An eye-opening version the Tube Map for central London was published by the FT today (& on Twitter). The graphic, created by Steven Bernard of the FT Data team, is based on “PM 2.5” air pollution particulate matter readings, measured by FT researchers while travelling in tube carriages between stations in an area roughly bounded by the circle of the Circle line. It shows that the deep-level tube lines are worse for PM 2.5 than the “cut and cover” ones (which form the border circuit of the map here), but that pretty much everywhere in the zone has PM 2.5 readings above the WHO safe limit. It also shows that once again, the Central line is the line that you really don’t want to be on (and that should have had many of its journey now replaced by the Elizabeth line – however that is now very late). Be it crime, temperature, overcrowding or pollution, the Central line always wins. The accompanying article goes into detail about the measurement work, the nature of the dust, and how hard it is to clean. It’s surprising that only in the last 3 years has TfL started to think seriously about the pollution in the central London tube tunnels, some of which have been carrying passengers for more than a century. ©FT. Created by Steven...

The Fallen Fruit project, by David Allen Burns and Austin Young in the US, allows communities to map publically owned/accessible trees in their neighbourhood which are likely groaning with fruit to eat, at this kind of year. There is an online Google-powered map, Endless Orchard, but Mapping London was particularly taken with their printed maps, some of which are on display as part of an exhibition on depictions of fruit, at the V&A Museum in South Kensington. The maps are quite spartan to look at but show a local street network, with stars indicating fruit trees, and codes inside the starts indicating the fruit type. “Ap” is the code if you like apples. The maps appear at the end of this online magazine. London has as many trees as people. The ones on Fallen Fruit are either in, or overhanging, public spaces in London – so presumably fair game and not scrumping. Get them before the squirrels and pigeons...

This map, “Hooking Up”, was produced by the Evening Standard newspaper as part of their Future London project, in association with Source London, a service provider/lobbyist of charging points in London, and Zap-Map, who hold a comprehensive database of the locations of these facilities. The map can be seen in an Evening Standard article detailing how each borough is expanding its public electric charge point network – a critical piece of infrastructure needed for a cleaner, more efficient future where London’s motor vehicles will be electrically powered. While the map is a bit naughty in its colour scheme, using various different hues to represent a linear scale (number of charge points in each borough), can also see the key metric simply from the size of the circle representing each borough. The different hues, combined with translucency, also allow the circles to overlap slightly without much loss of visual impact of each circle, allowing the boroughs to remain in the approximately correct geographical location while allowing the big facility boroughs (Westminster, Hounslow, Hammersmith & Fulham, Wandsworth and Greenwich) to rightly dominate the map. The slightly overlapping circles also look a little like a cartoon exhaust cloud, which may have been a deliberate idea. The map is finished off with a really clever touch – the all-important River Thames is shown as a charging cable. The map was drawn by Adrian Black, a graphic designer who regularly contributes to the Evening Standard. Found online. © Adrian Black/Evening...

The John Snow Cholera Map is world famous as the map that identified the cause of the disease, and was one of the first epidemiological maps created. However, a number of other maps of the location of individuals with the disease were produced at around the same time, in an attempt to try and determine spatial patterns and possible causes. The Wellcome Trust‘s collection contains many of these maps and various graphs and other data visualisations of the disease’s spread. Various theories were tested, from postulating the airborne spread of a “mist” of the disease, to looking at the location with respect to the sewer network, underground geology, or simply height above sea level. We show excerpts of three such maps here, all good examples of data mapping in London in the 1800s. Above (source) is a map of an outbreak in London’s east end in 1866, with dots showing each victim. Red lines show the sewer network and areal colours correspond to different rock types. Blue lines show water supply catchment areas and the outbreak source is circled in red. The dot data was likely rolled onto an existing topology/geology map of London rather than the full map being drawn specifically for this purpose. Aside from the morbid nature of the subject, it’s a rather attractively draw and crisp map of London’s extent and major natural features and networks, in the mid-1800s. Below (source) is a variant of the “famous” John Snow map produced in 1854, showing deaths by household, each as a black bar moving away from the street entrance to each house. Also shown is a shaded area indicating a disused burial pit suspected as a possible source, along with the pump that famously was the actual source vector for this...

This attractive map of the housing and infrastructure history of Walthamstow and Leyton in north-east London has been created by Scott Davies. Scott used QGIS and OpenStreetMap data to create an attractive, vintage-style basemap and then shaded residential areas with different colours indicating when each block was developed. Older areas are shown in blues, while the shaded colour becomes yellower to show newer developments. CDRC Maps has mapped larger building blocks in a similar way from Valuation Office Agency data, however the resolution of the VOA data is quite low. This manually compiled map shows much more detail, including individual buildings in some areas. Scott used old Ordnance Survey maps, amongst other sources, to determine the antiquity of buildings – so once-isolated dwellings are discretely shown on the map even as more recent developments have surrounded them with newer housing. Dates written in red show the development of other major features in the area, such as the various reservoirs in Walthamstow Wetlands, the railways and Victoria Line, major roads, parks and cemeteries. The map is finished with an attractive set of adornments, including a lovely old-style title, compass rose, scale, overview map as an inset, and key. Scott used Inkscape to provide the artistic and cartographic finishing touches and elevate the work from a simple datamap to a work of art. The overall piece is a lovely bit of digital cartography that shows effectively and attractively the residential history of this London suburb. You can see Scott’s map on this tweet which links to a PDF of the map. Detail from “A Chronological Map of Walthamstow”, around the Wood Street/Forest Road...

The HERE Urban Mobility Index profiles 30 cities around the world, looking at how connected, sustainable, affordable and innovative they are, relating to urban mobility – the options that people have to move around the city area. London is one of the cities and scores first place for its public transport efficiency and low emission zone coverage, however its score is pushed down by its poor traffic flow (which is no surprise as it correlates inversely with public transport efficiency) and relatively expensive public transport fares (with respect to monthly incomes of its residents). As part of the dissemination of the urban mobility index results, HERE have produced a set of maps – the map at the top is a “placesetting” map for each city, showing the full public road network (with nice CSS colouring/animation), and the bottom map is a data map, showing the numbers of public transport vehicles (buses, trains, trams, metro) stopping at each stop or station throughout the city, on a typical weekday. There are several other data maps also included in the profile for each city, including coverage of mobility options regardless of frequency (London again scores well due to its dense network of bus-stops in particular), and areas of green space and low-emissions zones. The maps are good, cleanly presented maps of the pertinent data, they are a visually effective way of summarising London’s mobility, and allow an easy comparison with the 30+ other cities in the index. Explore the HERE Urban Mobility Index for London (and other...

The Greater London Authority has published a data map, showing the locations within London where tree canopies can be seen from overhead. There are about as many trees as people in London, and 21% of the capital’s land area is covered by them. This is an impressive number – this must make London one of the greenest large areas in England. Some of the home countries have perhaps 25%+ tree coverage, but most other “rural” areas are dominated by farmland or moorland, rather than forest. You can see the map at https://maps.london.gov.uk/canopy-cover/. The data and methodology has also been published. The data was automatically detected from aerial imagery by machine learning. I do have my concerns about it – for example, this area to the left of the curved of the railway line is shown as forest on the map, but actually it is a grassy field: In some residential terraced areas, the back gardens also tend to be entirely full of tree canopies, which seems a little surprising – even if a single tree’s canopy will cover much of a typical small inner London garden, I can’t believe it would cover all of it. So it’s a good first analysis of London’s tree cover, but does need some refining. The main data source is imagery in various wavelengths from the SENTINEL satellite. An obvious additional datasource for refinement would be LIDAR (which is released as open data by the Environment Agency, often at sub-metre horizontal resolution), which can accurately detect height changes. Trees tend to have a characteristic canopy shape and variation (i.e. they are not completely flat) and also comparing LIDAR DTM and DEM heights should show, for example, a green field where the grass is 1 metre tall, is not a...

Air pollution has long been a problem in London, and the current mayor has identified pollution as one of his major goals to highlight and tackle polluion, and improve the capital’s air quality during his time in charge. This map, of the modelled 2020 annual pollution levels of NO2, has been produced by Parallel, using the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory 2013 (LAEI) dataset that was published by the Greater London Authority in 2016 (they have since published a slightly updated version). The calculated data is presented as a raster (a grid of estimated pollution values) and Parallel have taken this and made it into an 3D webmap, so that you can “fly around” the map and see towers of pollution – and troughs of fresh, clean air: There’s something quite compelling this kind of presentation – it works well because this kind of pollution is dominated by, and generally restricted to, major roads. The 3D spikes therefore don’t obscure the rest of the map, as they are generally constrained to quite linear features. They act to both emphasise the significant and scary nature of pollution in some areas, and illustrate that, by walking or cycling through back streets rather than on main roads, your pollution intake can be significantly lowered. One striking element, on examining the map, is where elevated sections of road, such as the Hammersmith Flyover, the Westway and the bridges across the Thames, are pollution hotspots – the height meaning that the surrounding environment is further away and so can less effectively absorb the pollution: It’s not just cars, of course – some pollution shows along railway lines frequented diesel trains, while Heathrow Airport (see bottom image) also stands out – particularly the two runways, and specifically the points where aeroplanes...

