the UK average is 20.6%). The map is zoomed to London but you can zoom around and use the full screen version. Click on an area to find out more.

Full screen map

The highest value in the UK is in part of Springburn in Glasgow - with a value of 83.3% of children in poverty according to the HMRC definition. The highest value for anywhere outside Scotland is 75.0% in part of east central Manchester. 

Some technical information... The small areas used are Super Output Areas in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, Data Zones are used. These have around half the population of Super Output Areas (around 800, compared to 1600). Using these smaller areas means that Scottish areas dominate the list of the highest child poverty neighbourhoods in the UK. In the HMRC definition, 'children' are all dependent children aged 0 to 19. They also provide data on child poverty rate for children under 16 and this figure is usually about a half to one percentage point higher (e.g. 21.1% for under 16 compared to 20.6% for the whole UK). The data are from the most recent release - 2010.

Toddlers, teens and yoofs - where are they?

I've been doing some work on child poverty and social mobility recently, and part of this has involved looking at simple stats like the percentage of people in each area who are under 18. This has given me a better insight into which areas might be most affected by children's issues and policies. I've been looking across Great Britain but focusing on England and Wales and so I thought I'd just post a couple of maps showing the % of children across London Boroughs and the core cities - see below.

Bigger version for London

The results are quite striking - and particularly interesting I think are the differences between and within the core cities. What is also very interesting is the spatial divides in terms of which areas have a high concentration of children and which don't. These data overlap with many other datasets - which is partly what I'm looking at in my research right now - but this post is simply about the two maps.

Bigger version for core cities

One academic-related thought on this, though. I've been looking at the literature on neighbourhood effects over the past few years and following with interest the debate on where people 'choose' to live. This got me thinking about who might not get to choose, and children is one obvious group. As you can see from the maps there are large areas where 25% or more of the residents are children, and some areas where it is nearly 50%. Also interesting for me is the extent to which city centres in (e.g.) Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds are largely child-free - possibly linked to the concentration of students and new city centre living. Anyway, that's enough for now.

Technical note: this is done at the lower super output area level and for the local authority boundaries of the English core cities, plus all of Greater London. The data are from 2011 Census table KS102EW.

The Highlands and London: lots of space vs. lots of people

I've been doing some work recently looking at local authority data from across the UK. One thing that always fascinates me about this is the differences between areas at a very basic level, such as the different sizes and populations of local authority and other sub-national areas. The two examples which always stand out in my mind are the Highland council area (because that's where I'm from) and Greater London (because it's so big and dynamic). The other reason the Highland council area stands out is because it is by far the biggest local authority in the UK. It's bigger than both Wales and Northern Ireland, yet it only has 232,000 people. London, on the other hand, would fit into the Highland council area about 20 times over yet it has 8.2 million people - as you can see from the map (click to enlarge - and see full screen here).

The map above shows Greater London and the Highland Council area mapped to the same scale, with London moved to the middle of the Highlands (not expecting this to become official Scottish Government policy any time soon, but you never know). Greater London is about 40 miles across but it is totally dwarfed by the Highlands. What is the relevance of all this? Well, it is interesting to think about this in the context of local government and the challenges they currently face.

Within Greater London you have 32 Boroughs plus the City of London all performing a variety of functions and in the whole of Scotland there are 32 Council Areas (which esteemed blogger Peter Matthews can list alphabetically off the top of his head). In the context of the ongoing fiscal crisis, there has been some talk of merging all local authorities in Scotland. I doubt it is going to happen but you never know. A Scotland on Sunday article on it from late 2012 seems to suggest there is some truth to the idea.

Which world map projection is correct?

A recent Google map puzzle got me thinking once again about map projections and the ways in which they can be used for web maps. Google maps uses a variation on the Mercator projection which, as we all know, dates from 1569. Most people who are into maps know that this particular projection makes areas close to the poles look bigger than they actually are. This distortion is an unavoidable problem when trying to project the surface of a big round object like the earth on to a flat surface. So, which world map project is correct? The answer is of course that none are 'correct' or possibly that there can be no 'correct'. Every projection compromises something. To demonstrate this I've mapped the world nine different times in the image below to demonstrate the impact of using different projections.

