The fifth book in a series by author/cartographer David Fathers, Diverse London takes forward the four previous books (three with a rivers theme and one covering the city’s gruesome history) by describing and illustrating 20 guided walks through London’s current and historically multicultural districts. Diverse London continues the excellent format where the walk are illustrated with bespoke colour maps, which include the route lines themselves, landmarks, key buildings and tube/train stations. Each walk is also liberally illustrated with relevant colour sketches and graphics. The 20 walks are split into 6 themes, each with two or more walks – Huguenot, Jewish, Chinese, Black, Irish and South Asian. The walks focus on the city centre and inner city – traditionally the immigrant settling point of London like many other cities, although some walks do venture well beyond this – to Limehouse in the east and to Southall in the west. The West End makes four appearances, such is its cultural evolution through the centuries. Each walk is between 1 and 5 miles. Attractively presented in a compact format ideal for carrying on a walk, and coming in at just over 100 pages, Diverse London is published by Conway, a Bloomsbury imprint, and is on sale from Amazon and all good bookstores from 14...

This lovely map, hand-created by artist-cartographer Adam Dant, which was commissioned by the East End Trades Guild, is launched today at their Christmas takeover of Old Spitalfields Market – you’ll be able to pick up a free copy there. The map shows the locations of some of the more interesting traders and small businesses in the Tower Hamlets area and other parts of the East End, such as along Columbia Road. The map is an update of a similar map produced by Dant for EETG last year. The new one has a mainly black-and-white background, allowing the trader markers and a number of cartouches and other map embellishments to stand out. This post is Day 1 of the Mapping London advent calendar, where we’ll feature 24 of our favourite Mapping London maps from the last few years, including some new ones! Check our Twitter, Facebook or Instagram accounts each day between now and December 24 to see each day’s pick. Thanks to Carefully Sorted and the Hackney Business Network for the images used in this...

This hand-sketched map has been produced by Adam Dant and Herb Lester, for the East End Trades Guild, to promote over 200 small businesses based in east and north-east London. Over a hundred of these are independent shops, cafes and restaurants to visit. The map is presented with an unusual projection, focusing on Columbia Road near the bottom of the map (with the greatest concentration of featured businesses) with the rest of the area curving away as you look towards the top. Some places beyond the bounds of the map are included as little adornments attached to the map, which is in the style of a pinboard. Cardboard cutout-style illustrations show some businesses at work, while parks, tube stations and water features also show. The built up fabric between the road network is nicely illustrated with a striped hatching effect: The cartography is really rather lovely, and a million miles away from the ubiquitous Google Maps map with icon pins – it has its place, is accessible and is certainly an “easy” option, but putting points on a standard Google Maps map does not make a “map”. Designing a custom map like this, specifically focused on the structure of the area, gives the subject matter the framing it deserves. Kudos to the guild for commissioning a proper map like this. Here’s the full map in all its glory, click on it to view a larger version (you may need to click again if your browser initially resizes the image): Find out more about the map and the small businesses on it, at Spitalfields Life. Discovered on the Spitalfields Life...

Cycling in London is on the increase, however it can be tricky to discover the best routes for cycling in London – the ones that use proper infrastructure, or avoid busy roads, while still getting you from A to B in an efficient manner. Cycling maps are tricky to do – on the one hand, you can try a purely geographic approach, but this tends to results in huge maps showing the entire road network, 90% of which is of not of interest (though see this nice example.) There is an alternative approach – taking the famous tube map, with its straight lines and bright colours (see this prototype). But, above ground, such a simplified representation is difficult to follow. The Route Plan Roll Cycle Map has a good attempt at merging the two main mapping styles together. It essentially is the Tube Map for cyclists, with straight lines representing the main dedicated, protected and otherwise signed routes in inner London, – but in centre of the capital it switches to a geographic map, to help navigate where the various Cycle Superhighways converge and tourists on bicycles, unfamiliar with London’s geography, are likely to be. The transition between the two types of mapping is handled well (see below). Routes are coloured by their status – being part of the Cycle Superhighway or Quietway networks or a key radial or orbital route. The lines are then infilled according to the level of protection they offer – the solid colours showing the “gold standard” fully protected ways. Key parks and the ever-important River Thames are included. The fonts used are similar to those on the familiar London “tombstone” maps and are nice and clear. This is probably the best London cycle map we’ve seen, as it...

