2015 – London Datastore

Number of Properties in London

December 14th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

This dataset from the Valuation Office Agency measures the total number of homes. The VOA collects various data about each property including council tax band, year property was built, and property type (eg house/flat and number of bedrooms). The visualisation below shows the number of homes in 2015, the change in number of homes since…

2014 Round Ethnic Population Projections

December 1st, 2015 by Ed Klodawski

The GLA publishes annual ethnic group population projections for London boroughs to support the authority, its functional bodies and London boroughs in planning and policy decision making. This 2014 Round is the first to incorporate newly available ethnic migration rates and probabilities derived from moves captured by the 2011 Census. Greater London’s White and BAME…

New estimates of projected demand for school places in London

November 24th, 2015 by Wil Tonkiss

Understanding the relationship between population change and demand for school places is crucial if public authorities are to plan effectively for future place provision. Over the last ten years London has experienced exceptionally high birth rates – annual births in the capital rose by almost 30,000 (28 per cent) between 2001/2 and 2011/12. Initially this put pressure…

Where were London’s mothers born?

November 18th, 2015 by Monica Li

An analysis of data on mothers’ country of birth, based on ONS data, shows that in 2014, 58 per cent of live births in London were to mothers born outside the UK, compared with 27% in England & Wales. However within London there are still considerable differences between boroughs – in Havering, only 28 per…

City-Wellness Atlas

November 13th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Data viz by AnhTu Phuc Hoang uses data contained in the London Borough Profiles. It is described as an open-data intiative mapping municipal data on to mobile for the benefit of people to live even better in cities. Click on a red pin to reveal data about the area.

An economic perspective on house prices in London: analysing some big questions

November 10th, 2015 by Daryl Rozario

By Joel Marsden, Economist The market for home ownership, house prices and mortgage costs in London are all topics which excite much opinion, and have inspired many blog posts. The latest GLA Economics working paper attempts to cut through the myriad views to focus on the economic fundamentals – looking at how house prices are…

Blow out the candles: London Datastore in its new form is one year old today

October 26th, 2015 by Andrew Collinge

It’s a full year to the day since, with the able assistance of Datapress Open Data Publishing, we relaunched the London Datastore. As one tends to do as the smoke of the extinguished birthday candles invades your nostrils, the London Datastore team were for a few moments nostalgic about the journey of Datastore this past…

ONS Small Area Income Estimates

October 22nd, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

The small area model-based income estimates are the official estimates of weekly average (mean) household income at the middle layer super output area (MSOA) level in England and Wales for 2011/12. This Tableau report for a visualisation of this data including house price to household income ratio and a comparison with the GLA household income…

Will Big Data Be the Solution to the London Tube Strike?

October 16th, 2015 by Larry Alton

Several times a year, London will experience a Tube strike in which thousands are unable to ride the rails. As a result, Transport for London (TFL) has been working round the clock to provide extra transportation routes and networks to accommodate those people. Because people have a harder time getting to work, businesses experience the backlash of…

From Waste comes Value: Transferring New York’s expertise on waste-related Analytics

October 13th, 2015 by Alan Lewis

We haven’t checked but it’s a fair bet that the words big, data, smart, and analytics would appear in the top 10 most frequently used words in our Datastore blog posts. With this in mind we’d like to share an example of a project from across the pond that certainly ticks all these boxes, whilst proving the value these things bring…

Daytime Population of London 2014

October 8th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

This data present the average daytime population on a weekday during term-time. The dataset is available on the datastore. The population of London swells to over 10 million people on an average day. Around 2 million people, or around a fifth, are in just three local authorities – Westminster, City of London and Camden. Nearly…

Indices of Deprivation 2015 Explorer

October 7th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Department for Communities and Local Government published the 2015 Indices of Deprivation on 30 September 2015. The Indices of Deprivation are an important tool for identifying the most deprived areas in England. Along with the data DCLG also published an interactive explorer to enable simple geogaphical analysis of the data at Lower Super Output Area…

