Paper presented at the GIS Research UK 13 th Annual Conference (GISRUK), University of Glasgow , Glasgow 6-8 April, Proceedings p. 16 Who does not eat their greens? Geodemographics, health promotion and neighbourhood health inequalities Jones CE, Mateos P, Longley PA, and Webber R Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis University College London 1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 6BT kate-emma.jones@ucl.ac.uk p.mateos@ucl.ac.uk 1 Introduction In November 2004 the UK Government released the Public Health White Paper, highlighting the requirement for action to reduce health inequalities at local scales. The environment we live in, our social networks, our sense of security, our socio-economic circumstances and the facilities and resources available in our local neighbourhood can all affect our health. The differences in people’s health between neighbourhoods and socio-economic groups are officially deemed to be unacceptable (Department of Health, 2004). It follows that these differences must be addressed in order to improve population health outcomes. Personal behaviour and lifestyles, community influences, living and working conditions, accessibility to services, educational attainment and health literacy can all impact upon an individual’s health. There is an inherent geography to health and inequalities: Higgs and Gould (2001) identified a number of problems facing health agencies that are fundamentally geographical and local in character, and are thus worth analysing from a geographical perspective. Much recent research has been carried out to quantify health inequalities, in terms of local geographies of deprivation, identifying those that have relatively adverse experiences of access to material necessities (for example ODPM 2004). A myriad of indices have been used to measure deprivation, for example: Townsend Measure, Jarman Index of underprivileged areas, Breadline Britain, and Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 2004. Deprivation is a difficult concept to conceive, measure, and analyse due to its heterogeneity and a high degree of uncertainty of such representations (Longley and Harris, 2002),