Tired of London? Samuel Johnson said you are then tired of life. But sometimes, there are attractions in living outside the capital, while continuing to work in the centre. Such as a nice big garden, and being away from the “urban heat island” that makes London hotter than the surrounding regions. To do that, you need to pick a good commuter town, and this tool, from TotallyMoney (who also produced a London house price/sqft map we featured a while back), aims to help you find that. It’s been freshly updated with 2018 data. Basically, there are four attributes – min/max travel time to a London terminus, season ticket cost, life satisfaction score (between 7 and 8 – ask people how happy they are with life, out of 10, they will generally say 7 or 8 on average) and house prices. The tool adds these values together, and ranks each of 115 towns. You can set min/max filters on each of the attributes, and the tool will then reorder the rank of towns that have values falling within your filters. A green/blue colour ramp is used to highlight the better places. Looking at all 115-odd places, Purfleet in Essex is No. 1. Cheap, quick commute in, happy people and good value (relatively speaking) house prices. The results are arranged on a pseudo-map of how the towns link to London via the rail network. It’s not quite right – it’s missing Cambridge to Liverpool Street, and Bedford to Luton for example, and is also missing a few towns, e.g. Marlow. Hertford and Ware are not connected to London correctly, and Cheshunt is also wrong. So don’t use it for journey planning, but it might give you some ideas on places, for sure. To see the actual...

London’s been sweltering under a heatwave for the last couple of weeks. Mapping London co-creator Dr James Cheshire has created this map from the latest (29 JUne) Landsat 8 thermal imagery of the capital. ExCeL is a particular hotspot – its large, flat, metallic roof was showing a temperature of 38°C, having been baked by the sun. The map uses a striking thermal colour ramp – ranging from hot to super-hot. Dr Cheshire’s advice – head to the parks to stay cool. Copyright Spatial Analysis/James...

[Updated with additional technical detail – see below] Here’s a fascinating data map of ground deformation (subsidence, upswelling) in central London, based on data from 2011-2017 and recalibrated to show the average annual change – be it rising (blue = 2mm/year upwards) or sinking (red = 2mm/year downwards). The data was obtained from 150 remote sensing images captured by the TerraSAR-X satellite and other InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) sources. It was processed using at TRE ALTAMIRA in Milan, Italy, using a technique called Permanent Scatterer Interferometry. All sorts of interesting patterns appear from the map. The most obvious is the red line running across the middle – the Crossrail tunnels across central London. The project has likely resulted in the slight drop in levels seen, although extensive compensation grouting has aimed to minimise the changes. Other red lines show electrical ducting projects and other utilities/infrastructure projects. Conversely, a large blue area near the south edge of the map might be early premptive groundwork on the Northern line Underground extension to Battersea Power Station, and the extensive residential works at Battersea Power Station (which is right at river/sea level) and the Vauxhall area in general. The specific reason however is not known. The large red area to the east could be two projects – various residential and other construction around the O2 Arena in North Greenwich, and the various works on the north bank opposite – London City Island, Limmo Peninsula shaft for Crossrail tunnelling works, and general residential tower development at Canning Town. This area has the River Lea running through it with dramatic meanders. The dewatering of deep chalk aquifer here, necessary to stabilise the ground, has seen a significant drop. Also, crucially, there were no buildings here before, so ground level...

This stunning map reveals the athletic footprint of London. Strava have taken their huge volume of movement data, recorded by runners, cyclists and other data-enabled fitness peeps and created a heatmap of London (and indeed, the world). Many people use Strava to record their cycle to work, whereas running to work is much rarer, and recreational running is much more likely so, in order to see an alternative, largely non-commuting flow map of London, we have here featured the running data. A street network is still seen, but the brightest lines are no longer the big road arteries of London – instead it is the park roads, athletics tracks, canal towpaths and the Thames footpaths. It shows a London reordered towards two feet rather than four (or two) wheels. The extract at top, centred over the London’s central area, shows four parks in each corner – Regent’s Park, Victoria Park, Greenwich Park and Battersea Park, as hotspots of activity, along with both sides of the Thames, the Regent’s Canal towpath, and Hyde Park. Two blurred areas – at Canary Wharf and the eastern part of the City of London – are likely a combination of a large number of runners and the GPS multipath-interference effect of the very tall, close together buildings in these areas. Looking more closely at certain areas, you can start to see the thousands of individual traces in each area, along with local “obstacles”: This obstacle, at Barnes Bridge in west London, is due to be fixed soon with a new underbridge: We featured an earlier version of the map in 2013, back then it only include a month’s worth of data, whereas this latest map includes all the data up to September 2017 (except that marked as private, in...

Tranquil Pavement is an online map recently launched by the Tranquil City project based in London, in association with the Outlandish Cooperative and funded by Organicity. It aims to highlight tranquil places to visit, if the hustle and bustle of city life gets too much, by plotting “crowdsourced “locations – referenced in an Instagram feed – as green circles, and also shows a general overlay map shade of calmness (or otherwise) across the capital. The latter is shown by a white (higher noise/pollution) to green (lower noise/pollution) gradient based on official data from DEFRA and the GLA. A different shade of green, showing park footprints, is underlaid to further emphasise likely tranquil locations. The background map makes a point of naming, and so highlighting, only smaller roads, rather than larger noisy artery roads, and also showing some water features, including, unusually, underground rivers such as the River Fleet. The overall map – tending to green in more suburban outer London, but with green highlights for specific tranquil locations more likely to be in the inner city, results in a rather pleasing to look at – although perhaps grey black would be an even better colour for pollution/noise – representing the murk of an untranquil location. Explore the live map here, or add the #tranquilcitylondon tag to your geotagged photos of London’s peaceful places, on...

Urban Good, a new community interest company created by Charlie Peel, have this month published the first edition of their London National Park City Map. This huge (over 1 metre wide when unfolded) paper map covering the whole of London, was created through a crowdfunding campaign, and is available from Urban Good’s web store for just a payment of a postage and handling fee. (N.B. temporarily out of stock, but you can pre-order for delivery expected soon). It’s part of a campaign, led by Dan Raven-Ellison, to designate London as the UK’s first National Park city – along the way, increasing the awareness and use of the capital’s many and varied green spaces, to further the fitness and health of Londoners and visitors. The campaign has caught the eye of the London Mayor, and this map has the support of the Greater London Agency. The map was produced using Ordnance Survey and GiGL (Greenspace Information for Greater London) data and aims to map all of London’s green space and water. When you include private gardens, it’s is estimated that almost 50% of London is green or blue. Urban Good have created a detailed map which has many functions – as well as mapping the green and blue space, it highlights public parks, allotments, marked walking trails, city farms, allotments, cemeteries and nature reserves. It also shows the city’s highest peaks and is indeed overlaid with a hillshade texture to show the slopes and hills. This has the effect of blurring and pixelating the garden/water detail below it – a printing quirk when combining raster field data like this with the vectors of the park outlines and captions means that the whole image is typically rasterised when sending to a lithographer or digital printer –...

It’s a typical August day in London today, with the rain falling pretty heavily and at least one tube station closed due to flooding. London’s greatest long-term flooding threat, though, is from isothermal expansion of the world’s water (i.e. it needs slightly more space as it heats) due to climate change. The above map was produced by Jeffrey Linn, showing what London would look like if submerged by 40 metres of seawater, which would happen due to the isothermal expansion happening by a temperature change that would cause 2/3rds of the world’s ice sheets to melt. Blues show the underwater regions, while greens and yellows show land that is dry – for the time being. Unsurprisingly, Thames-side London is well and truly in the drink, with some new islands appearing at Wimbledon Common, Kingston Hill and Richmond Park, while Shooters Hill, Crystal Palace, Highgate and Epping Forest form new peninsulas. Dark blues show particularly deep water – as well as the Thames itself, the Bluewater shopping centre, currently deep inside a chalk quarry, becomes a dark pool. This is a nice looking, if alarming, piece of cartography by Jeffrey, using the classic altitude and bathymetric colour ramps made famous from the Times Atlas and other classic physical maps of the world, with the lush, verdant greens of low-lying areas offset by the barren yellows and browns of higher places. The existing main road map is lightly superimposed in grey, to ground this map in current reality and allow for easy checking of the under/above water status of your neighbourhood. Quite a bit of climate change will have had to have happened for this scenario to happen. A more pressing scenario, showing a water rise of just 10 metres, will still put plenty of London...

