Before I took refuge in Liverpool after being ceremonially stripped of my rights to live and breath in London, that’s what I’d done for most of my life. I was actually born in a posh part of Norf Laandon, although I recall nothing of this, and within months was flying back and forth between parts of West Africa and South Wales. I recall bits of this including the time when a local tribe wanted to trade me for wicker baskets, and when I was playing with a snake in a storm ditch not knowing it might not have been a good idea.
After living on a farm in South Wales and living in a caravan in Brighton, I ended up for nearly all of my actual adult life (so far) being a Londoner again. North London, of course, not South. South of the river is the badlands of course. I moved around North London, and then ended up for a while in East London (the part of East London that’s kinda North London really).
I suppose during that time I must have noticed the ever changing ethnic groupings that made up the areas I lived in. Certainly in my latter days I noticed the influx of Eastern Europeans, and I probably remember the growing pockets of Greek Cypriots and their enemies the Turkish Cypriots when I was a lot younger. For some reason I don’t recall any changes in the Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi communities, nor do I recall any relating to the Afro-Caribbean communities. They were always there, and there were pockets of ‘black’ areas which peppered the geographical landscape, sadly appearing more run down and in need of help.
Any modern Londoner just gets on with his or her life and the multicultural nature of the area becomes invisible. Indeed, moving to Liverpool I was struck by how white (and boring) it was. Everybody looking the same, everybody wearing the same, everybody having the same god, was something I just wasn’t used to.
So, it was really interesting to see what James Cheshire of spatialanalysis.co.uk had created at names.mappinglondon.co.uk.
Now, in a nutshell, he has taken all the surnames from the Electoral Rolls of 2001 (10 years ago, so it’s probably radically changed since then such is the state of flux that is London), coloured them by suspected ethnicity and overlayed them onto a geographical map of London. Of course this means that radically different ethnic groups sharing similar surnames aren’t able to be separated (for example, a lot of white and black communities have identical surnames), but it still leads to a fascinating result. Also, of course, he couldn’t possibly map every single surname. That would be a mish-mash and not show up the trends.
What he’s cleverly done is map the top 15 surnames for each area, and created an online interactive map tool that allows you to look through them all. It gives you hours of fun.
I was recently having to explain to an ignorant northerner that London no longer has any Cockneys, except among the old white population that aren’t dead yet, with the more common accents across all ethnic groups being ‘Street’ or ‘Estuary’. It’s interesting that the image outsiders have of London is completely different to the multicultural reality. Maybe the map will help them discover modern London.
Try it now! – names.mappinglondon.co.uk.
England's England 