This category includes all deaths in Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) between 1981 and 2004 inclusive.

The map of mortality rates from all causes combines in a single image all the influences on our survival. Having taken into account the distribution of the population according to age and sex, the map shows that across these areas a person’s chances of dying in a particular year varied from being more than 50% above the national average (an SMR of 150 as shown on the key) to less than 76% of the national average (with SMRs ranging from 71 to 76 in the lowest mortality category). Thus, depending on where you were living over the last quarter of a century, there are neighbourhoods of Britain containing populations of tens of thousands of people where you were more than twice as likely to die than had you lived in other places.

The 1,282 neighbourhoods shown here both physically and statistically collect groups of people together whose rates of dying vary considerably at the extremes. For the large majority in the middle, however, living in the areas with an SMR between 90 and 110, mortality rates do not appear to vary greatly. However, before concluding that this variation is low it is worth remembering that it is compound. If every year in certain towns in Britain an extra 10% of the population die than on average, whereas in another some 10% fewer die than you would expect given their ages and sexes, then the life expectancies of people in those two towns will diverge by several years.

Across much of the south of England outside London, and in a few isolated enclaves of prosperity in the north, Wales and Scotland, people’s chances of dying each year have been at least 10%, often 20% and at the extremes almost 30% lower than average since 1981.

Over this 24-year period, the average age of death in Britain was 74.4 years, 71.2 for men and 77.4 for women. The average age of death in our neighbourhoods varied between 66.4 years (in Glasgow Easterhouse) and 80.6 years (in Eastbourne West). These are averages. The lower figures are due to many people dying much younger; the higher due to many people living longer. Over this period 42.