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The “levelling up” agenda set out by the UK government was designed to tackle entrenched regional patterns of social inequality, which have been associated with “left behind places”. These places are united through discontent resulting from being ‘left behind’ in regional development, experiencing stagnation whilst other, often metropolitan, areas experience rapid growth. Alternative datasets, including social media data, have been identified as possible ways to evaluate this discontent. This study will use a specific case study, perspectives of London from outside London, to evaluate how this dataset can be used to understand the dynamics of levelling up.

This research explores the spatial focusing of the migration network within England and Wales at local authority level. The Gini Index is used to quantify the inequality of migration flows between local authorities at a national level, with the decomposed index then used to analyse the spatial focusing of origins and destinations within the network. It then analyses individual local authorities calculate the inequality of incoming and outgoing migration flows, to evaluates the geographical patterns of spatial focusing. The conclusion is that England and Wales have a spatially focused migration network.