Luminocity3D, an “urban density and dynamics explorer”, is a interactive mapping website developed by UCL CASA’s Duncan Smith, which shows a number of urban demographics for London and other UK urban areas, using an innovative hexagonal grid and a 3D effect to emphasise values. The above view shows how the proportion of London’s “Zero Car Households” varies across the capital, with colours showing the proportion, and the height of each hexagonal area showing the residential population of that area. London’s “Zero Car” distribution can easily be seen to be radial, with only a few places beyond the inner city having noteable zero-car populations – Barking and Croydon. A number of other census and other metrics are included, selectable via a simple dialog on the top right. I would be remiss not to mention my own project, DataShine, which has similar goals – it maps these datasets in a different way, colouring building plots rather than hexagons. What I really like about Luminocity3D’s approach however is its clarity and distinctiveness – it is easy to see the big picture at a glance and the interactive cues on the website make it a compelling tool to explore data with. An interactive chart is included with each map, comparing London’s result (normally an outlier, and easy to spot as it’s the biggest blob on the chart) with other urban areas in the UK. Screenshots from the Luminocity3D website, which was featured in Nature this...

Neal Hudson, housing market analyst at Savills, has been crunching, mapping and graphing interesting results from the 2011 census, since the data started to be released a year ago. Recently he has applied a pseudo-dasymetric technique to show more of London’s building structure alongside the census data, rather than just the classic choropleth style maps of, for instance, my CensusProfiler from 2001. Above is his most recent map, showing where, in central and inner-city London, people who work in the “cultural, media and sports” occupational sector live. The area around London Fields in Hackney seems to be a focal point, and looking at the map, it becomes more clear why Here East (formerly iCity and formerly the giant International Broadcast Centre for London 2012) is an obvious location for a creative/media and sporting hub. BT Sport are already based in the facility, which is the large building a bit north of the Olympic Stadium, itself revealed as a slender ring on the right side of the map. Here East is only a mile or so east of a huge area where people, who work in the same sector, live, and it’s just a couple of stops east from Hackney Central (itself close by London Fields) on the Overground – so avoiding a central-London commute. Another similar map by Neal, below, shows the most common housing tenure type, for the same...

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 great new resource has just been released by the Wellcome Library. They have meticulously scanned “Medical Officer of Health” reports for London between 1848 and 1972. These offer fascinating insights into the health of the city and since they contain personal accounts by the Medical Officers and statistical data in the form of graphs, tables and maps. The reports can be viewed online or freely downloaded and will offer an excellent resource for those interested in the past health of London.  Our favourite features are their many maps- such as the one above that shows death rates in 1905. The map, like several we have featured, demonstrates the persistent east/ west split in the health, wealth and wellbeing of Londoners....

The above extract (click for full-size version) is from a map that we’ve wanted to feature for a long time, ever since an fascinating talk was given at UCL CASA by Adam Towle, who included this map which was created by himself and others in the Design for London team at the Greater London Authority overseen by Mark Brearley, now guest professor at The Cass, Aldgate. It is a map quite probably inspired by the Map of London Social and Functional Analysis 1943. There is something wonderfully organic about a map of a city that is made up of circles, ovals and other assorted lozenge shapes, instead of the normal straight lines and distinct corners of network or boundary maps. The use of curves, and “buffer” of white space, also serves to reinforce that the boundaries are not rigid – they don’t run along a road or river, but rather their location is only approximate. The inherent imprecision of showing localities in this way helps “blur” any perceived sharp delineations. The map is mainly focused on London’s localities outside of the central “Zone 1” area. High streets are shown as lines of blue dots. Places identified for potential significant development are shaded pink. Major shopping and leisure destinations (as distinct from the high streets) are shown in yellow and orange respectively. London’s patchwork of large green spaces stand out. Purple dots are centres of higher/further education [Thanks @gooneruk for working this out] and green dots show the locations of hospitals. Defining distinct localities in London can be contentious – to people on the ground who consider themselves to be in an adjacent one or one that is not shown on the map, to elected officials and local government as administrative boundaries (in London, boroughs...