[Updated] TfL have published a “London Digital Speed Limit Map“, showing speed limits for cars on a map of London’s public roads, for the last few years. It is updated annually, and it’s latest version has just been released. The map is a graphical representation of data supplied to digital mapping data providers, so that they can program in the correct speeds for satnavs in cars. The updates over the last few years reveal the gradual switch, in inner-city London boroughs, from 30mph (blue) to 20mph (green) limits for residential roads. In 2017 and 2018, this has resulted in a glaring hole in west-central London, where Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Wandsworth boroughs have resolutely stuck to allowing motorised traffic to travel at up to 30mph in residential areas, with a few small area exceptions (e.g. Queen’s Park in Westminster borough). This is not a particularly pretty map to look at, being essentially the output from a GIS (geographic information system) rather than a cartographically produced work designed for regular viewing. The 20/30 split is clear but the colours used to distinguish 30/40, and 50/60/National are hard to see – not that many roads in London have speed limits about 30mph anyway. The trends described above, however, are clear. Zooming in a long way helps, revealing your local familiar street network. Nonetheless, it deserves inclusion on Mapping London as it is an important snapshot of how different parts of London are evolving from car-centric design to a more inclusive street scene. Spot the Westminster borough boundary: An earlier edition of the map, from March 2017, looked like this: ..and from June 2016: As well as these official maps, OpenStreetMap contributors have been diligently adding speed tags to the roads of London (and indeed the...

Following a data release of Southwark’s publically maintained trees a couple of years back, the Greater London Authority recently published a map which shows street trees (trees along roads and public paths, and trees in public open spaces, such as small parks and other minor green areas). Each borough has its own tree database and not all boroughs have, at the time of creation of the map, supplied their data, so the map is a little incomplete (for example, it includes Islington and Tower Hamlets, but not Hackney which lies between the two, except alongside TfL-managed “red route” roads). Still, it has good coverage in many parts of London and reveals interesting patterns, not only in planting patterns differing coverage across different streets, but also the variation of species – for example, the red dots in the extract below show lines of pear trees in Marylebone. In total, there are currently 700,000 trees shown, out of a total of around 8 million across London (including those on private land, in forests, and in major parks not managed by the councils.) The GLA has published the underlying data on the London Data Store as a huge CSV file, along with notes about the collection process. 25 of London’s 32 boroughs released the data in a form which was easy to map, so for 7 borough the map remains largely blank. Within each borough, the level of detail, and the scope of the trees recorded varied. Boroughs can be reluctant to release such data, as tree damage and ownership disputes can arise from such datasets, but it’s great to see this information, showing the greening of what can be a gritty urban streetscape, being made available to all. See the map here. Download the data here....

Welcome to the Mapping London Christmas List 2016! Not long now until Christmas Day – if you are having a last minute present crisis, our list includes direct links, so you can browse, order, sit back and relax in the knowledge that the present selections for your London map geek friends (or yourself!) are all sorted.     Books     London: The Information Capital – The ground-breaking book on data, graphics and maps about London, by Mapping London co-editor Dr James Cheshire, has been recently published in a softback edition and is currently available for the bargain price of just £10.49. See our review or get it on Amazon.     Curiocity: In Pursuit of London – This huge, whimsical and alternatively focused compendium of London was published earlier this year. See our review or get it on Amazon.     Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics – The second book by James is newly out. Find out, in a series of stories, maps and graphics how animals migrate and move through the world. Yes, there is a London map in it! Guess which creature it features? Get the book on Amazon.     The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps: 1939-1945 – We’re highlighting this one as it’s been a consistent best-seller with readers of Mapping London since it was released just over a year ago. A weighty tome reproducing the detailed, carefully coloured maps of districts of London, showing the damage wrought by the Blitz of London and other attacks during the Second World War. The maps were painstakingly drawn for the London County Council, shortly after the war’s end. See our review or get it on Amazon.     The Great British Colouring Map: A Colouring Journey Around Britain...

Mapping London’s co-founder and “Editor at Large” Dr James Cheshire co-produced “London: The Information Capital” with Oliver Uberti in 2014. We mentioned the book on its initial release. The book has this month has now been published in a softback edition by Penguin, with some minor corrections applied. If you missed out on the book the first time, this is therefore an ideal opportunity to pick it up (e.g. here on Amazon) at a new, low price. The book, containing over 100 data maps and graphics, visualises London, its people and its data. The book runs to nearly 200 pages and every map style is different – many techniques have been employed, each aiming to best show its dataset in an original and eye-catching way. Some of my favourites are: Islington has Issues. This graphic (above, also see full online version) uses glyphs to represent each borough as a face, with the mouth, eyes, eyebrows, perspiration and general “glow” varying according to four measures of well-being. The graphic is also a map – the glyphs are arranged in three concentric circles, the innermost being an average and the middle and outer rings representing inner and outer London respectively. The boroughs are arranged approximately relative to each other in geographical space. This technique has been used in hexagonal and square forms before and I think it’s an effective way of simplifying borough boundaries (which are largely unfamiliar to most people) while preserving borough separations to show a changing picture across the capital. A single futher glyph represents the rest of the UK, showing that Londoners are generally unhappier than most. Top Crimes. The Met Police release the approximate locations and category of all crime reports in London. Crunching this data can derive information showing the...

Just in time for Hallowe’en comes Grim London, a spooky and atmospheric map of central London. Navigate around the bleak, faded map of the city you thought you knew, then type in a postcode (try WC1E 6BT) or a borough name. This loads a number of Maltese crosses for the local area – clicking on these reveals the grim history of that place. This is really well themed data map by creative agency Impero, great to see this new and impressive piece of cartography, with a suitably restrained colour palette and a Rustic fonts, faded tube roundels, and occasional missing sections of streets, add to the cognitive dissonance of the map, while WebGL fog swirls across the browser. Click the lamp and find out the scary stories local to your neighborhood. Visit the map...

Time Out London, the venerable London free magazine, have spotted that everyone in London loves maps, and so have launched a regular London Mapped feature in their City Life section & blog. This week’s map is rather interesting and not one I’ve seen before. It shows ONS 2015 data on net migration between each of London’s boroughs and the rest of the UK – so it includes cross-borough moves within London (which typically radiate outwards from Zone 1 to 6 as people age) but doesn’t include international migration (which tends to come straight in to Zones 2 to 3). Instead, it looks at the migration that happens when Londoners form families and need a bigger space than they can afford in their local borough or pensioners that yearn for the seaside or a quieter part of London (e.g. the east and south-west boroughs) or somewhere else in the UK, balanced against a steady, but often temporary, move to the universities and graduate opportunities in the capital. The key statistic is an overall outflow (domestically) seen in London’s population. London in general is increasing in population, but this is mainly due to a combination of births and inwards international migration (and in particular, the high birth rate of international immigrants.) By removing these particular population sources and flows, London suffers just under a 1% population decrease from 2014 to 2015 – a lesser reported statistic in between the headlines that London’s total population has recently hit an all-time high. We like the simple, blocky style, which approximately retains the shape of the 32 boroughs (+ the City of London), so is a hybrid of a pure squares approach and a regular geographic data map. Bravely, the creator omits the River Thames, and also leaves out...

This map shows the cross-borough London commuting flows in a different way to the conventional approach of drawing lines between the start and end of each commute (as shown here. It’s a large map of London boroughs, which each borough itself containing a small map of London. The intensity of the colour in each of these mini-maps shows the size of the flow from the origin borough (on the big map) to the destination borough (in the small map). Once you get your head around it, it’s a powerful and simple way to show a complex dataset. The simple grey, white and red colours reduce the clutter of the map (although personally I would have added a River Thames link through the main map and mini maps, for clarity) and, as long as you are familiar with London’s boroughs and their approximate location relative to each other, studying the map allows some interesting results to appear that would otherwise be hidden if just using lines. For example, in the affluent boroughs to the south west, most commute flow seems to either remain within the borough itself, or to the centre of London. In the poorer north east boroughs, the pattern is different with a strong additional commute flow to intermediate boroughs, as well as the local and central-London flows. This is likely caused by the different location and nature of jobs performed by residents in these respective borough groups. This technique of nested maps to show flows was developed at the giCentre at City University London. The map was created by Robert Radburn and he explains in detail its creation, along with an interactive allowing the display of different types of commutes, in this blog post. Via a...