Differences in Employment by Gender in London

October 6th, 2015 by Joseph Colombeau

Differences in Employment by Gender in London | Create infographics

Update on the Witan Project

October 5th, 2015 by Ben Corr

The Witan project kicked off this summer with a flurry of meetings, workshops, brainstorming sessions and lofty aspirations. Out of this frothy mix came the pragmatic decision to aim for concrete deliverables which both demonstrated the project’s potential and offered real benefit to stakeholders. Demography was chosen as the field on which to focus first…

English Indices of Deprivation 2015

October 1st, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Deprivation in London is widespread, but not as dense as it was. Today, the Department for Communities and Local Government released the new English Indices of Deprivation. They are produced on a comparable basis for small areas throughout England. The map below shows how the new Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) ranks the areas within…

Hey, Big Spender – Using linked data to inform the management of public funding

September 28th, 2015 by Andy Hamflett

Hey, Big Spender – Using linked data to inform the management of public funding Here at AAM Associates we’re exploring how various data sources and approaches can be used to drive social impact. Earlier in the summer we supported a short open data project with London South Bank University and the Big Lottery Fund, who recently…

What will be the next Streetmapper?

September 24th, 2015 by The City Data Team

Everyone has a transport app on their phone nowadays – they’ve been extraordinarily successful. But what’s next? What are the new combinations of data that will transform our lives and drive successful new businesses, products and services? We at City Hall have been working with London-based startup DataPress to develop a new API for the…

New Census Tools: Ethnicity and Country of Birth

September 23rd, 2015 by Joseph Colombeau

The Census team at the GLA have put together two data tools that allow you to explore London’s diverse communities at ward level. The first of these tools, using data from 2011 Census Commissioned Table CT0226, allows you to see where people born in different countries live. The second tool uses data from 2011 Census…

The Fog of War: The problem with queueing and why data is important

September 17th, 2015 by James Swanston

In the military there is a great expression – the fog of war – which is all about how confusion can reign on a battlefield because of all of the unknowns that happen. There was a recent article in the Washington Post about the issue of waiting in line, and how the typical first-come, first…

Spotlight on London – What Do Millennials Desire in a Property?

September 2nd, 2015 by Alexandra Coumas

The housing market has undoubtedly suffered negative coverage in the media in recent years and with millennials (people reaching young adulthood around the year 2000) struggling to get onto the property ladder, it has become a cause for concern for many. With this in mind, it comes as a surprise that a recent study reveals that…

Integrating infrastructure data – publishing a first version of the London Infrastructure Map

August 28th, 2015 by Madalina Ursu

Today we publish a first version of the London infrastructure map. UPDATE: April 2016 now replaced by guest version of the Infrastructure Mapping Application (IMA). The aim is to create a database to better understand the phasing of projects, the synergies and tensions that arise when looking at the cumulative impact of development, the potential…

Big Data and Cloud Computing Are Fundamentally Changing London and Other Major Cities

August 27th, 2015 by Larry Alton

For the better part of a decade, IT experts have discussed the imminent impact of big data and cloud computing on the very cities we live in. It wasn’t until recently that the deeper effects of their forecasts became apparent, however. Now, in the second half of 2015, the question arises: How have technologies backed…

National Insurance Number Registrations of Overseas Nationals

August 25th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Total number of registrations issued to adult overseas nationals entering the UK – National Insurance Number (NINo) registrations of overseas nationals show the number of migrants who register for a NINo during the year. While this data is a good measure of inflows of migrant workers from outside the UK, it does not measure outflows…

An update on Witan – the flexible city modelling platform

August 19th, 2015 by Fran Bennett

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, Mastodon C is working together with the Greater London Authority to develop a flexible approach to city modelling. The aim is to take forecasting beyond the limitations of Excel, while providing modellers with the benefits of sophisticated data management tools, such as version control, security levels and scaling…

