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."
We always use the most recent official release of each source. Different datasets update on their own schedules — crime figures refresh often, while something like census data is published only every few years — so we take the latest available version of each rather than holding everything to a single date. Where a source is inherently slower-moving, that's a limit of the official data itself, not of how often we check.
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. 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.
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 — 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.
Entirely from official, publicly accountable sources — government and public datasets, not opinion or crowd-sourced ratings. You can see the full list on our Data sources page.
We're happy to explain anything about how the scores are built.