The tube map is a useful base for data maps of London, because most people (north of the river, at least) tend to think of the city’s layout in terms of the tube map – generally, you know what your nearest tube station is. We’ve used the idea before to show maps of life expectancy, jobs and local languages, but TotallyMoney have taken the idea for one of London’s most discussed metrics – the cost of property in the capital. There’s been a few property price/tube mashup maps that have crossed the Mapping London desk over the years, but we particularly like this one because rather than using the official map (which TfL get upset about, and can be hard to work with), or a geographic map (which is less recognisable, if more representative) it uses a hybrid, custom-created map which is recognisable enough as the tube map but has a design which works well in showing the data. We particularly like the ribbon-like, always-important River Thames which flows organically through the map. The creators have also been careful to make clear what they are showing – it is the average price per square foot of properties for sales within half a kilometre of each of the tube stations, based on data from Zoopla on 1 May 2016. In some cases this may only be a small number of properties (and Heathrow is removed altogether as there are obviously no sales there!) but the variations as you travel along tube lines are relatively smooth, suggesting the measure is accurate and useful. Values range from £300 around Dagenham, in the east, to Knightsbridge, in central/west London – the latter being handy for Halfords but a property would set you back £2000 per square foot. A...

Alexander Brett has created this interactive map of London using the D3 visualisation framework and its “Force Layout” view. This places the data points (London ward centroids) at their geographic origin, and then applies a series of competing forces, as if the points are connected by a mesh of springs, to subtly adjust the locations based on the data value. Alex has seeded the map with a number of socioeconomic datasets from the London Datastore. You can set two variables – one, a list of categorical measures, controls the colours, and the other, a list of qualitative measures, controls the area sizes. You then sit back and let the code do its magic, as the map warps and the circles grow and shift into their new data values. The technique is both clever and simple at the same time – it’s a neat bit of D3.js programming, and the results are easy to interpret and navigate. It reminds me of the After the Flood cartograms, although it’s more geographically accurate. I’ve tried a similar technique for my London Election map although I’ve not allowed my circles to ebb and flow based on the data, so my data can overlap or leave empty spaces. The code is open source so it should be straightforward for the community to adopt and enhance it. I would love to see the London Datastore use this as a “default” visualisation of their ward and borough level datasets. While a map with regular geographical features certainly has its place, sometimes stripping nearly everything away can be just as clear and informative. Above – crime rate for each London ward, based on crimes per resident population, 2014/15, Met Police area only. Each borough is coloured different. Westminster in the centre stands...

This is one of the many data visualisation and design postcards that Stefanie Posavec and Georgia Lupi sent each other of the course of a year. It’s a personal map of Stefanie’s London history – where she lived, studied and worked, her main commute and other routes. Everyone living in London will build up a map like this – in their head. Stefanie drew hers. Stefanie is giving a talk about the Dear Data project that she and Georgia created, at the St Bride Foundation on Fleet Street on 26 April. See here for more information about the talk. Copyright Stefanie Posavec. Many thanks to the St Bride’s Foundation for inviting me to the...

SmellyMaps reveals the “olfactory footprint of London” – the streets which are dominated by traffic fumes, the animal smells emanating out from London Zoo, and the influence of parks and greenspaces on London’s scent experience. Streets are measured for four smell groupings based on tags from Flickr photos calibrated from a smell taxonomy: emissions (coloured red on the map), nature (green), food (blue) and animals (yellow), the map colouring each road by the most dominant of the four. Clicking on the segment reveals the measurements. The results are attractively presented on a background map. SmellyMaps is an output from Bell Labs’ Daniele Quercia, based partly on many urban walks and surveys by RCA student Kate McLean, which created the smell taxonomy from which the Flickr and other social media data was categorised, creating the final map. I wonder how big the smell footprint from the Lush cosmetic shops extends? See the interactive map here. From a presentation by...

So, we thought yesterday’s post on Google Maps for Mobile was the last time we’d be mentioning Google Maps for a little while, but then this happened. Google has managed to turn the entire world, including much of London, into a Pac-Man game. Or rather, lots of Pac-Man games. Go to Google Maps right now, zoom into an area of interest (which needs to have a decent number of streets or tracks), and click the little Pac-Man box on the bottom left. Your current view gets turned into a Pac-Man game! You even get the classic sounds if you then click the speaker icon on the top left. Now you can go play Pac-Man based on the street layout of your childhood neighbourhood, your university campus, the centre of the last city you visited on holiday… If on mobile, the choices are more limited – you’ll need to zoom to the centre of a number of major cities rather than having free reign over most of the world. There are some clues in this help page, which also reveals that a Google red pin parker, and “Peg Man”, the Street View icon, are the top two “cherry” bonus objects that you might find. Chances are, this “April Fools” gift is only going to be around until the end of April 1, so get playing! Maps © Google and presumably Namco? Above: Trafalgar Square. Below: The Inner Circle of Regent’s Park....

This is a simple but effective borough-by-borough cartogram of the median house price in London. The map appears on the London data store but is otherwise uncredited. However, it is the first “in the wild” map that we’ve seen based on the prototype London Squared Map concept, produced by After The Flood and the Future Cities Catapult. The data comes from Land Registry price-paid data. The idea reduces each London borough (which have approximately equal populations, but are generally smaller in area in the inner city) to a square, then arranges them in the approximately correct location in relation to each other – a cartogram The Thames is added as a cartographical stroke as it the standard referencing object for London and helps make the cartogram more “normal” and relatable to London’s true geography. The numbers may be of surprise to some – a £500,000+ “average house price” figure has been popular in the press recently, because it sounds like a huge number and so worth shouting about – but it’s worth bearing in mind that this is a simple average. The median figures used in the graphic here are a better measure as 50% of houses are below the figure and 50% above – the skew caused by a few extremely high-priced houses doesn’t affect the median. There is no upper limit for how much you can sell a house for, but the lower limit is obviously £0. The graphic shows that in some of London’s boroughs, the figure is (relatively) low – and remember, 50% of properties in such boroughs sold for lower still. London’s median value for 2014 was around £340,000. We like the simple, “grid of squares” concept and the addition of the Thames. Cartograms are hard to produce in...

This animation from Will Gallia shows over 500,000 individual journeys on the London Underground network, it’s a 5% sample of Oyster-card journeys during a week back in 2009. Will has taken the individual origin/destination data and applied a routing algorithm to determine the likely route. I don’t think it’s perfect (the Underground flows north to London Bridge in the morning peak look a little low) but you can still clearly see people streaming inwards in the morning, and back outwards in the evening. You can also see comparatively underused parts of the network – the Hainault loop of the Central line in the top-right for instance, Aldgate on the Met, and individual bursts of travellers appearing in Chesham and Amersham in the far top-left (the trains there are quite infrequent). A key innovation is transplanting these journeys back onto the geometries of the “official” (and non-geographical) Beck-style tube map, so that it looks like the regular tube map that everyone knows, but “buzzing” with – and indeed created solely by – people. His animation slows the clock at one point and “flies in” to part of the map for a more detailed look. Each dot is a single person, undergoing their journey at that moment of the day. I like the simplicity of the idea – one person, one coloured dot. The directional flows therefore stand out, particularly at the start and end of the day when the network is quieter. During the rush hours it’s pretty intense – but then, tube travel is pretty intense then too! The density of the dots is sufficient that the map itself is fully recreated by the people moving along the network. Will has used advanced coding and optimisation techniques, using openFrameworks, to allow for thousands of...

This is a map of geolocated Tweets for the whole world (we’ve defaulted to London here) created by Eric Fischer of Mapbox, who collected the data over several years. The place where each tweet is posted from is shown by a green dot. There are millions and millions of tweets on the global map – in fact, over 6.3 billion. The map is zoomable and the volume of tweets means that popular locations stand out even at a high zoom level. The dots are in fact vectors, so retain their clarity when you zoom right in. The map is interactive – pan around to explore it. If you think this looks similar to some other maps on Mapping London, you’d be right. We’ve featured this kind of social media ‘dot-density mapping’ numerous times before, including with Foursquare and Flickr (also Eric’s work), as well as colouring by language. The key difference with this latest map is the sheer volume of data. By collecting data on geolocated tweets over the course of several years, globally, Eric has assembled the most comprehensive map yet. He has also taken time to ensure the map looks good at multiple zoom levels, by varying the dot size and dot density. He’s also eliminated multiple tweets that happen at the exact same location, and reduced some of the artefacts and data quality issues (e.g. straight lines of constant latitude or longitude) to produce perhaps the cleanest Twitter dot-density map yet. However it should still be borne in mind that while maps of tweets bear some relationship to a regular population density map at small scales, at large scales they will show a bias towards places where Twitter users (who may be more likely to be affluent and younger than the...