One of my earliest projects at UCL, back in 2009, was to create a customisable online map of all the 2001 Census key statistics. The result was CensusProfiler which took many months to produce, not least because I was learning about online mapping as I created it. So I was pleased to discover James Trimble’s UK Data Explorer and more specifically its view of the 2011 Census for London, the data for which was released earlier this year. James has created the map using R, D3 and Leaflet, and has based it on the Open Atlas Project which was created recently by Alex Singleton, who previously was my boss at UCL when I was working on CensusProfiler! The map is not without its flaws – it rigidly sticks to categories that vary by at least 1% – the means that very subtle small (but interesting) population results may be hidden. The list of variables has also not been curated – instead, you get all 400 odd key statistics, including some which, for London, have a value of 0% across all areas. It also took me a while to realise that the numbers in the key are normally percentages – the crucial part of the caption being cut off sometimes by long census variable names. The process of “curating” a large dataset for an area like this is something which a colleague of mine, Richard Milton, has been pondering, as part of his work on the GeoTalisman project. Nevertheless, the site is a simple, quick, effective and attractive way to explore the key statistics from the 2011 census, with an underlying OpenStreetMap-based map providing the necessary context. You can see the interactive map here. The site also includes more information on the Open Atlas Project...

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...

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...

Rentonomy, who describe themselves as, for now, “an easy-to-use site that looks at London in a totally new way and gives you all the tools you need to find the right area for you”, have got some nice heatmaps of some London attributes, such as average rental values, crime rates (shown above) and average council tax. Each area consists of a few postcode sectors (e.g. E9 5xx, E9 6xx) grouped together, and is shown on the map as a simple rectangle in approximately the correct geographic position. The totemic river is also included – an essential for any London map – and that’s it. Simple but effective. It’s similar to, but not quite, a cartogram map because the area of each rectangle is varied simply for aesthetic rather than quantitative reasons. Exact geographical boundary shapes are meaningless and unrecognisable to most people (except perhaps the Greater London Authority boundary) so doing away with them is no bad thing, while keeping the overall topological relationships between each area is also key. They have also developed their own metrics for each area, such as transport accessibility, based on travel time from train/tube stations, the number of coffee shops and bars in an area, and so on. The demographics are presented in a clear, attractive format. Finally, they have a regularly updated blog with more interesting metrics and maps – such as which tubestations are busier at weekends than weekdays – another revealing metric for an area. Screenshot, of crime rates, from the Rentonomy...

Duncan Smith from UCL CASA has produced some great maps of commuter flows. Each line represents the routes people follow to work (as a straight line from origin to destination) and whilst the map above covers nearly the all of southern Britain it shows just how dominant London is and just how far people are willing to travel to work there. I was surprised to see the volume of people flowing from Brighton (even if it is know as “London-On-Sea”) and also how far into East Anglia people are willing to live whilst still working in London. The map above, however, doesn’t show how people get to work. To do this Duncan has coloured the lines according to the mode of transport to produce the map below. As Duncan says: “The map really highlights how different London is in terms of its extensive regional public transport network, with the other major English conurbations like the West Midlands, Manchester and West Yorkshire being highly car dominant in comparison. The variation in public transport levels could be argued to relate to London’s massive size, yet the Scottish cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh perform well in public transport terms, despite being smaller than England’s northern cities. Active travel modes of walking and cycling are generally minimal. The cities that do relatively well are the “cathedral cities” like Cambridge and York, with a few surprises like...

