How the scores work, where the data comes from, and what we will and won't do with it.
Good for London. Scores are relative — they rank each place against every other London area, not against some absolute ideal. A high "quiet streets" score means quieter than most of London, not silent; even London's calmest neighbourhoods carry more traffic than a country village. Read every score as "compared to the rest of the city."
Every score is a rank against the rest of London, so as we add areas the comparison gets more complete and scores shift a little to match. That's the ruler getting better, not the area changing. We hold the ruler steady between updates and re-base it in one deliberate step, so scores don't drift day to day — and we date the last re-base on our methodology page.
It varies by source, and we'd rather show you than generalise. Crime updates monthly, private rents monthly, the school progress measures annually (the Ofsted outcomes we show for context update continuously), traffic counts annually, and census data only every ten years. We always take the latest release each publisher has made available — and we publish the vintage of every source on our data sources page, so you can see exactly how old the number in front of you is. Where a source is inherently slower-moving, that's a limit of the official data itself, not of how often we check.
Because a score would claim to measure safety, and recorded crime doesn't measure safety — it measures what the police record. We now show that measure properly: recorded crime over the newest published twelve months, divided by resident population (Census 2021) and shown per 1,000 residents a year, banded within London — with a second answer beside it: how evenly it spreads across an area's own streets, because an average can hide a tenfold range. You can filter the map by both. But it stays out of the number: it describes an area; it does not rate it.
Because a good commute depends on where you're going, and we don't know that. A single "connectivity" score would have to assume a destination — usually the City or the West End — which quietly builds someone else's life into your results. Instead we show you the stations, the lines and how long the nearest one takes to walk to, and let you judge it against your own map. You can also filter by TfL fare zone — each area shows its nearest station's zone, and stations on a boundary show both. Ranking by journey time to a destination you choose is something we'd like to add.
It measures whether you can meet an ordinary day's needs on foot — how many everyday places there are within about 800 metres, and how varied they are. A parade with a butcher, a chemist, a café and a library scores better than the same number of identical takeaways. What it can't measure is the way a place looks or how old it is: a well-served 1930s suburb can score higher than a prettier village with nothing open. It's the heaviest-weighted criterion by default, and like all six, you can turn it down.
We do, and they're published rather than hidden — daily needs on foot 30, independent scene 20, schools 15, green space 15, quiet streets 15, culture 10. They're a starting point drawn from what people told us mattered when we were doing this for ourselves, not a claim about what should matter to you. Every one of them moves, and the moment you move one the whole city re-ranks.
No. Nobody can pay to move up, and no area is promoted or demoted for commercial reasons. The scores are the scores — that's the whole point of them.
No. Every score is calculated by published code over public datasets — the same inputs always produce the same number, and you can read exactly how on our methodology page. We do use AI to help draft the written descriptions of each area, which are then fact-checked against the data before publishing. The words get a machine's help; the numbers don't.
No. We don't sell your data or share it to advertise to you elsewhere.
Local knowledge is genuinely valuable, and our scores are designed to complement it, not overrule it. A score captures what data can measure consistently across the whole city; it can't feel a street the way you do on a Saturday morning. If your instinct and our score disagree, treat it as a prompt to go and look — both are telling you something.
Our six criteria measure what's there — shops, schools, parks, how busy the roads are. They don't measure how well any of it is kept. An area can have everything within walking distance and still feel run-down, and no dataset we know of captures that reliably across a whole city. It's one of the clearest reasons to treat a good score as a reason to go and look, rather than a reason not to.
A neighbourhood score describes the wider area; a street-level view looks closer in. For some things — like how quiet a road is likely to be — the character can change noticeably from one street to the next, so the closer view is worth having. Where something genuinely can't be measured street by street, we tell you, and we'd always suggest visiting at different times of day.
No — and we don't try to. Locatio is a curated read, not a map of every road. Within each area we focus on the streets that tell you something — the quiet ones and the busy through-routes a single score blurs together — rather than listing every address. If the road you're looking at isn't there, treat the nearby streets and the neighbourhood score as your guide, then go and walk it. That's advice we'd give even where a street is covered.
Not to start with — we share the full neighbourhood map — with every score, filter and profile — and you can search any London postcode; but the really useful bit comes when you start looking at the streets themselves, and a free account unlocks that street-level view and lets you save areas so they're there when you come back.
You can filter by price — sold-price data from HM Land Registry sits behind the street view, so you can rule out what's out of reach. What you can't yet do is rank by value for money, because "good value" depends on what you're getting for it, and turning that into a single number honestly is harder than it looks. Price never affects a score: we score the place, not what it costs. If you're renting, the same filter has a Rent mode — borough-level average rents by bedroom count (see "I'm renting, not buying — is this for me?").
Absolutely — simply switch the budget filter from Buy to Rent and see rent instead of sale prices: we source average monthly rents from the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, and show those by bedroom count, updated monthly. But, just so you know: the official rent statistics exist only at borough level, not for an individual neighbourhood or street, so when you're looking at the numbers, remember that every area in a borough shows the same figure — the filter tells the boroughs apart, but not the neighbourhoods within them, and streets have no rent figures at all (we switch the filter off at that point). Rent, like price, never affects a score: we score the place, not what it costs to live there.
No — it's information to help you make your own decision. We give you a clear, consistent read on what different areas offer so you can weigh them up, but the choice, and any professional advice you take, is yours.
From 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. You can see the full list, with every licence, on our Data sources page.
We're happy to explain anything about how the scores are built. If you're inside the tool, the feedback button reaches us directly.