GuideLiving here
Homes here
What homes an area has, who lives there and how built-up it is: home type, tenure, households, age, ethnic group, country of birth, religion and density, beside London's.
Use it
Example
An area with 1,600 residents on 0.25 km² has 6,400 people per km². In its tenure bar, 35% of households rent privately. If the thin line sits at 30%, private renting is a little more common here than across London as a whole.
How we calculate it
- Residents come from the ONS mid-2024 population estimates for each LSOA (revised November 2025).
- Density is residents divided by the area's size in km². London's figure is all boroughs' residents divided by their total size.
- The bars come from Census 2021: type of home, whether it is owned or rented, household type, residents' age, ethnic group, country of birth (by part of the world) and religion. Qualifications and jobs are not shown.
- The same answers colour the map (People, and Tenure and Accommodation type under Homes & area): each area's share of one answer, on a calm colour scale where neither end is better. They describe an area; we never rank areas by them or use them to match areas to you.
- Religion included: never a filter, a My match weight, a ranking or a custom criterion. AI agents using Close Knit get the same rule: quote the share with its source and year, nothing more.
- Each share is one answer's count divided by everyone who answered that question in the area.
- We load each LSOA, then add LSOAs together for MSOAs and boroughs. London's share is the sum over all London LSOAs.
- For every LSOA, a topic's answers must add up to the published total, or the load stops.
The fine print
- Census counts are from Census day, 21 March 2021, during coronavirus restrictions. Residents are a mid-2024 estimate, so the two describe different years.
- ONS adjusts small counts slightly to protect privacy, so our MSOA and borough sums can differ a little from figures ONS publishes for those areas.
- Density counts parks, rivers and railways as area, so busy streets can feel more crowded than the number says.
- The religion question was optional. Occupation counts people in work in the week before the census and describes where they live, not where they work.
- Age groups follow the census's five-year bands, so they start 0 to 14 and 15 to 24.
- Household type groups the census's household composition: families where everyone is 66 or over count as a couple with no children, couples whose children are all grown up count as a couple with children, and other, including shared, covers flatmates, students and homes with more than one family.
- Country of birth is by part of the world for every area, and ethnic group by its 5 groups and 19 detailed ones. The detailed tables go further: one country of birth (190), an ethnic group as people wrote it in (Japanese, Polish, …), a passport, a national identity or a belief. ONS publishes these down to MSOAs of about 8,000 residents only, so on the map each MSOA is one colour: they never show a street or an LSOA. Main language and year of arrival are per area. A group needs 1,000 residents across London to be on the list.
- An ethnic group written in counts the people who wrote it under the broad group in brackets: Japanese (Asian) and Japanese (Other) are two lists.
- A topic with no data says unknown, never zero.
- ONS Census 2021 tables TS003, TS004, TS007A, TS012, TS013, TS015, TS021, TS022, TS028, TS030, TS031, TS044, TS054, TS063, TS066 and TS067 (Nomis), country of birth and main language from the ONS API, and ONS mid-2024 LSOA population estimates. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.