Open Data Companion

August 17th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

THE PROBLEMS: With the growth of open data, a lot of open data technocrats, software developers, enthusiasts, and academia have become interested in its use (especially in such cases as datasets on government-spending, population, city infrastructure, transportation and other smart-city data). However, many of these interested individuals and organisations are not aware of the existence…

10 Tools That Every Startup from London Needs

August 13th, 2015 by DrewAHendricks

The startup scene is growing throughout the UK, including clusters in Newcastle and London where deeper technical expertise is being sought to fuel the economic benefits that startups have produced in other countries. Numerous tech startups have paved the way in areas, such as cyber security, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. Some startups have even…

Work and life in the Central Activities Zone (CAZ), the northern part of the Isle of Dogs (NIOD) and their fringes

August 13th, 2015 by Daryl Rozario

The CAZ had over 125,000 local business units based within it in 2014, generating employment of over 1.8 million. The area produced output worth around £139 billion in 2012 and saw its population increase by 21 per cent between 2001 and 2011 compared to an increase for London as a whole of 14 per cent.…

Building the City Data Market

August 11th, 2015 by Andrew Collinge

We need to make smart cities and smart government real. To do so, we need to take city data seriously, and give shape to a complex marketplace. An elderly man sits comfortably in his housing association flat. As usual, his son is having a busy day. Both are content that (aided by an integrated health…

The Trouble with the Internet of Things

August 10th, 2015 by DrewAHendricks

There’s no doubt that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a great resource. Data gathered through the IoT has incredible potential for improving user experience and building a better city. In London, we have already seen how the IoT has been used to significantly improve public transport by managing disrupted schedules, offering personalized news, displaying…

Know your Place, realise your Value: exploring the Concept of Data-Driven Value Networks

August 5th, 2015 by Larissa Suzuki

This is the third in a series of blogs we are writing as we create a City Data Market Strategy for London. In the most recent post, we presented a new leadership pattern to create data infrastructures for smart cities called “middle-out” approach. This new leadership pattern is formed on the basis of social influence and…

Characteristics of Commuters

August 4th, 2015 by Joseph Colombeau

GLA Household Income Estimates

July 30th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

In July 2015, the GLA published an update to the Household Income estimates. This data covers a range of geographies from Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs) to UK regions. The full dataset can be downloaded from the London Datastore. The median household income for London in 2013/13 was £39,100, while the mean income was £51,770.…

The Middle Out Approach – A New Leadership Pattern to create Data Infrastructure in Cities

July 27th, 2015 by Larissa Suzuki

The need for data infrastructures (by this we mean data platforms, marketplaces, open data portals and so on) for smart cities is well established. Cities of today must be prepared to cope with population growth, scarcity of natural resources and environmental issues. The answer to these problems can be found in high quality contextualised data.…

London’s Mortgage Lending Hotspots

July 24th, 2015 by Alasdair Rae

A number of extremely useful new housing datasets have been opened up in recent years, including those on mortgage lending and house prices. So, at the risk of saturating the market in blog posts on housing in London, in this short piece I examine London’s mortgage lending hotspots by looking at changes in mortgage lending…

London Business Survey 2014: Foreign Ownership

July 23rd, 2015 by Daryl Rozario

Capitalising on last year’s innovative London Business Survey (LBS), which provided a unique insight into the issues affecting business owners and managers in the capital, the GLA Economics team has been looking at the LBS’ findings more closely to gain insights into the nature of foreign business ownership in London. What do we know about…

Data Suggests London’s Love with Contactless Payment is Only Beginning

July 22nd, 2015 by Anna Johansson

Smart Cities are progressive cities – and that’s especially true for London. For the last year or so, London has been seen as the unofficial contactless payment capital of the world. Most of this reputation comes from the widespread adoption of contactless payments on the Transport for London (TfL) network, which reports more than 1.2…

