Locatio London
Data sources

Where our scores come from.

Every score is built on public data — government and public datasets, plus OpenStreetMap, the open map of the world maintained by its contributors. What we never use is opinion: no user reviews, no star ratings, no forum sentiment. Where a dataset has known gaps, we say so rather than filling them in.

Scored

What the six scores are built on

These four families produce every number you see ranked. Nothing else moves a score.

High streets & local amenities

Shops, cafés, pubs, venues, libraries and civic buildings, mapped by OpenStreetMap contributors. This is what sits behind three of the six criteria — daily needs on foot, independent scene, and culture & leisure — counted within walking distance of the centre of each area. It carries more weight than any other source, and it depends on how thoroughly an area has been mapped.

Schools

The Department for Education's school-level pupil-progress measures — KS1→KS2 progress (2022/23) for primaries within about a kilometre, Progress 8 (2023/24) for secondaries within about two — joined to the DfE schools register for locations, corrected for statistical reliability, and blended equally. These are the latest vintages the DfE can publish, because Covid disrupted the baseline years behind the later cohorts. Ofsted outcomes are shown for every school in Ofsted's own words, with their dates, but never feed the score. Private schools are shown, never scored — there is no comparable progress data for them.

Green space

Ordnance Survey's Open Greenspace map of public parks, playing fields and sports grounds of two hectares or more, curated by a short published list of dated rulings — private grounds out, allotments and cemeteries out, named public woodlands in. OS doesn't map every wood, so publicly accessible woodlands enter individually by ruling; OpenStreetMap supplies evidence and names for those rulings but never scores anything. We measure two walks — to the nearest mapped public green space, and to the nearest big park (50+ hectares of connected green space) — blended 70:30. The full rulings list is published on the methodology page.

Traffic & quiet streets

Department for Transport traffic counts, which exist at fixed points and not everywhere — and the DfT revisits minor roads on a rotating cycle, so some points were last counted in 2019. Where an area's nearest counts are from an earlier year, we use the most recent one, no older than 2019, exactly as the DfT published it, and the area's page names the year: an older count, declared, not an estimate. Where there's no count of any year close enough, we mark the area unmeasured and leave quiet streets out of that area's score entirely — the score is built from the five measured criteria, and the area's page says so. We don't estimate it. The street-level view uses something different: Ordnance Survey road-network data giving each road's type and place in the network, which is an estimate of how busy a road is likely to be, not a count.

Shown, never scored

What we show alongside the scores

These colour the map and fill in the picture. None of them moves a score, in either direction — either because "good" means something different to everyone, or because the data can't carry the weight a score would put on it.

Recorded crime

Recorded crime from data.police.uk — "recorded" is the subset of reports that police formally document, so it understates what people experience; we use the accurate word. The newest published 12 months, excluding shoplifting (its victim is a business, never a resident), divided by usual resident population (Census 2021) and shown per 1,000 residents a year. Bands are relative within a city: a third of London's areas sit in each band, so "above average for London" is a comparison with the rest of London, never a national judgement — and an area's own rate can fall while its band worsens, because others fell faster. Crime is displayed and filterable, never scored.

Transport & connectivity

Station locations and lines from Transport for London, plus National Rail stations; outside London, from the Department for Transport’s national stop register. We show which stations are nearest and estimate the walk to them. We don't score connectivity, because a good commute depends on where you're going — and we don't know that.

Property & the local market

HM Land Registry sold-price records, the public record of what homes actually sell for. You can filter by price, but price never affects a score in either direction — we score the place, not what it costs. Sold prices don't exist for every street, so the coverage is patchier than the other layers.

Private rents

Average monthly rents from the ONS Price Index of Private Rents — overall and by bedroom count, updated monthly. Rent statistics exist at borough (local authority) level only: every neighbourhood in a borough shows its borough's figure, and streets have none, so the rent filter distinguishes boroughs, never neighbourhoods — and the tool says so wherever the number appears. The City of London has no published figure at all (too few rentals for the ONS to publish one). Rents are displayed and filterable, never scored.

GP practices

We use data supplied by the NHS and the Care Quality Commission to show you where surgeries (and similar) are located. This information is not used in our scoring, and it can't tell you whether a practice is taking new patients, or how long you would wait to be seen.

Social housing

Census 2021 tenure data from the Office for National Statistics, at census-neighbourhood resolution — small areas of roughly 400 to 1,300 households each, so the figures describe the streets around a property rather than a whole borough. We show each area's housing mix — the share of homes owner-occupied, privately rented, and renting from a council or housing association — plus how the social-housing share varies across an area's census patches, and any pocket well above that range. It is never scored: this is a tenure mix, not a measure of quality. We show it because buyers ask practical questions it informs — service charges on ex-local-authority stock, lending criteria on certain block types, estate-renewal and regeneration exposure. The census runs once a decade, so this layer's vintage is 2021.

Boundaries & the neighbourhood itself

Office for National Statistics boundary data, used to decide which postcodes belong to which area and to keep every neighbourhood inside Greater London. Neighbourhood boundaries themselves are ours — drawn to how Londoners talk about places, since there's no official register of where one area ends and the next begins.

