Ethnic diversity in London and other British cities

[muppet]

The 1850 surge alone into London formed 4% of the city's population. And that's not taking into account the waves before or after, including even larger ones.

[Docere]

I never said that all that Irish immigrants in 19th century Britain were all transients on their way to America. But Liverpool was the point of departure for America, Liverpool had a lot of Irish immigrants but there transients there too. Those who couldn't afford the passage to America stayed in Britain. So yes, they need to be accounted for.

And Britain did indeed have net emigration in the 19th century. That doesn't mean population decline. It means that the numbers of Brits emigrating to the US, Canada, Australia and elsewhere greatly outnumbered immigration into Britain from Ireland and the European continent. Around 10 million Brits emigrated.

[Docere]

[deleted]

[JMKeynes]

Irish who have been living in London for generations are not ethnic. Jews are the only “white ethnic” group in London who maintain a separate culture. This discussion is uniformed and pointless (as usual).

[Docere]

Liverpool is so Irish that Murphy, the most common surname in Ireland, is among the 10 most common surnames.

https://forebears.io/england/merseyside/surnames

6,495 Murphys in Merseyside. If one uses Murphy as a proxy for Irish origin (1:61 based on number in Ireland with this surname).

6,495 x 61 = 396,195

396,000 / 1,424,000 = 27.8%

Interestingly it lines up almost perfectly with the number of Catholics in the Liverpool diocese. Liverpool is the most Catholic city in England (27.4%).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_...e_of_Liverpool

Greater London has 13,022 with the surname Murphy, only twice as many as Liverpool.

That would yield 794,232 Irish origin, about 9% of London's population.

[Docere]

It's strange to focus so much on London's population in say 1900 when the population composition is completely different today.

The County of London (Inner London) had a population of 4.5 million and there were 6.5 million in Greater London. Th city was probably about 95% "white British/Irish" category then (Irish community BTW was estimated to be about 350,000 at the time).

Today London has 9 million, and only 3.5 million are white British/Irish.

[CivicBlues]

This thread topic is ripe for interesting discussions about so many different ethnic groups .

Instead we have 5 pages of how Irish London is

[Docere]

Greater Manchester

Population 2,867,752

White 2,190,838 76.4%
White British 2,045,951 71.4%
Irish 30,907 1.1%
Other 108,297 3.8%

Asian or Asian British 389,283 13.5%
Indian 69,481 2.4%
Pakistani 209,601 7.3%
Bangladeshi 46,460 1.6%
Chinese 29,582 1%
Other 34,699 1.2%

Black or Black British 134,114 4.7%
African 98,557 3.4%
Caribbean 19,711 0.7%
Other 15,846 0.6%

Mixed 86,520 3.4%
White and Black Caribbean 27,906 1%
White and Black African 16,379 0.6%
White and Asian 23,005 0.8%
Other 19,230 0.7%

Arab 27,322 1%
Any other ethnic group 39,675 1.4%

Manchester City

Population 551,938

White 313,652 56.8%
White British 268,572 48.7%
Irish 9,442 1.7%
Other 34,138 6.2%

Asian or Asian British 115,109 20.9%
Indian 14,857 2.7%
Pakistani 65,875 11.9%
Bangladeshi 9,673 1.8%
Chinese 12,644 2.3%
Other 12,060 2.2%

Black or Black British 65,893 12%
African 47,858 8.7%
Caribbean 10,472 1.9%
Other Black 7,563 1.4%

Mixed 29,026 5.2%
White and Black Caribbean 9,987 1.8%
White and Black African 5,992 1.1%
White and Asian 6,149 1.1%
Other 6,898 1.2%

Arab 15,028 2.7%
Any other ethnic group 13,250

[Docere]

Liverpool

Population 408,443

White 408,443 84%
White British 375,785 77.3%
Irish 6,826 1.4% (!)
Other 24,162 5%

Asian and Asian British 27,767 5.7%
Indian 6,251 1.3%
Pakistani 3,673 0.8%
Bangladeshi 1,917 0.4%
Chinese 8,841 1.8%
Other 7,085 1.5%

Black and Black British 16,964 3.5%
African 12,709 2.6%
Caribbean 1,493 0.3%
Other 2,762 0.7%

Mixed 16,880 3.5%
White and Black Caribbean 4,127 0.9%
White and Black African 4,157 0.9%
White and Asian 3,662 0.8%
Other 4,934 1%

Arab 8,312 1.7%
Any other ethnic group 7,722 1.6%

[muppet]

Originally Posted by Docere

Liverpool is so Irish that Murphy, the most common surname in Ireland, is among the 10 most common surnames.

https://forebears.io/england/merseyside/surnames

6,495 Murphys in Merseyside. If one uses Murphy as a proxy for Irish origin (1:61 based on number in Ireland with this surname).

6,495 x 61 = 396,195

396,000 / 1,424,000 = 27.8%

Interestingly it lines up almost perfectly with the number of Catholics in the Liverpool diocese. Liverpool is the most Catholic city in England (27.4%).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_...e_of_Liverpool

Greater London has 13,022 with the surname Murphy, only twice as many as Liverpool.

