Map of London boroughs by most common surnames

[jack]

Via mathcathy, an interactive map of london boroughs showing the most common surname in each. If you look at the most common, it's basically a sea of smith, but the default is to show something like 8th, where you can see an imperfect but striking map of ethnic makeup.

Website: http://names.mappinglondon.co.uk/

Blog post: http://spatialanalysis.co.uk/2011/01/mapping-londons-surnames/

Comments

[ptc24]

Really? I turned the dial to "most common", expecting to see a sea of Smith, with perhaps an island of something else for Southall, and saw plenty of landmasses of Patel, Shah and Begum. 8th is less striking, but more realistic; I think some ethnicities might have a greater diversity of surnames than others.

(This is one of my general obsessions - how different people describe the same data differently. Or for that matter what people mean by "basically" vs what they read by "basically")

Also, ocean trenches of Williams.

[jack]

Sorry, may fault! I was repeating how someone described it to me, and I misremembered; I'd been asking about the distribution of western surnames, which for the "most common" really were all Smith, and hadn't realised the "most common" actually did have oceans of non-traditional-western surnames.