[h4]An Introduction[/h4]
by Benjamin Hennig and Danny Dorling

London has fascinated people for centuries. The city survives by drawing people in. Far too few are born in London to sustain its population. London has always relied on in-migration to survive. Immigration has been essential for London to grow. London has also always needed people to be optimistic to travel to the Capital. It still draws many in with promises for future fortunes to be made.
We tend to only remember life’s winners. In the 1350s a boy was born in Pauntly in Gloucestershire and christened Richard. He travelled to London to be an apprentice, he became a master craftsman, then wealthy, and then he became Lord Mayor of London. It was easier then too to become a politician if you had money. In fact he became London Mayor four times over. Only one person can be Mayor at any one time and if someone becomes Mayor more than once that is less opportunity for all the rest, but sadly the rest don’t tend to be remembered.
Richard Whittington’s story is remembered today by the tale of Dick Whittington, who believed the streets of London to be paved with gold and who went there and did make his fortune. In the past most youngsters travelling to London would never become rich, they simply couldn’t. Many would in fact die young from infectious diseases which have always been more prevalent in cities. Those who did not perish young would often live in poverty. However, on average, people moving to London have normally been a little healthier, taller, and had a little more ambition or fantasising about them than those who didn’t make that move and this has kept London vibrant and results in a continued influx to the always highly divided city.
How divided is London? A reports released by John Hill’s inquiry during 2010 revealed that the richest tenth of Londoners had recourse each to at least 270 times the wealth of the poorest tenth of Londoners. The very worse-off of that richest tenth held at least one million pounds in assets, often this included the value of their property and their future pension rights. Usually these people did not feel very well-off in London because the rest of the best-off tenth of Londoners were mostly so much richer than even they were. London is thought to be the home, and almost certainly contains the second or third of fourth or further homes, of more of the very richest people on the planet than any other city in the world.
We have to say “almost certainly” because the rich tend to be very secretive about their wealth. In contrast, statistics on the poor have usually been easier to obtain, but are still often contentious. London has been known for many years not only as a place of concentration of riches, but also as the home to the single greatest concentration of poverty to be found in Western Europe. This was recognized as long ago as 1987 when it was said that:

[blockquote6]“Although the percentage officially unemployed in Greater London is a little smaller than average for Britain the city holds the largest concentration of unemployed in the industrialised world, and the real total is at least 150,000 larger than the total of over 400,000 admitted by the Government.”
[Townsend P. with Corrigan P. & Kowarzik U. 1987 p.29][/blockquote6]
It is still very much the case today that London contains some of the largest numbers of very poor people in Western Europe, despite being its richest city. In this introduction we’ll look at five aspects of inequality in London concerning education, poverty, work, squalor and disease. We’ll concentrate on the geographical distributions of these inequality distributions and do this at the ward level, but within each ward there is far more further inequality than is found between wards, so what you see next is just the tip of the iceberg of extremes of life chances to be found today in London. Map 1 shows are the boroughs of London which the wards nest in displayed on an equal population projection in which the map is stretched according to the population distribution. We use this map as a basemap as is gives every Londoner the same amount of space and results in a fairer display of the realities that people live in.

Gridded Population Cartogram

 

Map 1

The base map used in this text may look a little strange. That is because it is drawn on a projection that gives everyone equal space on the map – a detailed population cartogram of London (Data source: Office for National Statistics 2011)

Detailed map views: