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.

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.