Soho is Britain's unhealthiest place? Jeffrey Bernard would be pleased!

Look how unhealthy it all is - drinking, eating. Shocking.

I don't know where the quote comes from but, as kids, we used to exclaim "give me temptation, brother" when confronted with something especially lovely - cream cakes, ice cream, warm pork pie. It would seem that the irresistible nature of these temptations - fast food, pubs and assorted other dens on iniquity - is the main reason for the UK's health inequalities:

Soho is the unhealthiest place to live in Britain...

I can hear a gentle chuckle from the grave of Jeffrey Bernard, legendary Soho denizen, at this shocking revelation - as Jeffrey put it:

"I've always been drawn to the things I was told not to do. Drink, sex. God! how I have loved sex and racing. They're against the rules and that's why I like them. I never liked anything that was good for me, like All-Bran and fresh air. I like the things that kill me."

So it is with Soho. But not, apparently, apparently with Great Torrington in north Devon. Probably because there's precious little to do (certainly in the category of "things that kill me") in Great Torrington. That being said, Torrington is a lovely little market town, especially if you like buying the crystal glasses in which to serve your champagne or malt whisky.

After Great Torrington, the remainder of the healthy places are in further flung parts of rural Scotland, not a thing to inspire folk who like a good time. Meanwhile, the really unhealthy places are mostly in central London. So how did the researchers arrived at the ranking:

Researchers analysed a range of lifestyle and environmental measures including levels of air pollution, access to amenities such as fast food outlets or pubs, and proximity to health services including GPs in addition to parks and recreational spaces.

It probably isn't so surprising that London fares poorly - it's densely populated, as a large city inevitably has poorer air quality than wide open Devon countryside, and - especially in the tourist magnet of the West End - is rammed full of pubs, bars and restaurants.

But why - given all the stuff about the 'heart of the community' and so forth - do these researchers cite the presence of pubs as an indicator of a place being 'unhealthy'? I'm guessing that the continued lie about drinking - any drinking - being bad for you sits at the heart of all this. The good news, despite the new puritans' best efforts to get them all closed, is that most people are still reasonable close to their nearest pub:

...on average, individuals in Great Britain are just as close to a pub or bar as they are to their nearest GP, 1.1 km [0.68 miles]

If we're talking about community then, frankly, having a pub people might visit once or twice a week is a darned sight more important than a GP surgery they might visit twice a year. And at least with pubs you can walk in when you need it rather than having to negotiate a complicated, unfriendly and unresponsive appointments system.

Our researchers (surprise, surprise - this is public health fussbucketry at its finest) also have an issue with gambling. They're shocked that most people live within "a short drive) - I'm surprised they're not agitated about folk having to drive there - of a betting shop.

What the research really shows is that things like fast food outlets, betting shops and pubs are more concentrated in densely populated urban areas. They also observe that lots of rural areas have a really lousy (on top of the deranged appointment systems and unfriendly hours beloved of GPs) access to primary heath care.

The premise for these researchers appears to be that the very presence of these bad things makes people ill. Unfortunately for our fussbuckets, either they don't make people ill or else people are resisting the temptations of booze, burgers and betting shops. The male life expectancy for Westminster (home to glorious Soho) residents is 81.4 years whereas those Great Torrington chaps down in North Devon peg it on average at a mere 79.4 years.

So it would seem that the effect of all that unhealthiness - pubs, bars, casinos, late night kebab shops and so forth - has precisely zero effect on the health of local residents. The research we're being sold here as "...an important tool for citizens and policymakers alike..." is pretty much useless as a guide to whether or not the environment in which people live is healthy (Shotley Gate, the little town across the estuary from Harwich gets fingered for unhealthiness which seems to reinforce the arbitrary nature of the model - I use this term loosely - adopted by the researchers).

And while we're about all this - central London lacks parks? Have these people never been there?

The green bits are parks. Massive parks. Soho is the redlined box.

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