Interactive Map
In order to illustrate the current diversity of different parts of Britain, we have commissioned a new interactive map.
When you click through you will find 30 cities or areas of Britain, which appear as red circles – if you double click on a circle this takes you to a detailed neighbourhood map showing the most numerous minority groups by postcode, in that area. The white British population is excluded as otherwise it would dominate the maps, obscuring the minority group data.
View our interactive map of minority groups in Britain
We will be developing the map over the next few months to add more information covering all districts of Britain, as well as finding different ways of making this information accessible to everyone.
How the information was gathered
There is no easy and accurate way to establish the numbers within Britain’s different ethnic, religious and national groups or where they live. Census data has various drawbacks when providing detail at a neighbourhood level, as well as being out of date (the last census was in 2001). An alternative to using census data is to use family names to identify which national, ethnic or religious groups people belong to, and we have taken this approach.
With this method names do not always indicate people’s origins; however the information does allow us to build up a national picture of different minority groups when we categorise people together in a large enough sample. It is more up to date and lets us show results at a more detailed level of geography, by postcode. We have also adjusted some of the data to make it consistent with published national statistics. For example, because only a small proportion of people of black Caribbean origin have names that could be identifiable as such, the size of this group has been scaled up to reflect its size at the time of the 2001 census.
Despite this being more current than the census data, some groups, like eastern Europeans, will appear at lower levels than might be expected because temporary visitors like students and temporary workers are not included. One of the consequences of using names as the source is that this produces a combination of ethnic, religious and national origin in the groupings on the map.
There is more detailed information about where the data comes from and how it is interpreted in the ‘About’ menu on the map itself.
View our interactive map of minority groups in Britain
Copyright of data contained in these maps is vested in Experian, Geowise, Microsoft and OriginsInfo