Where is all London's new housing?

Some of my recent work on housing markets, mortgage lending and housing search has led me to consider the question of where, exactly, London's new housing is located. On a recent visit to King's Cross I was amazed by the sheer scale of development, particularly all the new flats. Because I've been working with the data for another project - and recently re-examined it for a project proposal which explicitly didn't focus on London - I thought it would be interesting to see whether my perception of the flats boom is based in reality. Of course it is! 

The maps below are based on all new build homes sold in London from 1 June 2010 to the end of April 2015 (the most recent data). During this time, according to HM Land Registry 'price paid' data, there were 42,938 transactions on 42,813 properties. This indicates that quite a few properties are not being picked up in this dataset - e.g. compare it to the completions data from the London Datastore. Nevertheless, the patterns and distribution of property types is revealing. 88.8% of transactions were for flats, 7.1% for terraced houses, 2.4% for semi-detached properties and 1.7% for detached houses.

All property types

Flats

Terraced houses

Semi-detached houses

Detached houses

Clearly, the mix of new housing - and its relative low volume - is something that many people have commented on before, but I've not seen many people look at the geographical distribution in this way. The important questions arising from these maps - as ever - is why are things the way they are? That's something the maps can't tell us but it does provide an interesting starting point for debate. The discrepancy between the Land Registry data and data on completions is also not surprising owing to the way new build housing is sometimes sold, but it would be interesting to explore this more in future. If you do happen to have a few million quid to spare, good luck finding a new detached London house to live in!

A note on the maps... I've geocoded the price paid data using Ordnance Survey's Code-Point Open dataset, which can match sales to postcode units, rather than street addresses. The transparent bubble map is of course far from perfect but I've used it here to convey the scale and location of new housing, rather than to offer a precise fix. So long as it gives the impression of there being a massive splodge of newbuild flats in Central London that'll do for now. I am aiming to highlight the general scale and geography of development as a fairly quick experiment to see what might be done with the data. No plans to make it interactive (update: the best laid plans of... see map point datadump below).



Update (1715, 22 June 2015): I fixed the glitches, which were caused by a rogue space here and there in the codepoint open file. Moral of the story? Build more houses (I think). Always a giveaway when there aren't many dots in Wandsworth. The numbers were correct all along though. Finally, I've added in some information from HM Land Registry on properties not included in the price paid data.

Data excluded from Price Paid dataset - link

The 2015 General Election: London Results

The perennially excellent London DataStore has published comprehensive, accessible and usable data on the 2015 General Election. So, naturally, I had to make some maps of it. There probably isn't anything about this election that hasn't been mapped but since my last blog was a General Election piece I thought I'd do a little follow-up, with not a hexagon in sight. There have been quite a few 'who came second' maps but not many which include third and fourth places. I'm particularly interested in London because it's something of an exception in the South East of England and, well, I just wanted to make some maps. Below you'll see maps for who came first, second, third and fourth. The last map has the constituency names. I resisted the temptation to do a 'who came eleventh' map, but, since you asked, there were only four constituencies where there were at least 11 candidates, and the parties included the Whig Party. They might have been quite prominent had these maps been made in 1830 (incidentally, there were 658 constituencies in the UK then, which only had 24 million people).

'That's Blockbusters' - for Labour

UKIP emerge and Tories dominate second place

UKIP by far the most in third place - Greens emerge

No place for three 'main' parties here

Just in case you don't know all constituencies off by heart

You should be able to see pretty big versions of the maps if you click on them and then open them in a new tab/window. I've dispensed with the usual boring map legend and instead turned it into a 'bargend' (a portmanteau I just invented). I hope you find these interesting. 

Final nugget: the Whig Party came 9th in Bethnal Green and Bow (their best result) with 203 votes for my namesake, Alasdair Henderson.

Manchester: a "Northern Powerhouse"

The announcement yesterday from the Chancellor that we need a "Northern Powerhouse" in England was greeted with much enthusiasm - and also a good bit of cynicism, given that it's not far from the General Election. After the announcement, the BBC asked whether more English cities should be like Manchester. What I wanted to know was how this nascent northern powerhouse compared to the already established southern one (London, I think). We all know the numbers - well most do - but what about spatial scale, density and visual comparisons? Given a previous bit of mapping on the urban fabric of England and the fact that I've been thinking about the 'underbounded' nature of the City of Manchester (as opposed to the city region), I thought I'd go a bit further with this post.

The first image here shows how Greater London compares to Greater Manchester - they're mapped at the same scale - and I've also put the Greater Manchester boundary over Greater Manchester and vice versa, just to show that they're not that radically different in size.

Greater Manchester - a large urban area (higher res version)

I've also produced the same image without the respective boundaries overlaid on each city, just to provide a quick visual comparison at the same scale.

Click for higher resolution image

Finally, in order to demonstrate the way in which the City of Manchester is really 'underbounded' in relation to its wider city region, I've shown just the urban fabric of the City of Manchester (i.e. building footprints) in relation to the ten local authority areas of Greater Manchester, beside Greater Manchester as a whole. 

Click for bigger version

I have some even higher resolution images if anyone is interested - if so, feel free to get in touch via e-mail or twitter (@undertheraedar). I just wanted to produce these images to illustrate the fact that Greater Manchester is actually very big (about 80% of the size of Greater London in area) though of course has far fewer people (about 33% of the population). It does seem like the most likely 'northern powerhouse' in England and it will be very interesting to see how things pan out over the coming years.

Stratospheric London

I've recently been looking at the Land Registry's price paid data for England and Wales. This is now open data and the Land Registry recently published all data going back to 2009 and by November 2013 they have promised to release all price paid data going back to 1995. I've been looking at the period from January to May this year to see - at a very basic level - what is happening in terms of the total volume and value of sales across England and Wales. As expected, this simply tells us that the London property market is 'stratospheric', as the Evening Standard recently reported. A few summary stats and charts before I go on holiday...

• Total value of sales in England and Wales between January and May 2013: £51 billion.
• Total value of sales in Greater London: £14 billion (28% of the total)
• Total value of sales in Westminster: £1.6 billion.

Explore the data and charts for yourself in the spreadsheet I put together here. The original data comes from the Land Registry's price paid data. I've used the original source files to produce some summary stats by Local Authority, City/Town and County. If you want to know more about the data, make sure you read the Land Registry's FAQs. 

Data produced by Land Registry © Crown copyright 2013.

This data covers the transactions received at Land Registry in the period 1 January 2013 to 31 May 2013. © Crown copyright 2013.

How Big is Beijing?

I was in Beijing recently for a conference and was astonished by the scale and intensity of the city. I found it a little difficult to get my head round the sheer size of Beijing so I thought I'd do a little comparison between Beijing and London. 'Beijing' here refers to the municipality of Beijing (i.e. the Province-level city) and 'London' refers to the 32 Boroughs + City of London which make up Greater London. I've illustrated this in the graphic below, which maps Beijing and Greater London at the same scale. As you can see, Beijing is much bigger - both in terms of area and population.

Click here to see the full size version.

Key facts: Beijing is, area-wise, more than ten times bigger than Greater London. It has a population of 19.6 million, compared to about 7.8 million for Greater London. This comparison is of course not really fair because Beijing includes several large rural areas. A better comparison is to look at the Inner Districts of Beijing since these cover an area quite similar to Greater London (1,377 vs 1,572 sq. km. respectively). In this comparison Beijing has 11.7 million people compared to London's 7.8 million. No matter how you look at it, though, Beijing is 'big'! If you're interested in another comparison, take a look at Oliver O'Brien's comparison of Tokyo and London...