Researching long-run trends in South East England 1931-2011 for the European Union and Greater London Authority

This paper describes the sources, methods and preliminary results of two related projects on historical census data funded by government bodies for policy purposes. Both required data for diverse historical reporting areas to be redistricted to a single set of modern units. All redistricting is done by a simple vector overlap method, but this requires boundary data for both the modern and the historical units; and, as far as possible, that the historical units be more detailed than the modern ones. Even for recent periods, locating boundary maps is often much harder than locating statistics.