The UK capital is administratively divided into boroughs: 19 outer and 13 inner, plus the idiosyncratic City of London. Five million people live in the outer boroughs, from Hillingdon in the west to Havering, Bexley and Bromley in the east and south. These areas encircle 3m Londoners in boroughs such as Hackney and Kensington and Chelsea. Although the poverty rate in inner London remains higher than that in the outer boroughs, the gap between the two is narrowing.
In the years 1999-2002, for example, child poverty in inner London was about 53 per cent. By 2009-2012, however, it had fallen to 42 per cent, according to figures from London’s Poverty Profile, 2013. Over the same period the rate in outer London rose slightly. Poverty among working-age people increased faster in outer London over the period, while the number of pensioners in poverty dropped much faster in London’s core than its periphery.
The highest level of unemployment in London used to be found in the borough of Tower Hamlets, the area between the City and Canary Wharf, according to the New Policy Institute, a research organisation. Today, it is in the outer eastern areas of Barking and Dagenham and Newham. A similar pattern can be seen on the western side of the capital: Hillingdon has a higher unemployment rate than Wandsworth, for example. The six boroughs that had the biggest increase in unemployment since the recession were all in outer London, the NPI says.
Where there is work, in the outer boroughs it is more likely to be low-paid. Approximately one-fifth of jobs in the outer boroughs are low-paid (defined as less than the £8.50 an hour London living wage, a needs-based amount calculated by the Greater London Authority). In inner London about one in 10 jobs are low-paid – jobs that increasingly are done by people who live further out; one-third of low-paid jobs in inner London are done by outer Londoners.
London has been undergoing its own version of what scholars of US cities have termed “the Great Inversion”: the return of people, swish housing and high-paid jobs to city centres, that were once thought of as places defined by high levels of deprivation and blight.
In inner London there may soon be only two types of people left: those wealthy or willing enough to meet its rapidly rising costs and those who are in social housing
By 1981, London’s population had reached its 20th-century nadir. A city of nearly 9m people on the eve of the second world war had shrunk to less than 7m. The dwindling of the capital happened at the same time as the growth of suburbia. Suburban expansion was in turn both a cause and consequence of economic development on the outskirts of London. Large employers established themselves in cheaper satellite towns where their workforce wanted to live."
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