“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...

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...

Step aside Stephen Walter, over 270 UCL students (and staff) have created their own interactive hand drawn map of London. Organised by two students Alistair Leak and Ian Morton from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the map has brought out some great insights into what people think of their city. Sometimes inaccurate, frequently crude but always personal, the map could serve as an abstract and slightly whacky guide to modern day London. Highlights include Battersea Dogs Home: …the Queen Victoria Pub: …and the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs: Alistair and Ian were keen that all contributors get a mention by making sure they signed around the edges. You can see some of them in action...

Duncan Smith, a colleague of ours, has written a great review of the “Shaping London” book for his City Geographics blog. He has kindly let us share it with you here. I have recently been enjoying Terry Farrell’s book “Shaping London: the patterns and forms that make the metropolis”. Farrell is one of the UK’s best known and respected urban planners, and his passion for place-making and urban culture shine through in this accessible discussion of the development of the capital. Rather than an analysis of planning politics and economics, Farrell considers the historic features that underlie London’s structure and continue their influence to the present day- the Thames, village centres, estates and major transport infrastructure. He convincingly shows through text and illustration that contemporary planning tensions between connectivity and place-making are age-old London challenges, from the bridging the Thames 2000 years ago to present day issues over airports and motorways. Of particular interest to me was the discussion of rail development. London is currently dominated by rail-land development schemes (Kings Cross, Stratford, Waterloo, Paddington…) with difficulties in integrating these sites into the wider urban realm. The history of the railways underlies the many issues of connectivity and isolation that create severance in areas of Inner London from rail and industrial infrastructure. So overall a very enjoyable book. And as a bonus it includes some great images from CASA’s very own Andy Hudson-Smith. Images are taken from Shaping London by Terry Farrell and remain the copyright of their respective...

A few months back I had the honour of being asked to approve the use of a couple of excerpts from my London Surname Map in The Times Atlas of London. The wait was finally over last week when I received my copy in the post. It is a great book and an essential guide to the city. The Atlas begins with the first mapped representation of London in 1250 and covers a detailed history of London mapping that provides interesting context to both the development of the city and its mapping culture. The Atlas includes detailed information on each of the London boroughs interspersed with great photos and fascinating insights into London life covering everything from its inhabitants (below) to football, and public transport (below) through to London’s World Heritage Sites. As you would expect from an atlas there are may detailed maps (see below) to break up the extensive commentary associated with the topics I mentioned above. I think the Atlas is brilliant book (not just because I’m in it!) and should make a great addition to the coffee table of fellow London map...

This week, thousands of teenagers across the capital will receive GCSE results that will likely have an impact on the life decisions they take over the coming years. Back in March the full list of the 2010 GCSE results were released and I mapped them alongside an indicator of child poverty. As the graph below shows, unfortunately it continues to be the case that that a pupil’s level of deprivation has a stark impact on his/her attainment. London has some of the richest and some of the poorest pupils in the country; this is something I have attempted to show in the map by re-scaling the area of each of the London Boroughs by its level of child poverty (measured by number of under 16s receiving means-tested benefits) and colouring it by the percentage of pupils that achieve 5 A* to C (or equivalent) GCSE grades. The map above is not perfect as it is still quite generalised and shows only one of the many measures of child poverty that are used but I think it is demonstrative of one of the many hurdles that teachers have to overcome to help their pupils achieve academic success (on paper at least). I have written more detailed post on these results over at spatial...

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)...

Daniel Lewis, a Geography Ph.D student at UCL, has produced this map of inner London, using multidimensional scaling (MDS) to simultaneously depict 41 geodemographic measures of each area.

