Best areas to live in London, ranked

The map is coloured pocket by pocket. A pocket is a small area of roughly 1,500 residents — statisticians call them LSOAs — and London has 4,994 of them. Pockets are the finest unit we score: the map and side-by-side comparisons work at pocket level.

A ward is the electoral neighbourhood those pockets sit in — 684 across London, each home to 5,000–15,000 residents and typically 7 pockets, up to 14. Ward pages, the wizard and the rankings work at ward level: a ward’s score is the average of its pockets’ scores.

That averaging matters: a ward page shows averages across its pockets, so a specific pocket can score above or below it. Click the map when you care about one spot; read the ward page for the neighbourhood picture. Boroughs — the 33 councils wards belong to — organise the city for browsing. A borough is never scored in its own right: any borough figure you see is an average of its wards’ scores, not a separate measurement.