A City Data Market Strategy: creating a Knowledge Infrastructure for London

July 20th, 2015 by Larissa Suzuki

The modern city should provide an environment in which information flows rapidly and easily, making of itself a platform for both the dissemination and active consumption of innovation to improve the way it works and peoples’ lives. It needs to. Every day nearly 180,000 people move to cities, creating more than 60 million new urban…

Study Suggests London Appoint a Data Tsar

July 17th, 2015 by Larry Alton

The next mayor of London needs to appoint an official Data Tsar to collect and organize data in a more efficient manner. At least, that’s what a new report from Capital City Foundation says, having reviewed New York City’s data set monitoring practices. The Pursuit of Becoming Smarter While many cities drastically need better data…

House Prices 2014-2015

July 16th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

The latest house prices data from the Land Registry (LR) is visualised in the Tableau report below. The LR publish details of every house sale in England and Wales, including sale price, whether freehold/leasehold, type of property, and full postcode for example. The GLA uses the postcode to calculate, which administrative or statistical area e.g.…

The Morning after the Night before: international recognition for the London Datastore

July 10th, 2015 by Andrew Collinge

Last night, my colleague Paul Hodgson and I attended the ODI Annual Open Data Awards. The event took place in the striking Bloomberg headquarters – a good choice of award partner because there was a guy who understood the potential of data. The GLA, and more specifically the London Datastore, had made it through the…

London’s Open Data Powering Action on Climate Change

July 8th, 2015 by Daniel Barrett

On the 18 June – Live Earth day – the GLA Environment Unit partnered in Climathon: the 24-hour hackathon-style climate change event organised by Climate-KIC that took place simultaneously in major cities around the world, including London. So why did the Environment Unit get involved? We have already seen the value of ‘data hacks’ when…

Bromley Healthcare Community Appointments 2014/15

July 1st, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Appointment information from April 2014 to March 2015 for Bromley Healthcare major services. The dataset includes patient ages, gender, ethnic group, outcomes, number of appointments within the time period, reasons for discharge, number of patients seen by each healthcare professional and the location of those appointments.

Why and how data will save the NHS

July 1st, 2015 by Jonathan Lewis

Today Bromley Healthcare, the south London community healthcare provider I have led for the last four years, has become the first to publish clinical data on the London Datastore. We have done this because we believe that data will save the NHS. I realise this is a hard concept for the many in the NHS…

Engaging Londoners in Open Data

June 29th, 2015 by Alan Renwick

Some people have described data as the new oil. A precious resource that fuels growth and innovation (let’s just hope it doesn’t have so many downsides…). For the great global cities such as London, data certainly has the potential to unlock fundamental progress. If data can record our human actions and our physical environment, and…

London’s Digital Connectivity

June 26th, 2015 by Julia Harrowsmith

London has a healthy market of digital connectivity providers – some big names, but hundreds of other smaller firms offering all kinds of different solutions. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of potential consumers of faster digital connectivity. We know that some businesses and residents in parts of the city cannot access fast…

Electricity Consumption in a Sample of London Households

June 24th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Using SmartMeter technology, UK Power Networks gathered electricity use data for a sample of 5,567 London households between November 2011 and February 2014. Readings were taken every half hour. The Acorn group of each household is included in the data. The full raw data is available to download from the Datastore. Within the data set…

Connectivity Map

June 23rd, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

The interactive connectivity map is intended to assist the decision making of digital connectivity providers based on current availability and demand. Ofcom gathers data from the main fixed broadband Internet Service Providers (BT, KCOM, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media) on both their retail services and the services they provide to other ISPs as a wholesale…

Property Build Period

June 18th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Data from the Valuation Office Agency on build period, or age of property, has been used to create 12 property build period categories. The report below uses Tableau to present some of this data at both MSOA and borough level. This geographical presentation highlights that a high proportion of the recently built dwellings (since 2010)…