UsVsTh3m, prolific creators of topical news games (more!), have put together this great looking map showing the London locations of a large number of classic British sitcoms. There’s a good spread across the whole of London, except in the south-east. Like tube lines, it seems sitcoms ignore this part of London. And as one Reddit commenter (where I first spotted the map) noted, many of the classic sitcoms were set in, at the time, tough looking neighbourhoods, which gave them a particular feel. Most of these places have now gentrified to the point that the programmes would have a very different setting if they were filmed there now. The map includes Birds of a Feather which is based in Chingford – although technically that’s not London, the area certainly feels like it is, so it’s very worthy of inclusion in a London map like this. We like the adornments surrounding the map itself – it’s constructed within an old-style TV set and includes caricatures of some of the most famous faces of London sitcoms. Like all good London maps, it also includes the Thames – Londoners’ standard point of reference. The map itself is clear and simple, with the borough boundaries drawn in for context, and little else, so that the map doesn’t distract from the main emphasis of the graphic – that London has played host to a great number of our TV comedies. See the full map and clips from the shows on the UsVsTh3m website. (While we are on the topic of UsVsTh3m, here’s a great “guess the mystery tube station” game. Think you know the standard tube map by heart?) Map created by UsVsTh3m, based on an original set of data on a Google Map researched by Jonn...

We’d thought we’d put together a list of our favourite London map gifts that are in the shops, as last year‘s list proved popular. 1. London: The Information Capital This brand new book by Mapping London co-editor James Cheshire, contains “100 maps and graphics that will change how you view the city” and it certainly is a book that sits at the intersection of London, mapping and data. It’s a book as much about data map design as it is about London, as it contains various innovative graphic techniques and map designs to show London’s data, old and new. From a time chart of activities of London’s police helicopter, through a colourful ribbon graphic of every census statistic across every part of London, to . We’ve featured a number of the graphics in previous posts too. The book’s RRP is £25 and it is currently selling like hot mince pies on Amazon and in various bookshops across London and beyond. (Full disclosure: I contributed a small number of the graphics in the book.) 2. Map of London’s Craft Breweries Craft breweries have bring springing up in all corners of London recently, as the capital has acquired a taste for chilled, hoppy local brews rather than the big chains. Blue Crow Media have produced this lovely poster showing all the locations of the breweries, many of which have tap rooms open at certain times, where you can try out the beers, fresh! It’s £12.50 in their online shop. One craft brewery we particularly like is the Hammerton Brewery in Islington. Their beer is nice, and as a bonus, they have maps of London on their bottle labels! 3. Nairn’s London There is a new reprinting of Nairn’s London, a 1966 classic, quirky guide to a...

Above is a map from Mapping London co-editor Dr Cheshire’s new book The Information Capital that appeared in this week’s Time Out (print & online). It dramatically shows how unaffordable large parts of London have become – areas where the median price of a flat (i.e as many flats above this price locally as below it) is over £250,000 have completely burnt away. As the local level approaches that threshold, the colours get increasingly firey, suggesting that, if prices continue to rise, the burnt edge will continue to expand. (Some of the white areas in the suburbs indicate where flats are not generally sold, regardless of price). On a similar theme, Splittable uses similar colours to show where you are really going to have to share if you are looking to rent, and where you can live on your own – for £130/week budget, the yellow colours in the excerpt below show that there is only a small pocket in south-east London where such a place is unaffordable. These two maps may be alarming to look at if you are setting to buy or rent, but remember they are just the median – there are plenty of places in “good” areas for a lot less than the values shown – you’ll probably have to compromise on something else...

London has been home to many great cartographers and has been the subject of many stunning maps that depict all aspects of life in the city.  Drawing inspiration from these and capitalising on the huge volumes of data now available, I have spent the past year working with designer Oliver Uberti to create a collection of maps and graphics entitled London: The Information Capital. We asked ourselves questions such as Which borough of London is the happiest?  Where are the city’s tweeting hot spots?   How many animals does the fire brigade save each year?  Which London residents have left their mark on history? Where are London’s most haunted houses (and pubs)? What makes London the information capital? and sought to answer them through data visualisation. The book contains over 100 full-colour spreads alongside some brief essays to introduce each of the 5 broad themes – Where we are, Who we are, Where we go, How we’re doing and What we like. Oliver Uberti and I worked closely with our publisher Particular Books (part of Penguin) to create a book that was a beautiful as it could be. Inside you’ll find some graphics with transparent overlays for before/ after comparisons, binding that minimises the impact of the centre fold and page dimensions tailored to the shape of London. All this showcases everything from watercolours of London’s protected vistas, 24 hours of shipping in the Thames Estuary and London’s data DNA. You can find out more here or pick up a copy on Amazon now or in all good bookshops from the 30th. There are also a couple events taking place to mark the launch of the book. Find out more...

The Foursquare social network has always been very focused on place – its key element being the “checkin” to the pub, restaurant or park you are in. The more ubiquitous social networks Facebook and Twitter have subsequently adopted the idea of checking in you (& your hopefully willing friends) but Foursquare was the pioneer and has amassed a huge set of data showing the social places that people visit. There are number of visualisations that have been produced, showing this activity for London and other places. Here are two. Above is Foursquare’s own visualisation, showing checkins over a 24 hours period in the capital, late last year. They have categorised and coloured each type of place (food, shop, nightlife etc) and also included checkins on a moving object (mainly trains/buses), showing this activity as a visually striking pulse of movement. Play the short animation and you can vividly see the commuter influx at 6-8am in the morning, and back out from the centre of London which starts at around 5pm, but carries on late into the even. Late at night, a few night services can be seen, such as the 24 hour trains to Gatwick Airport and Brighton. A similar idea is The Back of Your Hand by Stuart Robinson, using Foursquare checkin data. Checkins are grouped into Eat, Drink, Shop and Entertainment, each colour-coded – clusters of places being alpha-blended to increase their visibility. The website is interactive – you can click on a dot to find out the names of the establishment concerned. Like Foursquare’s own map, the traditional central London social clusters of Soho, Covent Garden and Shoreditch stand out, as do some other edge-of-centre hotspots such as Camden, Angel, Borough and Shepherd’s Bush. One more thing about Foursquare – they...

A website calling for a Greater London National Park launched today (1 April) although it’s keen to point out that it’s not actually an April Fool, but a (half-)serious idea – although it is just a Notional Park for now. Why should the UK’s national parks be exclusively in rural areas? The website points out the large number of parks in London (over 2000) and also that it is a city mainly of houses and gardens than high-rise flats, as such the “greenspace” of private gardens forms a not insubstantial portion of the capital’s land use. Taking water, parks and gardens together, the natural environment accounts for more than half the total land area in London. To drive the point home, there is this map, we like how it uses a rather beguiling series of shades of green to illustrate just how rural the metropolis actually is. As a bonus, the website also contains a map by Ben Hennig of WorldMapper (and soon LondonMapper) fame, showing the distribution of hedgehogs in London, with the boroughs distorted to show their hedgehog population rather than their geographical area. Thanks to Daniel Raven-Ellison for sending us the...

This was the submission by the Mapping London editors into the 10×10 Drawing the City London 2013 art event, which was a charity auction run by Article 25. The graphic shows nine different census results for the area around Shoreditch in east London. A single print was produced on canvas, bound by UCL Geography’s Drawing Office, and presented for the auction at the Granary Building in King’s Cross late last year, where it received four bids and raised £140 for good causes. You can find more about the work in the blog posts by James andOllie. The following explanatory notes were on a sheet accompanying the artwork: This work shows demographic information from the 2011 Census, broken out by Output Area and clipped to buildings within the 10X10 project area. The data is based on where people live, not where they work. Windows: University Education: Proportion of population educated to Level 4 (equivalent to higher education certificate) or above. Technology Workforce: Proportion of population employed in the information and communication industry sector. Financial Workforce: Proportion of population employed in the financial and insurance industry sector. Never Married: Proportion of population that has never married. Bluer colours indicate a higher proportion. Population Density: Residential population density. White British: Proportion of population that consider themselves to be White British. Purpler colours indicate a higher proportion. Health: Proportion of population that consider themselves to be in Very Good Health. Greener colours indicate a higher proportion. Age: Mean age of the residential population. Gender Balance: Male to female ratio. Purpler colours indicate a higher proportion of males. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.1.0. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2013. Created by James Cheshire and Oliver O’Brien at...

There is always interest in London’s astronomical rents and house prices. As with any global city, there is huge demand for somewhere to live in the heart of the action – that is within 40 minutes or so commute to central London. This is a classic geographic problem with where you live determining how much you pay to a greater extent than almost any other factor. Maps therefore offer the best way of charting the trends. The FT Interactive team have produced this map that shows the proportion of people’s gross income required to rent in each postcode area of London. This was part of a series of articles that discussed the increasing amount of house sharing required amongst recent graduates in order that they can afford London prices. Find Properly have created Tube- map based graphics of rental prices. This concept isn’t new, but they have made them “real-time” which is a neat feature especially given the volatility of prices in some areas. Finally, for those looking to buy, Neal Hudson from Savills has produced this (very dense!) map of the average prices paid for flats per postcode. …and for those readers on a larger budget, here are where flats are selling for over...

