Londonist: A map of London’s most common surnames
As feats of data visualisation go, they don’t come much more compelling than this. James Cheshire (@spatialanalysis) has built a map of London’s commonest surnames by area, using data from the 2001 electoral register. The map contains 2379 individual surnames represented some 15,000 times.
Names are colour coded according to ethnic origin. Among a blue tide of British appellations (Smith, Brown, Williams, Jones) patches of pink can be found in Tower Hamlets to show the large Bangladeshi population (where Begum, Miah and Ali dominate). Large sections in orange, over to the north-west and near-east, denote Indian origins, exemplified by the name Patel. Meanwhile marked clusters of Pakistani names can be found in the southern areas of Waltham Forest and Lambeth boroughs.
