Beyond Black and White
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How do we strike the right balance between treating London’s BAME communities as though they were a single bloc versus treating each as having its unique character and heritage?

A talk by Richard Webber.

Shortly after the introduction of the postcode system, Richard Webber developed a system which classified postcodes according to the types of people who lived in them.  This system was rapidly adopted by direct marketeers and retailers since it enabled them, simply from a list of their customers’ postcodes, to establish the profiles of typical buyers of different products that they sold.

It subsequently occurred to him that the personal and family name elements of customer names held in an organisation’s register could be used to infer which ethnic or religious groups were most and least likely to occur on a customer or client list. 

Whilst the technology is mostly used to profile clients, users and audiences, it also makes it possible both to identify the locations within the country where particular minorities are now concentrated, right down to unit postcode level, and to see how this has changed since the date of the last census.  It is not difficult to imagine the relevance of this information to the analysis of Covid deaths (and other medical conditions) and to the targeting of more customised public health messages to neighbourhoods with higher than average risk.

The talk will make use of insights gleaned from this technology in a number of recent applications to illustrate its key points.

This is an online talk delivered by Zoom. Booking is essential via Eventbrite (click here). A donation (minimum £1, suggested £5+) will be requested during booking to help compensate the Society for loss of income due to closure of the hall during the pandemic.