Guidance

The Night Time Observatory is a collection of datasets and research relating to London at night that has been curated by the Greater London Authority (GLA). It has been created primarily to support local decision makers in improving the night time offer in their area.

For this first iteration of the Observatory we have focussed on publishing data that the GLA has used for decision making internally. Our ambition is to build upon this by bringing this data more up to date, getting more local geographical breakdowns and supplementing what’s there with additional datasets.

Accessing data

To access the data from the Observatory homepage first click one of the four themes: Vibrancy, Vitality, Safety, or Livability.

This will take you to that theme’s landing page. From here browse the list of data sources. Once you have found one that interests you click on the link to access the data.

Most of the links will take you to a dataset page. From here you can download the available data for your own analysis.

GIS Boundaries

GIS stands for “geographic information system”. Simply put, GIS files are the files you need to create a map on your computer. For example, in the observatory you will find links to GIS files that allow you to create a map of London’s boroughs, wards, highstreets and more.