Charles Booth’s 1899 Poverty Map of London is a seminal work in the history of London maps and the development of geodemographics (characterising people based on where they live) which are now widely used by marketers and retailers. Over the course of several years, Charles and his researchers knocked on doors all around London, interviewing and characterising the people they met, into seven categories, such as “Well-to-do” or “Vicious, semi-criminal”. The houses were then coloured in, on the map, according to their category. The resulting map allows an at-a-glance look at the characteristics of suburbs and whole districts of London at the turn of the 20th century. The Museum of London’s modern galleries recently reopened after a two-year refit, and one of the highlights of the new section is a “walk-in” Booth Poverty Map. The floor, walls and ceiling are covered with the map, while a touch screen allows visitors to pan and zoom in on the map and, for certain places, find out additional characteristics of the area concerned. It’s worth visiting, if you can find the museum (it’s suspended above a roundabout in the City of London, so not intuitive to find) – and other highlights include a scale model of the original Skylon, and the gilded coach used by the Lord Mayor of the City of London in his annual...

MurderMap is a manually curated map of homicides in London, based on records from the Central Criminal Court, aka the Old Bailey. The map’s creators are building an online database that “will contain details of every murder and manslaughter committed in London from the crimes of Jack the Ripper to the present day.” While the map itself is relatively simple – different coloured pins on top of a Google Map – the value of the project is that the location and details of each crime have been individually researched. Attached to each pin is a link to the case notes. Some striking spatial patterns appear, such as the almost entirely empty spaces around Richmond and...

Chris Gale, a fellow UCL Geographer, has produced these maps showing the change in deprivation scores in London between 2007 and 2010. They show a measure called the Index of Multiple Deprivation which ranks areas nationally according to how “deprived” they are. According to an area’s rank it is assigned a score that gives an indication of its levels of deprivation. How you define “deprivation” is obviously subject to debate and the index is not particularly straightforward to calculate. Nevertheless the measure is widely used by government, industry, and academia so it is useful to know how where you live fares. The map above shows the change between years 2007 and 2010 and the animated gif below shows the actual scores for each year. Click for high-resolution...

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....

Embedded below is a high resolution version of John Snow’s 1854 map of the Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) cholera outbreak. Widely cited as the one of the first (and arguably best) examples of using spatial analysis in epidemiological studies, Snow’s map holds a special place in the hearts of those using spatial analysis to improve people’s lives. About the map: I found this map on the UMapper website and am therefore indebted to andreit (Andrei Taraschuk) for uploading it. Each black bar on the map represents a death from cholera and these can be clearly seen to cluster around the pump (red dot). A much more detailed explanation is provided by the UCLA Department for...

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...

The map is a cartogram showing the level of child poverty for each of London’s councils in addition to their predicted loss in revenue spending power resulting from the recent government cuts. As you can see the shapes of some of the poorest boroughs in London have been enlarged to reflect high levels of child poverty. The darkest colours, sadly, also seem to match the most enlarged boroughs, showing that they will be hardest hit by the...

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...

Inspired by the What’s in a Surname? map we helped make with the National Geographic, I have created 15 interactive typographic maps to show the most popular surnames across London. What they lack in cartographic brilliance, I hope they make up for in detail. There are 983 geographic units (Middle Super Output Areas) in each map and across all 15 there are 2379 individual surnames (15,000 surname labels in total). The font size for each surname label has been scaled to give an idea of the number of people who have that surname in each place. The surname frequencies come from the 2001 Electoral Roll and won’t contain everyone living in London but it is one of the best datasets available. London is renowned for being a diverse city but this is barely reflected in the most prevalent surnames- only a few name origins can be discerned from the map. You have to look a little further down the surname rankings for this diversity to become apparent. The surnames shown on all 15 maps can be traced back to one of 38 origins; I have selected unique colours for 10 of the most popular. Surname origins were established using the Onomap classification tool. We are mapping the origins of the surnames, which are not necessarily the same as the origins of the people possessing them. Many people in London have adopted Anglicised surnames. It is also clear from the maps that the same sorts of surnames tend to cluster together. This is because they often closely reflect the naming preferences of particular groups of people within an area. As you transition through to the less popular surnames things become a little more jumbled and the distinct patterns present in the first map become less distinct....