Read all about where YOU live!

LittleMissAspie

Jadoube wrote: »

Not true. The Acorn code goes by FULL 8 character postcode - areas on average of 15 houses - which is why moving from one street to another can mean you're in a different type of neighbourhood. Like real life really.

Well in that case mine is completely wrong. We're all young and renting, not middle class families. The next street is middle class families, but I'm sure that has a different postcode.

Captain_Demographics

ACORN is calculated at postcode level not borough! There are approx 15 households to 1 postcode in the UK, it is designed to inform you about your neighbourhood and not just yourself. However, individulal level consumer segmentations are available!

hethmar wrote: »

Ive used this site for a long time but I have to say it can be WAY out on descriptions of your neighbours etc. Point being that they go by the borough rather than the district - hence if your doss hole of a street is actually under a generally expensive borough your sun reading/non reading neighbours can become Guardian subscribers

harryhound

Finding your home on one of these maps can be quite fun.

Those of you in docklands are probably coloured in as "semi criminal".

It is interesting to see how the poor lived next door to the rich (True wealth is cheap servants?)

The Guildhall library has copies available.

This is how it was done:

The information gained from the School Board
Visitors were checked against the 1881 Census, the
opinions of other officials such as the clergy, and street-
by-street fieldwork undertaken by Booth and his team.
These checks convinced Booth that the data obtained by
the School Board Visitors were acceptable and capable
of providing a measure of poverty, despite the inherent
bias towards families with children living in poorer areas
(O’Day and Englander, 1993). The information pro-
vided by the School Board Visitors and others were
subsequently used to classify households on a street-by-
street basis. The purpose of the classification system was
to provide ‘‘a statistical record of impressions of degree
of poverty’’ (Hennock, 1991, p. 190) and households
were classified by their conditions of poverty. An
innovative feature of Booth’s work was the plotting of
these classifications by household onto maps, the most
important of these being the ‘Descriptive Map of
London Poverty’ (Reader, 1984). This map shows the
streets of inner LondonFfrom Pentonville prison in the
North, Millwall docks to the East, Stockwell smallpox
hospital to the south and Kensington palace to the
WestFbuilding by building coloured to correspond to
one of seven categories reflecting the condition of
poverty of the resident household described in Table 1.
When households of different classes inhabited the
same building, the building was divided and plotted the
corresponding colours. This was quite common in both
poor districts, where the poorest families often inhabited
the basements, and affluent districts, where wealthy
households employed live-in servants (i.e. the ‘upstairs-
downstairs’ household structure). This map is only one
of several that Booth and his team produced, illustrating
in detail the social geography of late Victorian London.
With the exception of the last class (Black), which is a
description of a lifestyle (Hennock, 1991), Booth’s
classification of households reflects ‘‘their apparent
status as to means’’ (Booth, 1889, p. 24). It is this
system of classification that Booth is most commonly
remembered, and his classification remained for a long
time a convenient set of terms in social description
(Gillie, 1996). In fact, as it will now be explained, it is
still used today in an altered but recognisable form in the
UK census of population statistics

vivatifosi

I've used Acorn for a long time and following the last census the house where I used to live changed from educated urbanites (sub-category 16 prosperous young professionals) to starting out (sub-category 25 white collar singles and sharers). This did very much reflect the changes in the neighbourhood that had happened in the time that I lived there and I do find it quite a useful tool.

Now I've moved to a type 26 (younger white collar couples with mortgages), also pretty accurate for the general area. However my parents (who are pensioners) are also a type 26, yet their house used to be a type 9. Type 9 reflects them better and their former neighbours, but the houses have been bought up by younger commuters and though although they are typical of the former type, the list has been updated to better reflect those that are now the majority.

Overall I think CACI do pretty well in terms of accuracy, though few people are going to say that wholly reflects who I am.

Incidentally, if you want to read all the descriptions, you can do so here:

http://www.caci.co.uk/acorn/downloads/New%20ACORN%20brochure.pdf

Edited to add: sorry just realised that the new brochure doesn't include all of the categories in the way that the old one did, shame...