Well, in a nutshell the East end grew the most. Here is the map of where the extra 1 million people living in London in 2011 as compared to 2001 now live. The next map looks a little like the map above, because it is generally where there already were a lot of people that more people squeezed in, but the little blue-green map shows you that it really was the East End which saw the greatest increases in population, so that when you look at the large map again you’d be right to focus your eyes there. However, not everywhere in London saw population growth. In one borough there was overall decline and so when we draw London sized by declining population we get a very strange map indeed.

We did you tell you it was odd. Here it is (see below). Only one borough appears, Kensington and Chelsea, because only that borough recorded and overall drop in population. Because it was the only borough to record a drop the little rank map (top right on the map) just shows it and it is coloured yellow as having the lowest rate of increase. It happens to be a negative rate of population increase. While London as a whole was growing in population by just over 1 million people, the Royal Borough was declining by some 221 souls (net). This may not sound a great deal, but even a small population increase would, in relative terms be very surprising in a city that has been growing in population so quickly and by so much. Something about the Royal borough has put new-comers off. We would hazard a guess that may be the housing prices, but you’d have to look at other sets of maps in this series to see that. For now let have a look at which age groups have experienced the greatest falls here and in a few other London boroughs, before looking at where all those gains have been.

A couple of boroughs have seen a decline in babies and toddlers, mostly in the Royal borough, but also nearby. Some 803 fewer here in 2011 as compared to 2001. But the pattern of where there are 3502 few children aged 5 to 9 is very different again.

And it looks a little like a butterfly! Or at least a very asymmetric butterfly (see below). Only a small fraction of these falls are in the Royal borough. Far more are out to the East and also South of the river. The river is carefully drawn on all these images to try to help in orientations as we and you try and figure out what is going on here. Later we’ll see just who has been moving in to take up the space of the children who are no longer living in these boroughs in such numbers, but first lets carry on looking at who has been squeezed out and from where.

Older children have been squeezed out of a mixture of similar places in the centre of London. There are fewer families which children living here now as other adults without children squeeze in. Kensington and Chelsea is again ranked as having the greatest decrease by these ages. You can tell that because it is shaded in yellow on the little map (top right on the following map), and you can work out which area is Kensington and Chelsea because it is always shaded the same muddy brown on all the large maps in the centre of these images, even as its shape appear to change beyond all recognition!

The map of decline in teenagers just shows that there are only fewer now in the Royal borough, so we’ll skip over that and turn instead to who is moving in.
Some 100,000 people aged 20-24 and, showing a very similar pattern, 144,00 aged 25-29.
But there is so much more to say…to be continued.