I've pasted the individual images below and you should be able to flick through them for comparison by clicking on one and then clicking to see each successive image. Two that I think are particularly effective are the Robinson and the Winkel Tripel. These have both been used by National Geographic. The former was their default projection until 1998 when they switched to Winkel Tripel, which was originally developed by Oscar Winkel in 1921. Equal area projections are of course used widely (e.g. Gall-Peters) but some suffer from extreme flattening at the poles, like the Behrmann one below. No matter what, none are really 'correct'.

Now I should get back to marking reports!

Google Fusion Tables Info Windows

A short post today related to info windows for Google Fusion Tables maps. In case you didn't know, an info window is what pops up when you click on an area of a Google map - as shown below. I've blogged about this in the past and today am sharing some more tips in relation to how to get a Google Street View snapshot of an area to appear in the info window. I just added this in to my new SIMD website.

This page tells you how to add a Street View snapshot and there isn't really much to it. You just need to make sure you have an API console key (baffled? see this for how to get one) which is just a key code that you need to make it work.  All you need to get one is a Google account. The other thing you'll need is two columns in your table specifying a latitude and longitude. I do this in ArcGIS before importing the data into Fusion Tables. Once you've done this you can add in the Street View code to the Fusion Tables info window layout (via Tools, Change info window layout... as below) and then add in the code via the Custom tab.

I've added in an Employment page to my new SIMD site where this is all put into practice - I have an info window chart, some data and a Google Street View snapshot in it, plus some text. Here's the code that makes it work - I'm certainly not a coding expert so apologies if it is a bit messy. If you're into this kind of thing, I hope you find it useful. 

You can change the dimensions from 400x400 to whatever you like. The curly brackets specify which column the lat/long comes from so you will need to make sure that this matches the name of your lat/long columns.

The only downside to this is that the image it displays is fairly random and not always representative of the area people click on. Sometimes, no image is available.

SIMD2012 - An Interactive Website

With the release of the latest version of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation I thought I would take the time to put together an interactive mapping website so that people who are interested in exploring spatial patterns of deprivation could easily interact with the data. The official Scottish Government interactive mapping site has some nice features but I find it a bit cumbersome and the map interface is too small for my liking so that's why I've produced my own version, based on Google Fusion Tables.

Putting this together has prompted me to develop some additional mapping tools using Fusion Tables code and these can be accessed via the 'Tools' tab on the new website. The 'search and zoom' allows you to enter a place you want to look for and when you hit 'Search' the map immediately pans and zooms to that location.   The other tool I've created simply lets you turn the SIMD map layer on and off, which is quite a useful feature.

I've just looked at the relative ranks of places within Scotland in this site. For details of absolute change you can see the employment and income domain data available from the new SIMD 2012 website.

Population growth in Manchester city centre, 2001 to 2011

Manchester city centre experienced a population explosion between 2001 and 2011. In the area covered by the map below the population increased by nearly 400% - from 5,957 to 23,295; a rise of 17,388 people.  In 1991, the same area (roughly) had a population of 2,887, as you can see here. Anyone who knows Manchester will know about this but possibly not about the scale of the change. A lot has been written about these changes (e.g. Centre for Cities in 2006, Manchester Evening News in 2012) but it is clear that much of the growth experienced in Manchester has been driven by a new phase of city centre living. Click an area on the map to find out more about it and zoom in to the larger version of the Google map to see it in more detail.

Click for larger version of this map

But who are these new residents? Chris Allen, writing in 2006, said they might be a mix of 'counter-culturalists' from the new middle class, 'city centre tourists' from the service class and 'successful agers', who tend to be over 50. Whoever they are, they're living in the new apartment buildings that began to sprout in the perforated urban landscape of central Manchester over a decade ago.

The map above contains a total of 15 small areas known as super output areas. If you click on any area you can find out how many people now live in each. The map also tells you the total land area of each small parcel and how many households are in it. You can find more of this kind of information via the Guardian datablog and also by clicking through to the raw data on the ONS web pages. It was only released on Friday but I've been looking at it now because I'm writing a short paper on small area population change in the English core cities. Central Manchester has grown the most but other cities have also experienced rapid expansions.

A note for spatial analysts: the 15 LSOAs you see in the map above are new. They are just 15 of the 229 new LSOAs across the core cities and this makes change over time analysis a little more tricky. Manchester's total population growth during this period was just under 20% (or 80,000) so the growth in the centre accounted for just over 21% of the increase.