The London Plan, since 2008, has had five sub regions. Before then, there were the same number of sub regions, but they were slightly differently labeled. Whereas today the sub regions are West London, North London, North East London, South East London and South West London, they were once more simply identified as North, South, East, West and Central. Each sub region comprises a number of boroughs and different neighbourhoods and a map of the postcode areas of London is often broken down by sub region. Indeed, the postcode identifiers, such as SW, W, E, etc., indicate which sub region the postcode is in.
South West London includes seven boroughs. They are Richmond, Kingston, Croydon, Wandsworth, Lambeth, Sutton and Merton. Within these boroughs live more than one and a half million people - 1. million to be more precise - and it is the location of 730,000 of London's jobs. From these numbers, one can deduce that many people commute to other parts of the city for work, most likely to the large hubs of commerce in West London or into the city centre. Since the River Thames runs east-west through Greater London, parts of this sub region fall above the river, but most of it is south of the riverbanks. Fulham and a handful of postcode areas fall north of the river.