Story · Transport map · about 3 min
Who lives without a car?
The 2021 census asked every household how many cars or vans it had. This story reads the answer neighbourhood by neighbourhood: where having none is normal, where it is rare, and how closely it follows deprivation.
Nearly a quarter of households have no car
On Census day in March 2021, 5.8 million households in England and Wales had no car or van, 23% of all households. The map shades every neighbourhood by that share, from pale blue where hardly anyone is without a car to dark blue where most households are. England stands at 24% and Wales at 19%.
Inner London: most households have none
In London as a whole 42% of households have no car. In the City of London it is 77%, in Islington 67% and in Tower Hamlets 66%. The most car-free neighbourhood of all is Southwark 009H: 90% of its households have none.
Where almost everyone has one
At the other end of the map fewer than one household in ten has no car: Hart has 8%, Uttlesford 9% and Wokingham 9%. All three are councils in the south and east of England.
Fewer cars where deprivation is higher
Now England’s 2025 deprivation index, with the most deprived tenth of neighbourhoods in dark purple. In that tenth 43% of households have no car, in the least deprived tenth 10%: 4.4 times as many. Having no car and living in a deprived neighbourhood tend to go together.
For classrooms and curious minds
Questions to talk about, alone or in a group.
- Why might a household in inner London manage without a car when a household in a village could not?
- Neighbourhoods with few cars are also the more deprived ones. Does that show that having no car causes hardship?
Try it on the map: Find your own neighbourhood. Is its share of car-free households higher or lower than the next one along, and does that match how people around you get about?
The figures above are calculated from the datasets listed on Data & sources and are approximate: many map layers are modelled or interpolated. Read each layer’s caveats on the map.