Monday 14 March 2016

Deprivation and the 1%

There's a lot of talk these days about the 1%, or the global elite in terms of wealth. Danny Dorling's  'Inequality and the 1%' is a recent example of a powerful polemic on this issue. This post is about a slightly different kind of 1%, within England. As keen observers may know, I've been producing a series of map extracts based on the English Indices of Deprivation, so I'm now adding to this by looking at the 1% most and least deprived areas across the country.

Cheltenham features prominently at one end of the spectrum

Middlesbrough features prominently at the other end of the spectrum

It's a very simple concept, and I was particularly interested to see which local authorities came out of this with no representation at either end of the spectrum - in addition to those which feature at both ends. In total, 160 local authorities feature in the map series which looks at the top and bottom 1% most deprived in England and 10 local authorities have areas that fall within the 1% most and least deprived, as follows: Bradford, Bury, Chesterfield, East Riding of Yorkshire, Leeds, Newcastle, North Somerset, Sheffield, Stockport and Wirral. See below for more maps.

Wirral - features at both ends of the 1% most/least spectrum

Sheffield also features in the 1% most/least divide

Leeds has quite a distinctive inner/outer deprivation pattern

Look closely at the north east coast here

If you want to see all 160 maps to find out if your area is included, I've set up a separate page for that - you can see a preview below. If you're looking for other IMD maps, please take a look at my Indices of Deprivation 2015 maps and data page. I've done the 1% versions today to highlight the extent to which deprivation is concentrated spatially in the areas at the very top and bottom of the rankings - and also as an exercise to see which local authorities have areas in the top and bottom. I didn't know this before and I think the results are quite interesting.


You can explore all the areas here

Finally, a bit of map-related trivia. I couldn't help notice that in this map series Guildford looks like some kind of animal, but I can't quite think what. I'll add this to my previous observations.

I'll add this to my 'boundaries that look like animals' file

Note: I missed out the East Riding of Yorkshire in the original list. Thanks to Adrian Bailey for spotting this. 22 Oct 2017.