  A huge amount of energy is wasted each year in London as heat escapes from our buildings in winter or is pumped out from air conditioners in the summer. In a bid to look into the ways that London can be made more sustainable, the GLA have just published a report that identifies the parts of the capital where this wasted heat can be converted into useful energy. As the map above shows, the City and West-End rank among the areas with the greatest potential to recycle energy currently wasted. We have produced an interactive version here. There are other areas too that have large supplies of untapped energy that is either emitted from sewers – shown in the map below – or from industrial sources. Thanks to Chris Grainger of Buro Happold for sending over the maps. You can download the data used to to create them here.   As an addendum (thanks to Roberto Gagliardi la Gala for the extra information) there is a similar work that has been carried out in 2009: the GLA (former LDA) launched the London Heat Map – which links to an interactive GIS map (registration needed to access full functionalities) – in order to show heat consumption data, heat supply potential and opportunities for Decentralised Energy...

Strava, one of a number of services that walkers, runners and cyclists can use with their smartphones, recording and uploading their routes, has released a heatmap showing the activity uploaded to the network on Saturday 20 July. Zooming into London reveals many tracks. By default it shows cycling uploads, with a toggle for routes on foot. There is a sizeable pulse heading NE from Hackney, when viewing the visualisation for the evening hours. This is the Dunwich Dynamo, a 120-mile free sportive, that takes place overnight once a year, where upwards of 1000 cyclists head out of London, towards the Suffolk coast. As such, despite Strava’s claim on the site, it was anything but a typical Saturday. (Note also that the map possibly normalises based on activity, so that when the Dynamo starts at around 8pm, other cycling activity in London is less prominently represented. Or maybe that’s just because it’s starting to get dark…) It’s a nice visual, although an aggregated view across several Saturdays, or several weekdays, would provide a more representative graphic of London’s activity hotspots and popular recreational routes. See also this heatmap of running routes using Nike+ apps which we highlighted earlier this year. Found via an article on road.cc. Basemap is Google...

This is an extract of a map, by Matt Ashby, formerly of the UCL SECReT (Security and Crime Science) lab, that takes police.uk open data on crime locations, analyses and filters the data for hotspots, and shows the concentrated areas of crime by colouring in a road network map sourced from Ordnance Survey open data. The cartography of the map is clear and attractive, and the visualisation is a great example of “less is more” – by filtering and removing the “noise” (crimes of all sorts happen across London but that doesn’t mean everywhere is in the grip of a crimewave) it allows the significant results to stand out. The full map is available to download as an A0 PDF from this blog post which also highlights some of the interesting patterns in the data, such as crime along the long traditional high streets of London. Matt also produces Crime in London [Update – site closed] which provides a clear and simple way of displaying up-to-date police.uk data, for each borough and ward in the capital, including trend information, local hotspots, and detail on the individual crime categories. Headlines are automatically generated which present the most pertinent information. It’s one of the clearest and most informative websites I’ve seen for a while and an excellent example of combining statistical and geographical open data sources with sensible simplification and good web design, to create a compelling and informative website. As well as the crime-specific information, neighbourhood profiles are also available at ward level, pulling in census, land cover and other information, including Geograph photos. Matt continues to update his blog with crime data-related research, you can read the latest posts here. The map is CC-By Matt Ashby who is @lesscrime on...

UbiSoft have created this compelling live map of London’s sensor and social media data, as part of a promotion for their upcoming game “Watch Dogs”. There are also versions available for Paris and Berlin. The map shows a wireframe style map of London – using OpenStreetMap data for building outlines and augmenting them with POIs for electronic features in streets (e.g. CCTV cameras, traffic lights, Barclays Cycle Hire docking stations, tube stations, ATMs and mobile phone transmitter masts) and for the most recent social media posts (Flickr and Instagram photos, FourSquare checkins and Tweets). Tube trains are shown as blobs moving along their network – the map is near-live, although the trains locations are based on timetabled frequency rather than actual live position. Selecting a POI either reveals its contents or shows a “triangulation” animation connecting it to its nearest neighbours, revealing an implied network of sensors. The POI data comes from the aformentioned social networks and also data from OpenStreetMap, Data.gov.uk and TfL. There is also some vaguely sinister background music and occasional sparks and fizzes, which create a compelling, futuristic atmosphere. It’s a great effort by UbiSoft – showing geolocated social media activities on maps is not new but this comprehensive aggregation and polish has created a compelling glimpse of London’s “online” presence and hopefully it will continue after the game’s launch. N.B. The full experience requires a Mac/PC with Flash. There is also mobile version of the website which is much more cut-down, showing just a subset of the data. All the information used in the visualisation is of course freely available on the internet – although many people using social media often don’t twig that their data is available in such a way. N.B. the CCTV camera images don’t display...

A map full of striking patterns, from Savills’ analyst Neal Hudson. It shows the areas of London where, for each area, the second most popular language is spoken by more than 5% of residents there, based on the 2011 Census. It clearly reveals London’s linguistic clusters, from Arabic to Yiddish and Lithuanian to Tamil. The full-size map is no longer on Neal’s website but you can download it here. Note that this is not a map of people’s own second languages, but rather of the second most popular language spoken in each area. The areas used are Middle Super Output Areas which have a typical population of around 10000 people, so, as a guide at least 500 people within each area speak the language shown as their primary language. Middle Super Output Areas are a statistical grouping of areas. They are somewhat analogous to political wards, except that they change if their populations decrease below, or increase above, thresholds, whereas wards tend to remain constant. Thanks to Neal for creating this map and allowing us to host it here. See also Tube Tongues and Ward...

  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 million Oyster users. After inferring the times and locations of each bus boarding and alighting, bus and rail transactions are combined to reconstruct each cardholder’s daily travel history. If you are really keen to see how this was done, the work behind this formed part of Jays’s masters thesis. This is a cross- post from...

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 terrain layer. The result reveals the most common running routes in London. Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, Battersea Park, Victoria Park and Clapham Common stand out, as does the canal network, particular the section of the Regent’s Canal between Victoria Park and Dalston, and also routes along the river – particularly the classic loop between Westminster Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge. Narrow Street (near Canary Wharf) also appears. A few surprising areas – Southampton Way near Burgess Park, and Kilburn Grange Park, also show strongly on the heatmap – likely due to a very keen local regularly uploading their routes. View the live map. Background map copyright Google 2013. Foreground data copyright Nike and the running...

Here’s a map of Zone 1 London (concentrating on the tube lines) constructed with sprites from the old-skool (80s!) console game Super Mario Bros 3. Take the stress out of navigating across the central part of London’s tube network by imagining you are a computer sprite! If you like this style, see also 8-Bit London. Seen on the London Subreddit. Created by and copyright...

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 realistic Google Earth fly-through, this presents central London in a cartoon-like 3D environment, with a fixed 45-degree “birds-eye” view, and intuitive controls – just drag to fly somewhere and pinch to zoom in/out. What I really like is the little cars moving around the streets, trains moving along the railway lines and in and out of the stations, and ships on the Thames. Buildings are shown in 3D with generally generic textures, except for major buildings which have a dedicated texture and shape, such as tourist attractions, skyscrapers and stations. Building heights appear to be correctly represented, with the appropriate number of floors being shown even on the generically-textured blocks. Particular care has been taken on adding in the Olympic venues – below left is a zoomed in view of the Olympic Park. The map covers most of Zone 1 and 2 of London. it’s not perfect – the DLR is missing for instance, and the road network is also often not joined up correctly, meaning it is potentially tricky to use as a navigation app (as opposed to a POI finder). A welcome addition is the location of bike hire points. By default, the bike hire point closest to the middle of the map “view” is higlighted, with an empty/full indicator displayed. Tapping on any other bike hire point will reveal its status. Moving around the map feels not unlike playing the classic Sim City 4 computer game. This fun...

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 are completed every day in London (a trip corresponds to a single bus completing its route). Roads with more buses running along them are wider and redder, those with fewer buses are narrower and yellower and those with no buses have been excluded. The map demonstrates the impressive coverage of London’s bus network and how integral it is to London’s transport infrastructure. Joan Serras  (the data guru who also produced the above video last year) calculated the routes* between each of the bus stops in London and used the timetables to calculate how many times a bus passes along them. This method is an improvement on previous work (and the video), which has simply assumed the buses travel in a straight line between stops- in the map above the buses follow the road network. The map’s simplicity disguises the fact that it contains routing information calculated between 22,565 bus stops (in the GLA and a little bit beyond). You get a sense of this complexity if you take a look at the underlying spatial data (see below: each dot is a bus stop).   The top map will be on display as part of CASA’s Smart Cities Conference taking place this Friday. *This is the shortest route between two bus stops using as cost a measure of travel time deduced using the length and the speed limit on each road...

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, hand-drawn look, although of course it’s actually some very clever programming that is allowing the imagery to be produced automatically – for the entire world. Stamen go into detail on the textures and the general creation process in wonderful detail on their blog, which also introduces the style and two others. Map imagery CC-By Stamen Design, based on OpenStreetMap data CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap...

