CDRC – Page 2 – O.O'Brien

leicester_industry

Top Industry maps the most popular employment for each of the ~220000 statistical small areas* within the UK. I’ve reused the “top result” (i.e. modal only) technique that has produced interesting maps for travel to work, to look at the Industry of Employment tables produced by the national statistics agencies, from the 2011 Census.

The tables I’ve used group each job into a Standard Industry Classification (SIC) category, I’ve then mapped which of these is the most popular. I’m mapping the home locations of workers, rather than where they work. I’m also only mapping where at least 20% of the working population falls into one of the categories. The “G: Wholesale retail trade, repair” category dominates through the UK – we are a nation of shopkeepers – so I’ve used a muted off-white colour to represent areas where this is the most popular. Other, rarer categories have more vivid colours.

swales_industry All sorts of interesing patterns appear:

Manufacturing (mid-blue) in Derby vs education (red) and accommodation (light green) in Nottingham.
Similarly, manufacturing in West Bromwich contrasts with a predominance of education and social work (pale orange) in nearby Birmingham.
London as ever is an interesting place, with a huge professional scientific and technical workforce (yellow) living in Islington, Wandsworth and Fulham, contrasting with the financial sector (dark orange) based in the West End, the City and Canary Wharf, near where they work. Stamford Hill’s traditional community stands out as a teaching hotspot.
Crawley is full of transport workers (turquoise) for the nearby Gatwick Airport.
An ICT community (purple) in Reading and neighbouring towns.
Teaching and science in Cambridge.
Social work in Liverpool and Sussex seaside towns.
American service personnel in Mildenhall (maroon), contrasting with manufacturing in nearby Thetford and arts/recreation (pink) in Newmarket, also not far away.
Military bases (dark blue) in North Yorkshire.
Edinburgh shows less employment segregation, with communities of educators, science/technical professionals and financial workers spread throughout much of the city.

The map shows that the UK is far from homogenous when it comes to the industries and occupations that people work in. It reveals many areas where manufacturing remains the key employer for the local working community – typically mid-sized towns – while showing the diverse and uneven nature of the employment landscape in the larger cities. While remembering that the map is only showing the “top” (and second-top where relevant) industry category, and that other industry workers can also live in the same places, it still shows a structure and pattern consistent both with historical reasons for many of the communities’ development, but also the realities of the modern workforce, with new technology industries, and social work, becoming increasingly prevalent.

See the interactive map on CDRC Maps.
The data is available on CDRC Data.

edinburgh_industry

* Known as Output Areas in Great Britain and Small Areas in Northern Ireland.

sengland_industry

The Age of Buildings

We don’t have individual building age open data in the UK, unlike in some other countries (the data has been used to great effect in New York City and Amsterdam) but the Valuation Office Agency, which amongst other things decides council tax bandings for residential properties, has published some interesting data on how old houses are in England and Wales – it’s their “dwelling ages” dataset. A separate governmental organisation, the ONS, publishes house prices summaries, at a relatively small-area* scale, on a quarterly basis for the previous year. I have combined both these datasets into a record on CDRC Data. and have mapped them both on CDRC Maps.

The dwelling age data is supplied grouped in approximately ten-year age bands (+ a Pre-1900 catch-all) with a count of the number of houses in each band, for each small area (LSOA) in England/Wales. I’ve mapped just the modal band, that is, the band with the most number of houses in it**. In some cases, houses were steadily built in an area throughout the 20th century, so that the band assigned to that area is not actually very representative of the houses there – this can be spotted by looking at the “Classif. %” number which appears on the right.

Many UK cities show a pattern of Pre-1900 inner-city (dark grey on the map), with early 20th century houses out towards the edge (lightening blues). The “Green Belts” of the 1940s stopped this radial outward development, so, some old housing was instead overhauled to build 1960s-70s housing estates (shown in yellow) and more recently, the urban core has seen much of the recent housebuilding activity. This shows up on the map as an area of red in the centre of many cities. There are some exceptions – Milton Keynes is a large, and new, town, its map showing mainly yellows and reds.

Not all areas are constrained by Green Belts but some have other, physical constraints, such as the sea. Weston-super-Mare, for example, has steadily expanded westwards over the last 150 years:

A second map concentrates just on post-WW2 (1945+) building, showing the proportion of such houses in each area. Hello, riverside east London:

The house price pattern in England/Wales is quite familiar to many people – basically London is eye-wateringly expensive, particularly in the central and west, along with some satellite towns and cities (e.g. Oxford and Cambridge) but not others (e.g. Luton and Harlow). I’ve mapped the median house prices for each small-area as I think this better provides an indicator of a typical price paid. 50% of properties sold in the previous 12 months, in each area, sold for less than this amount, and 50% for more. As only a few houses in an area typically get sold in a year (I have included this number in the metric data) it is worth noting that the values can jump around a lot.

Explore the interactive maps:

* There is separately individual house transactions (with prices) released regularly by a third organisation, the Land Registry, however I have not mapped this at this time.

** Where an area is fairly equally split between two bands, I’ve included the “runner up” band as well, shown thinner vertical stripes. This only appears where the runner up housing count is 90% of the modal band, and the two bands account for more than half of the total housing. I’m using Mapnik compositing operations to get the vertical stripes, rather than a very long and repetitive stylesheet. I calculated the modal band in Excel from the original VOA dataset by using MAX (to find the value) and nested IFs (to display the category). Calculating runner up (i.e. second from mode) was a little more tricky, but I was able to do this but using COUNTIF and LARGE (to find the value – which could the same as the mode, ie. multimodal) and then nested IFs/ANDs to display the category.