That would yield 794,232 Irish origin, about 9% of London's population.

You've got to be kidding me right? So your theory is that the popularity of a single surname indicates how many people have ancestry? Do you not see the problems with that? For starters I wouldn't transpose a tally on a variable based on only 1.6%, of only one dataset- a lot can happen in the other 98.4%, and with the tens of thousands of other surnames, let alone the variables in you know, geography, life, centuries of history in different locations etc. Even as the most popular it makes up only 1.6% among the other Irish names (the presence of a single Murphy out of 2 classrooms makes it the most 'popular'), that's way too low to even be considered enough to project with.


I would suggest the official census figures on Irish born, plus the amount of descendants averaged per couple would be a better gauge on ancestry.

[Crawford]

1% of the British population is Irish-born, so a relatively small amount.

Most Irish immigration went to the U.S., Canada and Australia. Of course immigration from Ireland to England wasn't actually immigration, so not exactly comparable. More analogous to the mid-century Puerto Rican migration waves to the U.S.

Not sure why surnames can't be used as a rough proxy for ethnic background, as names are obviously cultural markers of demography. Not too many non-Jewish households with surname Cohen, Levy or Katz. Not too many non-Chinese households with surname Wang, Li or Chen.

[muppet]

Obviously because ancestry does not necessarily retain surnames in equal measures, one can more easily have ancestry without an indicative surname than not. Also because 1.6% is way too low to transpose from.

The majority of my extended family no longer have their ancestral/ regional surname within a single generation, but that doesn't mean they don't have the ancestry, nor that we didn't double our numbers. The fact retention hinges on whether they married or not, whether they were female or not, or even whether their kids chose to keep one surname and not the other. The family tree tablet in our ancestral village is now filled with Spanish, British, Jewish, Hungarian, Indian and Greek surnames -about 30 cousins and their kids. About half of them appear to have no trace of mixed ethnicity either, let alone in name or culture.

[Docere]

This time with two names, Murphy and Kelly. Numbers come out slightly different, but not dramatically so. And pattern basically the same.

Greater London 901,000 10.1%
Merseyside 447,000 31%

Murphy is #10 and Kelly is #12 in the surname rankings in Liverpool/Merseyside. In London, they're down in the 40s and 50s. Irish surnames are more frequent in Liverpool (or Boston) than they are in London because a much higher percentage are of Irish ancestry.

London is 6x the size of Liverpool but it only has twice as many with the two most common Irish surnames. The two most common names are 3x as common in Liverpool as in London.

[muppet]

[muppet]

The reason you can't gauge ancestry from surnames is obvious, they don't align.

https://www.mylondon.news/news/west-...ondon-15047413

Of the Top 20 most popular in London, 17 are English, and the most popular non British one, Patel, is Gujurati Indian, despite the city 60% non-native in ancestry. There isn't a single continental European or African name, and just that one Indian one.

[lio45]

Originally Posted by Docere

Liverpool is so Irish that Murphy, the most common surname in Ireland, is among the 10 most common surnames.

https://forebears.io/england/merseyside/surnames

6,495 Murphys in Merseyside. If one uses Murphy as a proxy for Irish origin (1:61 based on number in Ireland with this surname).

6,495 x 61 = 396,195

396,000 / 1,424,000 = 27.8%

Interestingly it lines up almost perfectly with the number of Catholics in the Liverpool diocese. Liverpool is the most Catholic city in England (27.4%).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_...e_of_Liverpool

Greater London has 13,022 with the surname Murphy, only twice as many as Liverpool.

That would yield 794,232 Irish origin, about 9% of London's population.

Thinking about the most famous Murphy I know, that would be Eddie Murphy (who, if he bought a pied-à-terre in London, would raise the Irishness of the British capital to 77%+1 )

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by muppet

The family tree tablet in our ancestral village is now filled with Spanish, British, Jewish, Hungarian, Indian and Greek surnames -about 30 cousins and their kids. About half of them appear to have no trace of mixed ethnicity either, let alone in name or culture.

I don't believe this for a second. Random Indian surnames applied to WASP households. Magyar surnames adopted by Chinese households. Yeah, right.

[muppet]

wtf? How would you know? It only takes a woman to marry a man to take his surname.

Seriously?

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by lio45

Thinking about the most famous Murphy I know, that would be Eddie Murphy (who, if he bought a pied-à-terre in London, would raise the Irishness of the British capital to 77%+1 )

Descendants of the Middle Passage, like Eddie Murphy, took Reconstruction-era names most common in slaveholding areas. So yeah, Murphy would have been a common Scotch-Irish name.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by muppet

wtf? How would you know? It only takes a woman to marry a man to take his surname.

Seriously?

So where did the surname come from? Ancestry. This is why surnames are a good proxy for ancestry. There aren't too many many ethnic Germans named Kumar, or ethnic Koreans named Kowalski.

Of course there are instances where surnames are erased, but this isn't the norm.