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 population projections on an annual basis at borough and ward level for London.  The ability to understand the changing characteristics of London’s population is crucial to decision making and the projections are employed by a wide variety of users.

The creation of an interactive tool to view these population projections allows users to more readily understand current and future population trends across London.  The tool makes it easy to visualise both how the total population and the structure of that population are projected to change over time.  It allows users to look at how large-scale developments, such as the Barking Riverside or Olympic Park legacy developments, are projected to drive population growth in the local areas.

The interactive tool currently allows users to view three variants of the GLA’s most recent set of population projections (2013 round) – those that project forward recent trends, those that include information on future development, and those that assume no future development will take place.  While the latter assumption is highly unlikely, the results can help us to understand the potential impact of future development.