You don’t have to be Einstein to realise that a survey like this is bound to have its flaws… When The Evening Standard came up with this clever little diagram, it wasn’t the result of personally going round and testing the IQ of every resident in London. Let’s face it, that would have been a logistical nightmare. Instead they surveyed members from the world’s oldest high-IQ society, Mensa, considered in the top 2% of IQs in the population. And the results are pretty interesting (if a liiittle precarious)…
If you’re a resident of Tower Hamlets, you’re the brainiest of the bunch, with 44 Mensa members in a population of 55,861. This is explained by Dr Riccardo Crescenzi, associate professor of Economic Geography at LSE, as being down to the concentration of “young professionals, academics and students” in the area. Close behind that comes NW3, once home to Karl Marx and now home to Harry Styles, which we’re pretty sure has nothing to do with anything.
Wimbledon also fares very high, with a whopping 51 Mensa residents living in SW19. But is someone’s IQ level really a test of their intellect? And what’s having a bunch of Mensa members living in our borough got anything to do with what’s going on in the space between our ears? Things are looking a little tenuous here…and we’re not just saying that because we live in a low-scoring area…