Mapping London
with Richard Harris (Professor of Quantitative Social Geography)
Introduction
Welcome to the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. We will spend this session looking at maps as representations of London’s population. One of the themes of A-Level geography is Changing Places, where place can be defined as location + meaning (Phillips, not dated). Maps obviously show location but they also give meaning to those locations in terms of what they show and what they do not, and by how we interpret them. In the following exercises we shall begin with what is called partipatory mapping, creating maps from your knowledge and perceptions of London. We then move on to discuss more formalised representations.
- Throughout the exercises there are some questions, formatted like this, for you to stop and think about. There is no need to spend long on them but don’t ignore them completely as I may well ask you to feed your answers back to the group.
Exercise 1
Please go to http://map-me.org/sites/london2 and wait for further instruction. Please do not start the exercise until you have been given a brief demonstration of what is required.
At the end of the exercise you will be returned to these instructions. You can continue on to Exercise 2 as you wait for others to finish. We will look at the results when everyone is ready.
Exercise 2
Charles Booth was a businessmam and English social researcher whose Descriptive Maps of London Poverty are an early example of social cartography. In the maps, each street is coloured to indicate the income and social class of its inhabitants.
The maps can be viewed at https://booth.lse.ac.uk/map/14/-0.1174/51.5064/100/0. It is worth clicking on the Legend and reading the descriptions of each group. Some are quite amusing by modern standards.
Have a look around the map. Can you find any evidence of spatial clustering - that is, a pattern whereby a street of one class is surrounded by other streets of the same class? And how about any evidence of spatial heterogneity - when two very different classes are found in close proximity to each other or where there is what we what we might now call ‘postcode poverty’ (small pockets of poverty within wider areas of wealth)?
Try searching for postcode SW1A 2AA - any suggestion for why it has not been given a colour?
Exercise 3
Charles Booth’s maps are an early example of geodemographics, a form of geographic analysis that classifies people by the areas in which they live. For a modern example, go to https://loac.datashine.org.uk/.
Is there an overall pattern to London’s neighbourhoods? How would you describe it?
Try comparing a few streets in Booth’s map with those in its modern counterpart. How have they changed?
Have a look at your neighbourhood and how it is described. Is it a fair description? Have a go at coming up with a better desciption but using only a few words to do so (you may be asked to feed this back to the group later). Do you think it is possible / sensible to represent people and places in this way - what might be the advantages and disadvantages of doing so?
(If your neighbourhood isn’t on the map try using https://oac.datashine.org.uk/)
What you are looking is an open classification (meaning it and its data can be accessed for free) that was developed by academics at UCL and Liverpool. Commercial version of geodemographics also exist - they are used for marketing or for selecting sites for new stores, amongst other thing. If you have time, go to https://acorn.caci.co.uk/ and register to Try Acorn Now (Acorn was originally an acronym for A Classification of Residential Neighbourhoods). Once you have confirmed your e-mail you can log-in and find the Acorn type of any neighbourhood. Mine can be viewed at https://acorn.caci.co.uk/data/#t6_p1. What do you think: do I look like the type of person described?!?!
- Have a look at page 3 of https://acorn.caci.co.uk/downloads/Acorn-User-guide.pdf. What is your reaction (if any) to some of the names and short descriptions of the Acorn types?
Exercise 4
An argument against geodemographics is that it over-simpifies a more complex reality and this can lead to stereotyping. One way around this is to look at the source data which, in many cases (at least in part) is the 2011 Census. Maps of the 2011 Census are available at https://datashine.org.uk.
Take a look at the data for where you live. Use these data to form a simple profile of your neighbourhood.
What might be the advantages and disadvantages of using Census data to profile neighbourhoods rather than using a more participatory approach like the one in the first exercise?
Exercise 5
The Census is an important source of geographic information but it isn’t the only one - rightly or wrongly, data are being collected about people and places all the time. For example, the National Pupil Database contains information about state school pupils and the neighbourhoods in which they live. That information can be used to produce maps showing the ethnic diversity of neighbourhoods in London.
Some examples are below: they show the most and least diverse local authorities in London (but, remember, most places in London are more diverse than England as a whole), the most and least diverse Wards with local authorities, and also the most and least neighbourhoods within wards. Those three maps come together to form the map in the middle, which shows the overall pattern of ethnic diversity in London (the darker the shading, the more diverse the area). How does it meet with your impressions of the ethnic diversity of London and its geography?
And finally
A lot of what we do in the geography programme at Bristol is teach people data skills - ways of analysing and visualising data. We believe that these are important skills for any geographer to have so that they can use the various sources of data now available in responsible, meaningful and critically-informed ways that develop geographical understanding. Today’s taster session hopefully gave a flavour of that.
Thank you for coming today and wherever you travel in the future, I wish you every success.