The English - British and Irish immigration

The English — where from?

Regional origins of English immigrants

	London	South-east	South-west	Lancashire
UK Census 1871	15.5%	10.6%	8.3%	12.4%
1840–52	14.9%	21.1%	23%	5.3%
New Zealand Company 1839–50	25.9%	20.8%	26.4%	3.4%
Auckland 1840–52	20.1%	17.2%	21.8%
1853–70	17.3%	12.7%	16.2%	8.6%
Miners – Otago 1853–70	7.8%	8.5%	36.8%	9.4%
1871–80	15.8%	15.1%	18.7%	4.7%
1881–1914	18.8%	12.9%	12.2%	11.6%

The table and graph suggest:

• London was an important birth-place for immigrants to New Zealand, but no more than its representation in England as a whole.
• The 'home counties' of the South-east sent a large number of people to New Zealand, especially in the 1840s. Kent appears to have been a strongly 'New Zealand-prone' county.
• The counties of the South-west, especially Cornwall, were strongly over-represented among the immigrants. There was a spectacular inflow of people from this area among the miners reflecting the strong tradition of tin-mining in Cornwall and the decline of that industry from the 1840s. But the numbers from the South-west were consistently high until 1880 with over twice as many likely to migrate to New Zealand as their proportion of the population in England.
• The more industrial areas of the North-west, including Lancashire, were not well represented among immigrants to New Zealand until the end of the 19th century.
• If we add the Cornish immigrants to those from Ireland and Scotland, it is evident that the Celtic fringe of Great Britain in fact comprised a majority of New Zealand's founding British immigrants.