Flood risk & EV charge points

Flood-risk zones from the Environment Agency, and public charge-point locations from OpenChargeMap. Both are map overlays only. Neither is scored, and neither is a substitute for a survey or a check with the provider.

How current

The vintage of every source

We always take the most recent official release of each source, but "most recent" means very different things across them. Rather than claim everything is current, here is what each one actually is.

Source
What you're seeing
Publisher updates
Recorded crime (police.uk)
The 12 months to April 2026
Monthly, ~2 months behind
DfT traffic counts
2024 counts; where none is near, the most recent back to 2019, declared
Annually, mid-year
ONS statistical boundaries
December 2021 edition
Rarely; a fixed edition
Census 2021 tenure (ONS, shown never scored)
Census day, March 2021
Once a decade
Private rents (ONS PIPR, shown never scored)
Average rents for the month named in the tool (July 2026 at this update)
Monthly, ~7 weeks behind
OpenStreetMap
Greater London extract of 28 May 2026
Continuously
Ordnance Survey open data
The current release at each rebuild
Quarterly
DfE pupil progress (scored)
Fixed vintages: KS1→KS2 2022/23, Progress 8 2023/24 — the latest the DfE can publish; the next KS2 release lands December 2026
Annually
Schools register & Ofsted outcomes (shown per school)
The current release at each rebuild
Continuously
HM Land Registry sold prices
Five years of sales to the latest release
Monthly
Energy Performance Certificates (MHCLG)
The extract current at each rebuild
Continuously
TfL & National Rail stations (shown, never scored)
The station set current at each rebuild
Rarely — stations change slowly
NHS / CQC GP practice locations (shown, never scored)
The register current at each rebuild
Continuously
Environment Agency flood-risk zones (shown, never scored)
The zones current at each rebuild
Periodically
OpenChargeMap EV charge points (shown, never scored)
The extract current at each rebuild
Continuously

Scores are ranked against a fixed London benchmark so they don't drift day to day. That benchmark was last re-based on 26 August 2026, against a pool of 307 neighbourhoods.

Where a source is inherently slow-moving, that's a limit of the official data itself, not of how often we check. We'd rather show you the date than imply everything is current.

What we don't do

We don't sell your data, and we don't let anyone pay to move up the rankings. The scores are the scores.

Attributions & licensing

Built entirely on open data.

Every dataset below is used under the terms of its licence, with the attribution wording each provider requires. Most is published under the UK Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL v3), which permits use — including commercial use — with attribution. Two sources carry their own terms: OpenStreetMap under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), and the EV charge-point data under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Both are credited separately.

Open Government Licence v3.0
HM Land Registry — Price Paid Data
Sale prices and transaction volumes.
Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Energy Performance Certificates
Floor area and property age, used to derive price per square foot. Source: MHCLG.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Ordnance Survey — Open Roads, Open Greenspace & Code-Point Open
Road names and classification, green-space proximity, and postcode locations. Code-Point Open also powers postcode search — Locatio publishes the postcode-to-coordinate lookup it derives from it, which is why this entry carries the full three-part Code-Point credit rather than the OS line alone.
Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026.
Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
data.police.uk
Street-level recorded crime.
Data from data.police.uk licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Get Information about Schools & Ofsted
School locations, types and inspection ratings.
Get Information About Schools / Ofsted (OGL v3).
Department for Transport — NaPTAN
Station and tram-stop locations outside London (Manchester and Liverpool), from the national stop register.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (Department for Transport, NaPTAN).
Office for National Statistics
Statistical boundaries (used to aggregate crime data), Census 2021 tenure of household (TS054), and the Price Index of Private Rents (borough-level average rents) — all shown as context and never scored.
Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
ONS & Ordnance Survey — LSOA Boundaries (December 2021, BFC)
Statistical-area boundaries, used to assign postcodes and clip neighbourhood extents. A joint ONS/OS product, so both credits are required.
Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.
Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.
Department for Transport
Annual Average Daily Flow traffic counts.
Department for Transport (OGL v3).
NHS Digital / CQC
GP practice locations (shown for context, not scored).
NHS Digital / CQC (OGL v3).
Environment Agency — Flood Risk
Flood-risk zones (shown for context, not scored).
Contains Environment Agency information © Environment Agency and database right 2026.
Transport for London
Station locations and connectivity.
Powered by TfL Open Data. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2026 and Geomni UK Map data © and database rights 2026.
OpenStreetMap (ODbL)
OpenStreetMap contributors
Points of interest and venue density, road classification, and base map tiles.
© OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

OpenStreetMap data is published under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), which is share-alike for derived databases. The scores, rankings and rendered maps shown here are produced works derived from that data, not redistributions of the database itself.

Map rendering
MapLibre GL & Protomaps basemap
Base map tiles and interactive map rendering in the tool.
© OpenStreetMap contributors. Self-hosted vector tiles styled with Protomaps basemaps, rendered with MapLibre GL.
OpenChargeMap (CC BY 4.0)
OpenChargeMap
Public EV charge points (shown for context, not scored).
Charging location data © OpenChargeMap contributors and respective data providers (CC BY 4.0).

OpenChargeMap aggregates data from many providers; each charge-point marker carries its own provider and licence, and the credit above covers the aggregated dataset.