Looking east as well as west… and plenty more besides: a response to “Big Data in the Big Apple”

June 17th, 2015 by Andrew Collinge

Last week, the Capital City Foundation (CCF) published “Big Data in the Big Apple: the lessons London can learn from New York’s data-driven approach to smart cities”. First of all, I am going to say that it is a great piece of work, going deeper than before into how the NYC model could be applied…

Average Floor Area and Energy Rating by Borough

June 15th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Average Floor Area Cartogram maps showing the average floorspace by borough for all properties, houses and flats added to the energy certificate register between Q1 2012 -Q1 2015. Houses include Bungalows, Flats include Maisonettes. The register records information about the certificates issued for buildings which have been newly constructed, sold or let. The same property can…

Pay Attention To Analytics Data to Predict Future Outcomes

June 14th, 2015 by LarryAlton

One of the best ways to determine what will happen in the future is to look to the past. In today’s big data-driven world, we have the ability to access and use information on how customers are interacting with our websites and social media networks. But if we’re capturing this information without knowing how to…

How can the London Datastore Improve Green Space Access?

June 12th, 2015 by Dan Steiner

One of the more intriguing elements of the updated Datastore design is the Schools Atlas. The Atlas’ case study notes that it “illustrates perfectly the power of accessing previously locked up data and using it in innovative ways”, and represents one of the ways in which the Datastore has democratized access to data that tangibly…

Saved by the Bell – Hypercat Summit Talk

June 11th, 2015 by Andrew Collinge

I spoke at the Hypercat Summit earlier this week. I suffered the shame of being buzzed out when my allotted three minutes were up, so here is my talk, published in full…. I will be straightforward. I want to see a range of actors in this city aware of and organised around the sharing and…

Improved Public Transport for London, Thanks to Big Data and the Internet of Things

June 9th, 2015 by LarryAlton

London has long been known as one of the busiest cities in the world, and it would be difficult for it to function without Transport for London (TfL), which runs a network of footpaths, roads, cycle paths, buses, trains, taxis, and ferries. Millions use this service every day, which makes planning services and providing information…

London Tube Station and Journey Stats

June 8th, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

London Tube Stats maps by Oliver O’Brien from UCL CASA data about how the London Underground is used – how many people use each station at various times of the day, and where they go once they are on the tube. The main view shows the entry/exit data, by time of day, for 2003-2012. Choosing…

A Next-generation City Modelling Platform is born… (well, conceived… blog post #1 in a series)

June 4th, 2015 by Fran Bennett

There’s been a lot of discussion, on this blog and elsewhere, of what to actually do with city data once it’s out in the world. We think that, given the capital’s booming population and the consequent policy focus on addressing a wide range of infrastructure needs, one of the most important applications is using data…

2015 General Election Maps

June 1st, 2015 by Gareth Piggott

Below are some interactive maps of the parliamentary general election results from May 2015. The full source data for this is available on this page. Read our blog analysing the results of the election here.

London Schools Atlas

May 29th, 2015 by DataPress

The London Schools Atlas is a real triumph of the city data agenda. It illustrates perfectly the power of accessing previously locked up data and using it in innovative ways to help solve real world public policy problems.For context, planning the provision of sufficient school places for London’s burgeoning school age population has become increasingly…

GLA Population Projections – Visualisation Tool

May 28th, 2015 by DataPress

The population of London is set to surpass its previous historical high of 8.6million in the coming months. With this comes a range of challenges for London to tackle, from meeting the need for affordable housing; providing school places for the Capital’s children; and increasing capacity on its transport networks. The GLA Intelligence Unit produces…

London Output Area Classification

May 26th, 2015 by

At a time of constrained finances across all sectors of service delivery, getting resource allocation right is of paramount importance. Of equal concern are the costs associated with acquiring the evidence needed to make those informed decisions. Therefore, the ability to understand the characteristics of an area and its population is crucial to decision making.…