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 grid where there is both Flickr and Twitter activity, a white dot is shown. The centre of London predictably has intense traffic from both Twitter and Flickr. It’s when you move away from the centre that interesting clusters appear. The route of the Thames is obvious because of the high density of Flickr photographs, compared to tweets – so it stands out in orange. Similarly London’s major parks and open spaces all stand out in orange. Two particularly large orange blobs, near the left and right edges of the image, represent Kew Gardens and Greenwich Park respectively. Other places have large young populations (likely leading to more Twitter activity) but aren’t so photogenic, so appear in blue. Croydon, at the bottom edge of the image, and Kingston, near the bottom left edge, stand out in this year, as do some straight lines radiating out from the centre of the city, corresponding to major arterial roads. Eric has applied the same technique for other cities around the world, and also compared Flickr photograph locations for locals and tourists, again revealing some distinctive urban zones. Imagery is CC-By Eric...

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 taken data for 3.2 million journeys from the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme and combined it with GLA pollution data for particulate matter. Unsurprisingly, pollution is worse at junctions and where there is lots of static traffic, with the popular cycling routes around Waterloo Bridge and the Strand particularly affected. Most of the journeys are subject to relatively low (by London standards) levels because cyclists try and avoid the busiest routes, such as Euston Road. The loop around Hyde Park is really popular with Boris Bikers and fortunately one of the least polluted but clearly more could be done to sort out the pollution hotspots around the west end. The routes have been guessed using routing algorithms and OpenStreetMap data and optimised for cyclists (ie we assumed that people would prefer cycle lanes over roads etc). Thanks to Ollie O’Brien for this analysis. You can see more of his work here. I produced this map using the R software package and blog about how I did it here. *This post was originally published on the spatialanalysis.co.uk...

“Geodemographics of Housing in Great Britain – a new visualisation in the style of Charles Booth’s map” is a map that I have produced that shows the Index of Multiple Deprivation ranking deciles for London and the rest of England. The most deprived 10% of areas in coloured in dark red, the next 10% in lighter red, and so on. Instead of colouring each area uniformly, as a choropleth (or thematic) map, only building blocks are coloured as such. This stops parks and other uninhabited land from acquiring the colours of surrounding housing, although non-residential housing is unfortunately not excluded. This can be thought of as a primitive forma of dasymetic mapping. It is similar in concept to Charles Booth’s Poverty Map of London from 1898-8, where he also coloured building areas based on the classification, although his map was at a much finer detail, being based on personal visits to the houses. The building outlines, along with roads, railways, water features and placenames, come from the Ordnance Survey’s Vector Map District dataset, part of its Open Data suite. There is more information about the map on my blog. A simliar map, of the Output Area Classification (OAC), is also available, although, due to the capital’s unique size and characteristics, the OAC does not distinguish its areas well. Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2011. IMD 2010 data from the Department of Communities and Local...

LOCOG (The London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games) yesterday released a new map of the key Olympic Park in east London, as part of their 200-days-to-go celebrations. They also detailed new games-mode names for several of the venues, entrances and key roads in the park, such as London Way (the only such named road in London, apparently), Victoria Gate, Victoria Walk (aka the Hackney Wick bit of the Greenway) and the Copper Box, the latter being a rather appropriate name for the Handball Arena. Eton Manor Transport Hub used to be known as East Marsh – part of Hackney Marshes. There is also a World Square and an Orbit Circus, neither areas look particularly square or circular, but maybe tiling on the ground will rectify this. Anyway it is a nicely done map with some clear cartography and good colour usage (I particularly like the slightly pastel theming), once you realise that northwards is pointing to the left… As I live very locally to the site, I particularly appreciate such maps, as they lift the lid on what’s happening in the park, beyond what I can see through the tall perimeter fences. By way of comparison I have included another map below, which is the latest Ordnance Survey Street View map provided as part of its Open Data initiative, of the same area. I’ve rotated it so that northwards is also leftwards. This map is slightly older and the range of features included in the Open Data product is restricted. Path detail, in particular, is missing. Both maps are © Crown Copyright and database right 2011 Ordnance Survey. Both can be clicked on to view a larger version. A higher quality PDF of the top map can be found by following the links...

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 transport and people’s use of social media. So before we head into 2012, take a moment to enjoy 2011’s cartographic delights. January: Congestion Charge Shrinkage The Mayor of London removed the Congestion Charge’s Western Extension (WEZ), shrinking the zone back to its original area east of Park Lane. Map Copyright: Transport for London February: Tweets in London UCL CASA researchers Steven Gray and Oliver O’Brien produced a heatmap of London, based on geolocated Twitter data, collected through February. Certain geographical features of London appear simply by looking at where people were tweeting from. Contains data from Twitter, OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey Open Data (Boundary-Line). March: Anti-Cuts March In March there was a huge march against the government’s spending cuts, with an estimated 250,000 taking part. The Guardian produced this map of the planned route. Bonus Map: The Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010 was published in March. UCL Geography student Chris Gale mapped the data for London as a cartogram, distorting the areas to more properly represent the population in them. The full version on his site allows for a “swipe” comparison between the cartogram version and the geographical one, showing an apparent correlation between highly populated areas and areas with relatively high deprivation. Map produced by Chris Gale. Contains boundary data which is Crown Copyright and data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). April: The Royal Wedding The Royal Parks produced a beautiful 3D map showing the route of...

Transport for London would really rather you didn’t travel into Zone 1 – the central part of London. It’s a lot cheaper to travel on the London Underground, or indeed the rail network, if your journey doesn’t involve going to, or through, Zone 1. A Zone 2-3 journey is £1.40 during the Peak Periods, while the same journey on Zone 1-3 is £2.50. This map (larger version) shows what the tube network (and selected railway lines that go very near Zone 1) would look like, if the Zone 1 stations were taken out. The non-tube/non-Overground/non-DLR lines are shown as black dots. Stations on the boundary of Zone 1 are included as you can travel to these (but not further) without getting the Zone 1 premium. [As a followup, Here’s what happens if you add in bike share docking stations to the mix.] I’m using a pseduogeographical tube map. It’s based on an original SVG map, collected from public-domain measured coordinates and posted on Wikimedia by Ed G2s and James F, subsequently updated for Wikipedia by David Cane. I then used GEMMA to create a map of all the train lines in London, using the data from OpenStreetMap (CC-By-SA, will be sharing imminently). I then traced over that map in Inkscape to add in the Overground and the selected other railway...

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 company for 90 minutes of London map talk. For those who missed it I have included some of the slides, maps and videos that I talked about in my presentation. I have only been able to include those we have formally released so I am afraid one or two are missing. First up was a map of London Bollards. I used this to demonstrate that even though John Kennedy’s Bollards of London blog may seem a bit fanatical to you and I, he is not alone in his interests. All the bollards on the map below have been voluntarily mapped as part of the OpenStreetMap project. The map was produced using a great new tool called GEMMA (soon to be released) developed at CASA. Next up I showed a couple of maps that demonstrate my personal interest in some of the social issues affecting Londoners. The first illustrates the great educational divide in the city. Each Borough has been scaled by the number of children who took GCSEs in 2010 and then coloured by their grades. The map below shows a similar divide in the cuts to London Boroughs announced late last year. The Boroughs this time have been scaled by the number of children living in poverty. Next up were a couple of snapshots, featured in the Times Atlas of London, of the interactive map of London surnames I produced earlier this year. Click on the image to go to the map itself. After this...

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 large number of thin traces, while distinct London linear features like the River Thames and the Westway, are also clear – the former in the absence of traces and the latter showing up as a very intense line. The artwork will be appearing, with many other London-related maps, at The Art of Mapping, an exhibition curated by TAG Fine Arts in London, which will be taking place at The Air Gallery from 14-26 November. TAG Fine Arts have kindly lent me a number of images from the exhibition, from which the above is my favourite. More information about their exhibition – which will undoubtedly be a must for lovers of cartographic art and London maps – can be found on the TAG Fine Arts website. Mapping London will be visiting, not least to spot some new maps and visualisations of London for this blog! The theme of recording your life’s movements by GPS is one which we know well here at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Fabian Neuhaus, a Ph.D student here, as been carrying a GPS for over three years, along with a number of friends, to collect data as part of his work. He writes a blog, UrbanTick. I’m directly involved with a similar project at a different scale, by another UCL Ph.D. I’m carrying a GPS unit 24-hours a day for the next two months, along with around 50 other volunteers. GPS tracks of central London were also instrumental in getting OpenStreetMap off the...

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 early-1980s computer games. As you zoom in, more detail appears, but with the same square-block style. The project is 8 Bit Cities. It’s a great example of “‘Boing Boing’ cartography” (“hey, that’s neat!”), as distinguished from machine-generated “industrial cartography” (a la Google Maps) and “artisan cartography” (hand-made historical maps), the three categories of cartography identified at a talk I was at the the Society of Cartographers Summer School last...

