A New Lens on Urban Health: The 2025 Urban Health Index for Lambeth and Southwark

Impera
Jul 14
2 min read

In a rapidly changing world, health is shaped not just by medical care, but by the places we live, the air we breathe, the homes we inhabit, and the communities we belong to. The Urban Health Index (UHI) 2025 offers a powerful new lens to explore these influences—bringing together over 40 indicators to assess how different areas in Lambeth and Southwark are doing when it comes to creating healthy, equitable environments.

What is the Urban Health Index?

The Urban Health Index is a tool developed to track health equity at the neighbourhood level. It brings together a wide range of social and environmental indicators—such as air quality, access to green space, fuel poverty, crime, childhood obesity, and premature mortality—and combines them into a single score across four key domains:

Basic Human Needs
Foundations of Wellbeing
Opportunity
Environmental Quality

These domains reflect the essential building blocks for good health and thriving communities.

What’s new in the 2025 update?

This year’s updated Index reflects the evolving challenges and priorities facing our urban communities:

Fresher, better data: More than half of the indicators were updated with the latest available data, ensuring the Index reflects current realities on the ground.
Refined metrics: Several outdated or less relevant indicators were replaced—for example, the shift from measuring deaths under 65 to deaths under 75, a more meaningful marker of preventable mortality.
A stronger environmental lens: A new indicator on green space coverage has been added to help reflect how access to nature and open space influences health.
Ward-level focus: For the first time, the Index includes ward-level scoring, offering detailed insight into how all 48 wards across Lambeth and Southwark compare. This makes the tool more accessible and practical for local leaders, communities, and planners.

Urban Health Index 2025 Scorecard

How it works

At the heart of the UHI is an interactive scorecard that uses a simple traffic-light system to show how each area performs across indicators and domains—highlighting which wards rank in the top or bottom fifth for each measure. Users can explore data through maps, charts, and distribution plots, revealing spatial patterns and outliers.

One striking example: Brixton North ranks lowest overall on the Index and has the highest rate of racially aggravated crime—more than double the rate in neighbouring Herne Hill East. These kinds of insights are crucial for understanding inequality and directing targeted action.

Why it matters

The Urban Health Index isn’t just a research tool—it’s a call to action. It helps:

Identify neighbourhood-level challenges that affect health outcomes
Empower local government and community groups to design more effective, targeted interventions
Support accountability by tracking progress over time and helping to measure the impact of local investments

Explore the Index

The Urban Health Index 2025 is now live, providing local leaders and community advocates with the insight they need to make meaningful change. By bringing together diverse data into one accessible platform, the UHI helps shine a light on the conditions shaping people’s lives—and where support is needed most.

🔗 Dive into the data and explore your area here:https://urbanhealth.org.uk/insights/data/about-urban-health-index-2025