Last updated Tue 24th Sep 2024
About.
It has a film festival, is the title of a song by Bluey's dad, it used to have a local paper (The Inner West Courier, now online only), but where exactly is the Inner West, or more specifically, where are its boundaries? This project actually came about thanks to another little project I was am working on, the tiny parks of the inner west, and while getting the data I needed a definition of Sydney's Inner West. The easiest one to use was the Inner West Local Government Area (LGA), but as someone who's lived in the area on and off for the past 20 years or so, the inclusion of Balmain, Birchgrove, and Rozelle, and the exclusion of Erskineville, Glebe, and half of Newtown just didn't seem right, so it got me thinking about what, if anything, makes the Inner West the Inner West.
“I know it when I see it”
- comment by a US Supreme Court Justice in a pornography obscenity trial
So I took a bit of a look around online, and apart from the LGA, there's a bunch of notions, some based on geographical features as boundaries (the Cooks River, Parramatta River, Sydney Harbour), some on roads (Parramatta Road, King Street), some on proximity to stations on the Inner West train line (T2) etc, and the flight path occasionally gets a mention (and another song). There's a page about it on Wikipedia that potentially links it to parishes (among other things), there's an excellent piece on reddit, and it was pointed out online that the ABS has a SA4 region called Sydney - Inner West that takes in Rhodes and Homebush West but excludes most suburbs east of Lewisham. So in the end I just thought I'd set up an online form, send it to a few mates, and see what comes back (hat tip to the friend who lives in Marrickville who only ticked 'Marrickville').
This shows the -- responses so far, and on average people nominated around -- suburbs, from a total list of 41. Based on this, Marrickville (93%) is the one most commonly picked, and just over half (53%) seem to think Balmain is part of Inner West (it's not), but slightly less for Rozelle (43%) and Lilyfield (50%), despite both being closer to Marrickville and its surrounds. Plus I was sort of surprised that there were only three suburbs — Marrickville, Stanmore, and Newtown — that more than 90% of people thought were the Inner West. Anyway, I'd initially planned to do more with the data, but true to form this took waaaaaaaaaaaaay longer than I thought, and still haven't finished the tiny parks thing, so this'll have to do for the time being.
The map below shows all the suburbs from the form, and the percent of respondents who ticked them as being part of the Inner West (and there's a bunch of disclaimers in the footer). Use the slider to set the threshold to see different ideas of what makes up the Inner West. For example, if the threshold is set to 70%, it groups all the suburbs that at least 70% of people ticked as being Inner West. You can also show/hide the Inner West LGA, the stations on the Inner West line, as well as view the suburbs shaded by value (a choropleth). the suburbs for more details
The black line on the map above shows the boundary of the suburbs that at least --- of people think is part of the Inner West (the cross shows the centre point).
Has station on the Inner West line Within the Inner West LGA*
The Inner West
Not the Inner West
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Anyway, if interested, do the quiz if you haven't already, and I'll probably update this again in a few weeks or so.