This map of mobile phone signal strength, produced by the GeoInformation Group this year, was one of the graphics featured in the exhibition that accompanied the launch of the London Mapping Festival at the beginning of June. The map, a raster at 5m resolution, shows how the mobile phone topography of London is affected by tall buildings, rivers and terrain. Its colours remind me of the Output Area Classification Map of demographics based largely on the 2001 census. It could be argued that a modern geodemographic classification these days might indeed take into account the availability and quality of mobile phone reception. Other graphics in the exhibition included hand-drawn maps of people’s neighbourhoods and observations, the maps that are included on the Barclays Cycle Hire “miniliths” at each docking station, and some lovely old maps from the University of Cambridge Map Library. The exhibition will accompany some of the other events that take place over the next 18 months as part of the festival. Copyright The GeoInformation Group Ltd, 2011. N.B. Apologies for the poor quality of the image, which was taken with my mobile phone at the exhibition. Unfortunately there was no key accompanying the...

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 data across several weeks using some technologies he has developed. It is a heatmap of sorts, with particular locations where the level of tweets are very high. The data is collected in a 30km radius around central London. London’s city centre stands out, as would be expected, as well as a distinctive streak of tweets heading directly north – an arm of London where the typical Twitter demographic – young and connected – makes up a particularly high proportion of people living there. Other features – such as along a road in the North West that suffered severe roadworks during the collection period, the A13/Eurostar travel line running along estuarine Essex, and the runways of Heathrow Airport, also appear. It’s also interesting to see how large parts of surburban London are “empty” of tweets. Further detail on Steven’s Big Data Toolkit blog. The map contains data which is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap and contributors (the River Thames) and which is Crown Copyright Ordnance Survey (OpenData)...

Congratulations to Cycle Lifestyle, who have won £6000 in funding for “creating a colour coded Tube style map of the Capital’s cycling network” in the GeoVation Showcase event that took place last week at the Ordnance Survey. In all, three of the six winning projects were related to cycling. Here at Mapping London we look forward to some new-style cycling mapping of London, to complement the Transport for London’s general cycling maps, the TfL Cycle Superhighway maps and Andy Allan’s OpenCycleMap. Above is Simon Parker’s London Cycle Map, featured on the Cycle Lifestyle...

A map, tucked away on the GLA’s London Plan website, reveals graphically the legally “protected vistas” in London – generally views from certain parks in London of St Paul’s Cathedral or the Houses of Parliament. Planning laws disallow tall buildings that would impede on such views – either directly blocking the view, or significantly changing the landscape of the iconic building’s backdrop. It is the principal reason behind the clustering of skyscrapers in only certain parts of the Square Mile, aka the City of London. Generally, buildings nearer the cathedral are lower (otherwise you end up with something like this.) One skyscraper, currently under construction, is the Leadenhall Building, also known as the Cheesegrater. It “leans back” from the road, as it increases in height, in order to minimise its impact on the background of the view of St Paul’s Cathedral from Fleet Street – not apparently defined as a protected view, but nonetheless a classic one. There is also a map showing a number of other central London views, mainly across the River Thames, that are part of the View Protection Framework. It’s not just old buildings that have views to them protected – the view across the river from the Embankment to the 1950’s South Bank buildings is also included. One of my favourite London views, although not protected as it doesn’t include St Paul’s Cathedral or the Houses of Parliament, is the one from the hill in the middle of Brockwell Park, just south of Brixton. I wonder also if, in time, the “iconic” skyscrapers of the City of London, such as the Gherkin, will themselves become protected? Further details, of the considerations of views when designing tall buildings in London, are given on pages 257-264 of the London Plan. There...

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 the individual tweets (rather than groupings) and highlights the fine geographic scales at which these things can be mapped. Look out for the tweets from Heathrow’s runway! The data for this were collected using the technology behind Steven Gray‘s Tweet-o-Meter and animated by Digital Urban and Urbantick....

The OpenStreetMap project started in London in 2004 and has since grown to be a huge map of the whole world. It can be thought of as the Wikipedia of maps, where anyone can log in, go to their local area and add in local roads, rivers and pubs. London has taken a long time to get to its current “very nearly complete” status (in terms of road coverage) because, having been worked on early on in the project’s life, it was a testbed for techniques. As it stands, the building coverage is not comprehensive, but certain parts of the city do have this level of detail. OpenStreetMap’s real power is not the map you see on its website, but in the giant free, open and easily accessible database behind the map, allowing anyone to create new and exciting maps of any thing in any place. So, as well as many general purpose maps, there exist bike, waterway, train, ski, hiking and even public convenience maps. You may be interested in this review of an excellent book on OpenStreetMap that I recently wrote. The images contain data which is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap contributors. The top map is an extract of Angel in OpenCycleMap which highlights marked cycle routes, cafes and pubs and de-emphasises other major...

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 using a shortest path algorithm.  The animation uses a 5% sample of passengers on the network made available as a Transport for London Data Feed. Anil has also produced a “Flowprint” to show simulated flows of London buses across the 744 routes that make up the network. You can read more here If you are interested in some of the data behind this visualisation Mark Bulling has produced a great interactive graphic. LONDON BUSES Powered by Tableau...

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 London in Google Earth, with Adrian’s KML file loaded in, reveals canyons of empty docking stations, mountains of bikes. In the pictures here, taken on a typical weekday evening, someone at St Paul’s Cathedral needing to hire a bike, would need to head northwards, as the bikes look a little lean on the ground to the south. However, Waterloo is surrounded by “towers” of available bikes, so anyone arriving at the station there would have no problem finding one to hire. Background imagery is supplied by Google Earth and is copyright 2011 Bluesky, Europa Technologies, Tele Atlas and/or MapLink. The bike data is supplied by Adrian Short and scraped from the TfL...

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, especially compared to neighbouring Chelsea which has always been at Stamford Bridge. The map was produced just before the decision on which football club might be moving to the Olympic Stadium was made. West Ham has since been selected as the preferred club for the move. This map, though, shows that moving grounds is nothing new in London’s footballing history. One club (Wimbledon) moved so far away, from SW London to Milton Keynes, that a new one (Wimbledon AFC) has taken its place, based near Kingston. Secondly, The Football Supporter Map of London by “norre” on QPR.org attempts to categorise parts of London by their allegiances to clubs. Potentially very controversial and inherently simplified – with internal migration within London, can an area really have just a one or two allegiances (the latter represented with stripes)? Nevertheless it is a nice visual piece of work, particularly as it screens out the larger parks and the unpopulated areas within Greater London, as well as including some populated areas beyond the boundary, i.e. a “true” population map of the city. The colours used are taken from one of the “core” colours for each football team. Top map: Background by Google Maps, data collated by Londonist. Bottom map: See caption on map for...

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 contained the start point, end point, and duration for around 1.4 million bike journeys. An educated guess has been made about routes between stations using OpenStreetMap data and some routing software. The animation shows the scheme’s busiest day (thanks to a tube strike) and provides an amazing insight into the dynamics of Boris Bike users. You can find more info here. I suspect this animation will be another big PR win for TFL, it is just a shame that it took a freedom of information request to get the underlying...

The Nike Grid was an Alternative Reality Game (ARG) for runners, held over two weeks on the streets of London late last year. After each day’s race, W+K, the campaign planners, produced a stunning infographic video showing that day’s runs, superimposed on a map. The routes were heavily stylised as hexagonal traces, as was the map itself. Coloured hexagonal flashes were used to indicate the end of a successful run. Each day’s infographic was themed differently – one highlighting the runs through heavy rain on evening, another showing the routes of the runners that had been around the entire map. You can see all the videos on the Nike Grid YouTube page and also a blog post with more on the game. The background mapping is from the OpenStreetMap database, which is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap...

Buried in the London Datastore are the population estimates for each of the London Boroughs between 2001 – 2030. They predict a declining population for most boroughs with the exception of a few to the east. I was surprised by this general decline and also the numbers involved- I expected larger changes from one year to the next. I think this is because my perception of migration is of the volume of people moving rather than the net effects on the baseline population of these movements. I don’t envy the GLA for making predictions so far into the future, but can understand why they have to do it (think how long it took initiate Crossrail!). Last year I produced a simple animation showing past changes in London’s population density (data) and it provides a nice comparison to the above. In total I have squeezed 40 maps on this page! Find out how I made these maps...

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. The routes are calculated using Routino and OpenStreetMap...

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 of each circle is proportional to the total size of the stand. There is also a version that animates through the last 48 hours. In the picture above, the “super-stand” at Waterloo Station, which is actually composed of three stands beside each other, is highlighted. The background map is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap and contributors. The cycle data is from the Transport for London...