The beating heart of the City of London

I've had a rush of blood to the head so here I am with a second blog in two days. I'm getting some slides ready for tomorrow's Modelling World 2015 talk in London, which is all about visualising mobility (see below) so I wanted to add in a couple of new visuals on commuting in and out of London. Visualisation can often be just a lot of fancy graphics. This can be useful in itself for a number of reasons (e.g. capturing attention on an important issue, drawing attention to unusual patterns in a dataset) but since I've been working with commuting data in England and Wales I wanted to focus on flows into and out of the City of London. 

This interests me for a number of reasons, including i) commuting can play a significant role in wealth creation and it also needs to be understood in relation to how we measure GVA; ii) commuting is often very stressful and damaging to the individual - particularly long commutes - so I'm interested in the kinds of distances involved and this can be seen easily on a map; iii) commuting can often be environmentally damaging - though this isn't what I'm mapping here; iv) commuting in and around London is often about green belt hopping so I was curious to see how much commuting comes from beyond the metropolitan green belt; and v) commuting is a two-way process and affects places at both ends and in between due to travel. 

So, here's what I did. I took the MSOA-level commuting data for England and Wales (table WUEW01 here), used a bit of QGIS, extracted frames from QGIS using the MMQGIS plugin, then patched it all together in GIMP to create an animated gif. One for inflows, one for outflows and one for in and outflows (thanks to Ebru Sener for the idea). It might run a little slowly in the blog post in a browser but see below for the images. Just to clarify, I've only shown flows of 25 or more into the City of London. Those not familiar with the data should be aware the the 'City of London' refers to the small area in the centre of London and not the entirity of Greater London! An obvious point but one worth repeating in case anyone is confused. A Greater London map would have many more data points, covering most of England.

Commuting flows (>=25) into the City of London

Same as above, but going back the way

The 'pulse' of the City of London

You should be able to get a better view of the images by clicking on them individually and if you want them to work more quickly try saving them to your own machine.

Employee Growth in London, 2001 to 2012

The Office for National Statistics has released a new dataset on the number of employees across London's 983 MSOAs. The data are sourced from the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR) and they reveal some interesting trends. Naturally, I had to do a 3D map of this, so take a look at the image below for the obvious growth points...

Massive absolute growth in the City of London and Canary Wharf - and some other central MSOAs in Camden, Southwark and Westminster, but also massive growth in employment in Uxbridge.

Click on the image to enlarge

The number of employees in the City of London increased by 36%, compared to 267% in Canary Wharf and 170% in an Uxbridge MSOA. By contrast, one part of Islington had 78,600 employees in 2001 but only 57,000 in 2012 - a drop of 27%. This area of Islington is immediately north of the City of London and includes Clerkenwell and Finsbury.

If you're interested in this kind of thing it's definitely worth looking at the original dataset.

The Olympic Park Legacy Corporation

The London Datastore recently published on their website the boundary file for the Mayoral Development Corporation in East London. There is quite a bit of background information on the GLA web pages, at this link, but of particular interest is the precise boundary of the Corporation. If you are a GIS user you can download the file and then map it, or, you can look at the map and letter signed by the Mayor of London himself. Alternatively, you can look at my map below and explore the area in Google maps...

Full screen version

By my calculations, this area is 1.88 square miles in size (1,202 acres / 486 hectares) and has a perimeter of 6.47 miles. So, it's quite a big area and bigger than the City of London. It includes parts of the London Boroughs of Waltham Forest, Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets and the area has been described (in October 2011) as 'London's single most important regeneration project for the next 25 years'. 

The name of the corporation is to be the London Legacy Development Corporation, as outlined in this letter. This is also an example of the Localism Act in action.

I found it quite interesting exploring this area, looking at what is included and (more interestingly) what is not. I hope you find it useful.

Small Area Population Change in London, 2001 to 2010

Every ten years, data nerds in the UK get very excited by the prospect of getting their hands on new Census outputs. If you're lucky enough to be Canadian then you can get excited every five years but for many of us (Americans and Chinese included) it's the decennial Census that really does the trick. In the UK we can expect the first results in July 2012 according to this document. But what about in between Census dates? This is where small area data analysis becomes tricky. That's why the ONS publish mid-year population estimates for small areas in England and Wales. 

I've been looking at data for London again, so I thought it would be interesting to see which small areas have increased in population and which have declined in the period from 2001 to 2010 (the most recent data). Some map results below, but it is interesting that 11 areas (LSOAs) have more than doubled in population during this time. 

See this map with Borough outlines on a separate web page

• The 11 areas which have more than doubled in population are in Tower Hamlets (4), Greenwich (4), Ealing, Enfield and Hounslow
• 85 areas have increased in population by 50% or more between 2001 and 2010
• 344 areas have increased in population by 25% or more between 2001 and 2010

• 5 areas have decreased in population by 50% or more - these areas are in Greenwich (2), Southwark, Brent and Newham
• 19 areas have decreased in population by 25% or more during the 2001 to 2010 period.

Overall, the population of London has increased by hundreds of thousands between 2001 and 2010. According to the mid-year population estimates it has increased by approximately one Manchester in population terms (i.e. about 500,000 - equivalent to the City of Manchester population in 2011). That's about a 7% increase. 

The data are somewhat experimental but if we aggregate up to Borough level, then Brent and Newham both show losses (about 5% and 4% respectively) whilst City of London (60%) and Westminster (25%) show the largest gains.

This data for London - and lots more - can be found on the pages of the excellent London Datastore.

London's Daytime Population

A couple of months ago I did a short post on the difference between daytime and night time populations in the North West of England. I've been interested in this for a while but some other recent work from the US got me thinking about it again. More recently, the London Datastore released data on London's daytime population for 2010 so I thought I'd take a closer look at the data and do something with it. The graphic below pulls out the most interesting data - not least of which is the fact that London's daytime population is 9.3 million!

Full size version here

I downloaded the data, explored it and did a little 3D mapping of population density. The daytime population density figures for the City of London are quite staggering (350,000 people per square mile!). During the day, the population of Westminster is nearly 1 million - compared to about 250,000 permanent residents. The City of London only has about 11,700 permanent residents but its daytime population is 390,000. If you're looking for the London Borough with the most prams, then head to Newham - it has the highest number of children aged 0-4. If you're looking for overseas visitors, head to Westminster where you are bound to bump into one of the 65,000 or so who are there. 

The data are very interesting, but also important. If we want to understand cities and how they work (and how to make them work better) then this kind of information is critical. 

That's all for now...

Commuting Animation for 2001

The results of the 2011 Census will not be released for a while yet and in the case of migration and commuting data it usually takes about two or three years before we get our hands on it. I've recently been looking at commuting patterns at district level in the UK from the 2001 data in anticipation of studying changes when the 2011 data are released and have put together this short animation. You can play the animation and also use the slider on the time line to control the speed yourself... (it may take a moment or two to load)

I've just selected 18 different districts from across the UK and looked at the range of commuting origins. A couple of points to note here. I've only included flows over ten in order to cut out some of the 'noise' associated with very low flow numbers. Also, for Belfast, the commuting data is split into Belfast North, South, East and West so that one looks a little different.

A few points of note. City of London and Westminster have the highest inflows in the UK, at over 300,000 and 400,000 respectively. I've chosen a sample of places just to give reasonable geographical coverage. What I aim to look at in the relatively near future is commuting and deprivation together, but this is a slow-burner...

Here's the image file for City of London, just as an example. Click the image to see it in full size.