Where do people feel safest in Bristol? Part One
I’ve been looking at the Quality of Life data by Bristol City Council and found myself interested in which areas feel safe and which don’t. I’m not using crime data at this stage so I won’t be talking about actual safety but to an extent we can assume that people’s feelings reflect reality. People tend to feel safer in the north west suburbs and less safe in the south parts of Bristol, but not only.
There are certainly some geographical clusters showing consistency across the wards.
During the day time, there are more places that feel safe to residents but Hartcliffe and Withywood feels the most unsafe.
Only one in four people feel safe at night in Hartcliffe and Withywood as compared to nearly 9 out of 10 in Redland. The difference is striking.
I don’t intend to come to any conclusions in this blog post but that disparity in areas between where people feel safest and where they don’t, made an impression on me.
Safest-feeling places during the day
In some areas in Bristol, nearly everyone feels safe during the day. The top four are as follows:
Redland 99%
Clifton 98.3%
Clifton Down 98%
Cotham 98%
All wards have lower percentages of people feeling safer at night than they do during the day.
The top four safest-feeling places during the night
Clifton Down 88.9%
Clifton 85.1%
Stoke Bishop 84.4%
Westbury-on-Trym & Henleaze 83.7%
Redland and Cotham are no longer in the top four safest-feeling places at night, as they were during the day. The differences between feeling safe during the day and feeling safe during the night were not consistent.
Some wards had much smaller differences in percentage points than others. Two of the top four safe places from the day time and two from the night time had the smallest differences.
Smallest difference in percentage points between feelings of safety during the day and the night
Clifton Down 9% points
Westbury-on-Trym & Henleaze 12.5% points
Clifton 13.2% points
Stoke Bishop 13.5%
The wards with big differences between day and night were the following four:
Southmead 83.6% during the day, 38.6% at night
Hartcliffe & Withywood 68.6% during the day, 27.5% at night
St George West 93.4% during the day, 52.4% at night
Hillfields 85% during the day, 45% at night
The cluster of low differences can be found in the north west of the city but while there are clusters throughout, the wards with big differences are not near each other.
I’m open to thoughts and anecdotes as to why we are seeing these differences.