A Daily Mail analysis of crime, house price, health and deprivation data has identified a contiguous band of north‑east London neighbourhoods that rank among the worst in the capital on a combined scoring of four metrics.
The stretch — described in the report as a "rotten banana" — runs through parts of Enfield, Haringey and Waltham Forest, curves south through Hackney and Tower Hamlets and then sweeps east through Newham, Barking and Dagenham and Havering. When the Mail combined four measures for each of London’s roughly 5,000 lower-layer super output areas (LSOAs), the area with the worst overall score was a pocket of Haringey that covers parts of Wood Green High Road and Pelham Road.
That Haringey LSOA, identified in the analysis as 016A, recorded a median sold house price of about £240,500 in 2024, well below the London average of roughly £550,000 and far beneath the wealthiest streets, where prices can exceed £8 million. The 2021 Census showed 9.4% of residents in that area reporting they were in "bad" or "very bad" health, and 71% of households were deprived in at least one way. The Mail reported a crime and anti‑social behaviour rate of 517 incidents per 1,000 residents in the year to June for the same LSOA.
The analysis used crime reports per 1,000 population for the year to June 2025, median house prices for 2024 from Land Registry figures, and two 2021 Census indicators: the percentage of households deprived in at least one dimension and the percentage of adults reporting bad or very bad health. Each LSOA was assigned a percentile rank for each metric among the near‑5,000 LSOAs, with 100 being the worst and 0 the best; an overall score was the mean of the four percentiles, with higher scores indicating worse performance.
Crime rates were highest in some of central London’s visitor and retail areas but also spiked inside the rotten banana corridor. A Stratford neighbourhood that contains the Westfield shopping centre, Newham 039D, recorded the highest crime reports outside the two City boroughs, with 3,311 incidents per 1,000 residents in the year to June. That area, however, performed better on health and house price measures and did not finish bottom on the combined score.
House price extremes were not limited to the rotten banana, but several LSOAs within the corridor were among the capital’s cheapest. Newham 042D on the Royal Wharf of Silvertown had a median sold price of about £99,950, the second‑lowest in London, and one pocket of Ealing recorded a median near £80,000. In Hackney’s Stamford Hill the median sold price was reported at roughly £112,500.
Health and deprivation indicators also showed strong geographic divides. In Hackney 024D, centered on Dalston, 10.3% of residents reported being in poor health at the time of the 2021 Census, a figure exceeded by fewer than 1% of LSOAs. Haringey 013D, around Broadwater Farm near Lordship Recreation Ground, was placed in the top 0.1% of London’s most deprived areas, with 80.7% of households experiencing at least one form of deprivation.
The analysis follows broader public conversation about a so‑called "London banana" — a tongue‑in‑cheek description of a swathe of west and central London that some commentators have suggested offers better services, schools and living conditions. A previous Daily Mail review had argued that many indicators, including school performance and house prices, did align with the original "banana" hypothesis. The current piece uses the same public data sets to indicate that an opposite corridor, concentrated in the north‑east of the city, typically ranks near the bottom on multiple commonly used measures.
The Mail’s findings are driven by the choice of metrics and the percentile‑based scoring method; results identify relative performance among small geographic units rather than measuring absolute quality of life. The data sources cited in the report include police‑recorded crime figures for the year to June 2025, Land Registry median price data for 2024 and 2021 Census figures for health and household deprivation.