This animation, produced by Jay Gordon, does a great job of capturing the daily flows of London’s commuters. It combines the 16 million or so daily transactions made with London’s Oyster cards with vehicle-location data from the city’s 8,500 buses to infer journeys of approximately 3.1...

This is a screenshot of a heatmap of runs carried out in central London, using the Nike+ training “app” which utilises a phone’s built-in GPS to record the route. Many runs are aggregated and then combined into this heatmap, which is overlaid on the regular Google Maps...

Recce is an iPhone app which locates you on a map and shows you various POIs (points of interest) on demand such as local coffee shops. Nothing particularly new – but it’s the map which makes the app come to life here. Instead of your standard 2D overhead map, or a muddy if...

Duncan Smith from UCL CASA has produced some great maps of commuter flows. Each line represents the routes people follow to work (as a straight line from origin to destination) and whilst the map above covers nearly the all of southern Britain it shows just how dominant London is and just how...

People often say “I waited ages for a bus and then they all turned up at once”. As the map above shows if all the timetabled buses in London literally did show up at the same time you would be stuck in an impressive traffic jam. It represents the 114 thousand or so bus trips that...

Stamen Design are a bespoke design and technology company based in San Francisco. They have a reputation for creating wonderful looking maps, often with OpenStreetMap data, and their latest map is quite stunning – the Watercolour Map. The textures applied to the map give it a lovely,...

Eric Fischer produced this interesting data map of London a while back. The map is entirely made of of location coordinates included on Twitter tweets, and Flickr photographs, in the London area. Flickr photos show up as orange dots, while Twitter tweets show up as blue dots. In place on the...

As a cyclist in London you can do your best to avoid left turning buses and dozy pedestrians. One thing you can’t really avoid though is pollution (although I accept cyclists probably aren’t much worse off than pedestrians and drivers in this respect). To illustrate this I have...

James previously featured a tube map made up of just names of the stations. He’s also featured other London typographic maps. Exploring a little further, it turns out there’s some other fine examples out there, often available as prints. The screenshot above is part of a beautiful...

This arty image of the area around Trafalgar square is a small section of a rather interesting caricature created by Hartwig Braun, of a view of the West End and the City – looking east from a point somewhere well above Victoria station. It’s not a map – I wouldn’t...

Mapping London editors James and Ollie look back at some of the many maps produced each year in London to highlight the highs and lows of London life. As you can see there was more to 2011 than riots and Royal Weddings: hand drawn maps have never been so popular, nor have those showing...

Step aside Stephen Walter, over 270 UCL students (and staff) have created their own interactive hand drawn map of London. Organised by two students Alistair Leak and Ian Morton from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the map has brought out some great insights into what people think of...

Mapping London Life is the title of the talk I gave at a great event organised by the Londonist and hosted by TAG Fine Arts. Surrounded by the wonderful maps in “The Art of Mapping” exhibition and speaking alongside John Kennedy and Stephen Walter the audience and I were in good...

There is a shop in London that I always peer into when I walk past but have always resisted going in as it presented a real risk of bankruptcy. With a couple of hours (the minimum required I thought) to spare last weekend I thought it was finally time to go and look around the cartophiles...

A few months back I had the honour of being asked to approve the use of a couple of excerpts from my London Surname Map in The Times Atlas of London. The wait was finally over last week when I received my copy in the post. It is a great book and an essential guide to the city. The Atlas...

The above extract is an artwork from Jeremy Wood called My Ghost. Jeremy carried a GPS receiver around central London for nine years, gradually building up a “footprint” showing everywhere he went. Certain parks, such as Greenwich Park in the south-east, are distinctive by the...

This week, thousands of teenagers across the capital will receive GCSE results that will likely have an impact on the life decisions they take over the coming years. Back in March the full list of the 2010 GCSE results were released and I mapped them alongside an indicator of child poverty....

Aside from the odd rumble of a tube train, or perhaps a burst pipe in winter, Londoners often overlook the goings on beneath their feet. For this reason many are unaware that the city is built on a network of rivers and streams- each one progressively covered over as the city developed. These...

It’s a bit silly, and not exactly very helpful as a map for navigation – but it’s also a lot of fun. Brett Camper has taken the OpenStreetMap database for several cities around the world, including London, and applied a styling that is reminiscent of the blocky graphics of...

A new exhibition – Sense and the City – opens today at the Transport Museum in Covent Garden. It includes a number of transport data visualisations produced at UCL CASA. One of them, which I produced, is a visualisation of Oyster card tap-ins and tap-outs on a typical day. This is...

From Daniela Krug and Lars Malmqvist comes TubeViz – a nice visualisation of passenger entries to, and exits from, tube stations (not Overground or DLR) in London. As the animation runs, you can see the huge station usage in the centre of London during, and between, the rush hours,...

Many Twitter messages, or “tweets”, are sent with latitude/longitude information, allowing an insight into the places where the most amount of tweeting happens. For a magazine article, I produced the above map of London, with help from a colleague Steven Gray, who collected the...

Some of the most popular posts on spatialanalysis are about typographic maps. I thought it would be cool to put together some of my favourite’s for London. Click on each image to see the source. So in no particular order here goes… Thames London Type Map London Linocut...

This is another great map animation from our friends in CASA. It is a year old now (almost to the day) but it remains one of the most engaging Twitter animations I have seen for the city. It shows a sample of all the geo-located tweets sent over a London weekend. I like it because it shows...

Another brilliant visualisation from UCL’s CASA, this time from Anil Bawa-Cavia.  It visualises trips made on the London Underground using data gathered from Oyster Cards. Each trail is a single trip between a known origin and destination station. Anil has guessed the route in between...

Adrian Short, provider of one of the main 3rd-party APIs for the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme in London – the Boris Bikes API – has taken his data and produced a live-updating KML file of the numbers of bike at each docking station, viewable in Google Earth. Flying around central...

Two interesting maps of football clubs and London: First, Dean of The Londonist has mapped out the various locations of London’s football clubs over time. Many of them have moved a surprisingly large number of times. In the extract above, Fulham appears to be particularly nomadic,...

If you lack a sense of direction and resort to writing directions on scraps of paper or the palm of your hand, this glove is for you. It was designed for George Shove in 1851 and shows the Great Exhibition, held in Hyde Park, and its surroundings. I would hate to think how many pairs of...

Google has updated the aerial photography available in Google Maps, for London. The new imagery appears to be from late summer 2010, showing the current crop of skyscrapers being built in and around the City of London, as well as other major new construction sites like the London 2012 Olympic...

Some of us at CASA can’t get enough of the Barclay’s Cycle Hire data. We have had Ollie‘s hugely successful flow maps, journeytime heat maps, and now the the Sociable Physicist himself, Martin Austwick has created this stunning animation of the bikes. The TFL data release...

Demeter Sztanko has produced a stunning, minimalistic visualisation of the routes of the first 1.4 million Barclays Cycle Hire bikes. It is assumed that the cyclists take the “best” available route, as actual routes are unknown – only the start and end points are available....

Ollie O’Brien, one of the contributors to this blog, has produced a map, which updates in near-real-time, of the full/empty states of the 350-odd docking stands in the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme in central London. As each stand fill with bikes, the colour goes from blue to red. The area...