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Economic Geography of Great Britain

These two clusterings allowed us to find groups of LADs that share social and demographic characteristics. With the employment clustering we identified four different employment groups. We called these Business, Mixed, Manufacturing and Public. The area clustering identified five different area groups - Rural, Market Towns, Suburbs, Cities and Metropolis. The Metropolis group is small and comprises of the LADs making up central London. We then combined these two clusterings to get cross-classification groups. Inner London falls unsurprisingly into the Business-Metropolis group.

 

Using mapping software, it was then possible for us to map the degrees of membership to the employment and area fuzzy clustering groups. Click here to view a map which shows the cross-classification groups to which the LADs most strongly belong.

 

Another interesting application of this work was to compare our results with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s (ODPM) definition of Rural. We also looked at correlations between economic indicators and group memberships.

 

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