Manchester – Languages and Jobs

Many of my visualisations have focused on London – there is an advantage of being in the city and surrounded by the data, which means that London is often the “default” city to map. However, I’ve created a couple of Manchester versions of my popular maps Ward Words and Ward Work. Logistics and time reasons mean that I present these as images rather than interactive websites, although I used the existing London centric website with Manchester data. A bonus is that, by presenting these as images, I can use LSOAs which are more detailed than wards – although there are too many of them for my interactive version to be very useable.

I’m only showing the top result, and the way the categories are grouped can therefore significantly influence what is shown. For example, if I grouped certain categories together, even ones which don’t appear on the map itself, then the grouped category would likely appear in many places because it would more likely be the top result. It would therefore easy to produce a version of this graphic that showed a very different emphasis.

The maps were created using open, aggregated data (QS204EW and QS606EW) from the ONS which is under the Open Government Licence, and the background map is from HERE maps. Enjoy!

Languages second-most commonly spoken in each LSOA in the Greater Manchester area (click for a larger version):
second_languages_manchester N.B. Where the second language is spoken by less than 2% of the population, I simply show it as a grey circle. LSOAs have a typical population of around 1500 so the smallest non-grey circles represent around 30 speakers of that language.

The most popular occupation by (home) LSOA (again, click for a larger version):
manchester_occupation_adorned-1I’ve used grey here for the “Sales Assistant” occupational group, as this is the dominant occupation in large urban areas.

My interactive (London only I’m afraid) version is here – change the metric on the top left for other datasets.


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