East London

i_am_bob

Jaybo10 wrote: »

I am biased but we moved to leytonstone last year from west London and we really like it. Good community, excellent open spaces, good transport links and several excellent drinking holes. Our main concern before we got here was the crime rate, but I feel very safe and really haven't seen anything that concerns me.

Agree but if you have kids you would/should probably think very differently about it (because of gang culture).

jamespetts

Leyton, Leytonstone and Walthamstow are all more expensive than Forest Gate, Manor Park, Plaistow, Upton Park and East Ham, and there are only one or two houses within my budget in that area (one of which, as linked above, is potentially interesting, and I am seriously considering viewing that one if I do not make an offer after Saturday's viewing marathon).

On which bit of East London did you settle, incidentally, and what lead you to choose it?

Edit: The "index of multiple deprivation" seems to date to 2010, which, given the rapid economic and social change in the East, seems to me rather too out of date to be useful.

i_am_bob

jamespetts wrote: »

Thank you for that. I forgot that I am also seeing this one:

http://www.douglasallen.co.uk/for-sale/2-bedroom-house-in-east-ham/51311267/

Edit: Rats, just found that it is in a flood risk zone.

I suppose it's true that even in a flood area, it's going to depend a lot on the particular house/flat. If it's a top flat, or on the side of even a fairly gentle hill, you're not going to get flooded until God / global warming strikes, right?

Jaybo10

i_am_bob wrote: »

Agree but if you have kids you would/should probably think very differently about it (because of gang culture).

I agree partly, but i grew up on an estate in west London which had a lot of gangs and I know some who were sucked in and some who were not. It's everywhere in London and, though I know it is (much?) worse here, I would feel happy to bring up kids here.

jamespetts

i_am_bob wrote: »

I suppose it's true that even in a flood area, it's going to depend a lot on the particular house/flat. If it's a top flat, or on the side of even a fairly gentle hill, you're not going to get flooded until God / global warming strikes, right?

Ahh, I don't check the flood register for 2nd floor flats or above, but this is a house, so flood risk is all important. The elevation of a hill will be taken into account in the flood risk data themselves, as it has a high degree of local detail.

i_am_bob

jamespetts wrote: »

Edit: The "index of multiple deprivation" seems to date to 2010, which, given the rapid economic and social change in the East, seems to me rather too out of date to be useful.

IMHO I think you're putting much too much emphasis on the rate of change here.

Replied by PM re exactly where I moved.

jamespetts

i_am_bob wrote: »

IMHO I think you're putting much too much emphasis on the rate of change here.

Replied by PM re exactly where I moved.

Ahh, interesting. Where can I find objective data on the rate of change? Incidentally, which of the metrics in the deprivation survey did you find particularly useful? The general one, or the crime one specifically (or others/another)?

i_am_bob

jamespetts wrote: »

Ahh, interesting. Where can I find objective data on the rate of change?

The census, crime statistics, railway usage figures. Local council studies maybe. Back of the envelope thoughts re how often people move, start up businesses, etc. Remember that any social data like this tends to be a few years out of date. 4 years is actually pretty good, relatively speaking. It will be 2010 because that's when the last census was done (the next one will be 2020 if it follows the usual timing). Be grateful that you're not doing this in 10 years' time, I think the government in their wisdom have been debating making 2010 the last ever census...

In general my approach was to use anything I could lay my hands on to get a feeling for places and then try to find out where I was wrong using hard data - but I found the hard data pretty limited.

Incidentally, which of the metrics in the deprivation survey did you find particularly useful? The general one, or the crime one specifically (or others/another)?

The "index of multiple deprivation" map I found useful showed an index in what I suppose is the usual social science sense of that word: a single number combining multiple disparate data sets, where the values of the index (1 to 10 I think) represent ordering from good to bad rather than a value that is in proportion to something (like a measurement of a physical quantity would be). I looked at the area where I lived then and found it tallied fairly well with what I knew about my own area (the crime maps less so, and I knew that they suffered from the problems I listed earliier).

Here it is:

http://mappinglondon.co.uk/2012/the-index-of-multiple-deprivation-as-a-map/

The data.london.gov one is nice also, but different.

jamespetts

Ahh, interesting: that is different to the map that I found here.

Edit: I have to say, I am having trouble trusting that map, as it shows fashionable hipster hotspot Shoreditch as having the highest possible level of deprivation.

i_am_bob

jamespetts wrote: »

Ahh, interesting: that is different to the map that I found here.

Hmm, the one I linked to seems to have broken since I used it, sad. It shows up all coloured uniformly pink for me.

The one you link to looks similar to the one that open.data.gov links to (http://ukdataexplorer.com/imd/). I don't remember which one I used of those two.

Edit: I have to say, I am having trouble trusting that map, as it shows fashionable hipster hotspot Shoreditch as having the highest possible level of deprivation.

Which map, the opendatacommunities.org one?

Remember that East London genuinely is very mixed: rich and poor often live very close to each other.