English Index of Multiple Deprivation, rebased for London

Deprivation varies significantly across London, and, to truly understand the diversity of deprivation across the city, it is useful to adapt national indices to compare within just London itself, excluding variations outside the capital. Mapped here are the deciles of neighbourhoods in London as defined by the Index of Multiple Deprivation, which integrates deprivation domains relating to income, employment, crime, living environment, education, health and barriers to housing and services, in various proportions, to produce an overall index.

Every neighbourhood in England has been given a deprivation score based on various measures which form each domain above, integrated together in various proportions to produce a single value. They are then ranked for England. We have taken these rankings and rebased, by excluding all non-London areas and then reranking. We then have divided the rankings into 10 equal groups, known as deciles. This means that a neighbourhood in Decile 1 - the darkest red on this map (we use a diverging colour scale to highlight both the most deprived as dark red and the least deprived areas as dark blue) - is among the 10% most deprived neighbourhoods within London itself.

This technique allows us to equally view the least and most deprived areas in London, because roughly equal populations are represented in both ends of the scale. This allows for a more nuanced approach to targeting areas which, while not necessarily extremely deprived on a pan-England basis are nonetheless at a significant disadvantage compared with London's large least-deprived areas.

From this, we can see that London is a patchwork of deprivation, with neighbourhoods of different deciles pushed up against one another in all boroughs to some extent, but some clear wider trends also emerge. Neighbourhoods in the very centre of London, in the City and the West End, tend to be amongst the least deprived. This is also true of more suburban areas in outer London, particularly in the south west around Richmond and Kingston. There are several areas with clusters of neighbourhoods that are highly deprived. These include parts of inner London, particularly around Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Islington, parts of East London and the western side of the Lea Valley up into Enfield.

Unpopulated areas such as green spaces and industrial estates are shown as light brown on this map leaving just the residential areas. This means sparsely populated neighbourhoods that cover wider areas of the map do not become overrepresented to the viewer's eye.

This dataset and map was supplied by the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) as an experimental dataset. The data can be downloaded at CDRC Data.