Colchester Chronicle

Two Sunny Colch maps have come the way of The Chronic over the past couple of days. We’re not gonna lie – maps give us a great big gushing feeling and the urge to home in on our hyperlocal patch.

First up we have the Geodemographics of Housing in Great Britain.

Which is easy for you to say.

Basically it is the modern update of the famous Booth Poverty Map for London – but rolled out online on a national level. Housing is arranged by the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Which basically means a scale of one to ten, ranging from the Most Deprived Decile through to the Least Deprived Decile. We fear that it will soon become the online mapping tool of choice for knobber estate agents.

And so let’s zoom in on our hyperlocal patch and see what we can find.

The Greenstead, Mersea Road and the area around White City sadly fall under the Most Deprived Decile. Leafy Lexden and Wivenhoe are positively glowing with their greenness.

Now then – if only the *ahem* politically coloured map of Sunny Colch could resemble something similar.

Meanwhile those clever folk from The Graun Data Blog have managed to build a language map, based on the 2011 census. The map is made up around the simple Q: what do people speak where you live?

Don’t ponder the question for too long, Sunny Colch Comrades. Certain parts of the Borough have been known to speak twaddle – especially around chucking out time.

Chin chin.

The language cartography exercise probably makes more sense for The Graun Luvvies over in North London. No one is claiming that Sunny Colch is at the epictentre of diversity, but there are some interesting patterns in which to observe.

It comes as no surprise that 30- 40% of people living on campus at the University of Essex state that non-English is their main language. But how the chuffers do you explain the HUGE 40-100& demographic of non-English speakers around the Hythe?

The remainder of the Borough returns a steady pattern with 10 – 20% of residents having a language other than English as their mother tongue.

Clickety click on the map and The Graun cuts to the chase. Overall 6% of residents in the Borough do not speak English as their main language. French and Spanish count for the highest proportion of other languages at 0.33%.

The random fact of the day from The Chronic is that 0.07% of residents in Sunny Colch speak Russian as their main language.

Вот это да

Now then – which clever digital data cartographer wants to create a map for The Chronic displaying a geographic representation of those that understand where to catch a bus from at the new bus station (that isn’t really a bus station.)

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