Blog

I've uploaded the latest data for English and Welsh property prices to the site. It looks like the current trajectory is flat-lining prices even though the annual change remains negative. Sales volumes continue to be low

Possible London boundaries

One of the more popular pages on the site is the postcodes in the City of London administrative area. This confused me for a while since the City of London is a small area that is important for financial services but not much else. I came to the conclusion that it was based on people trying to find a list of all London postcodes so I added a link to a more comprehensive page of London postcodes. But then I wondered if that was really what people would want from a list of London postcodes and where in fact London ends. So here's a brief description of what the options are.

The City of London administrative area does closely line up with what was considered London several hundred years ago. It's now more commonly known as the Square Mile and as you'd guess from the name, it's tiny. It's the smallest black area in the map above

This list of London postcodes is a list of postcodes that are considered to be in the London post town and consists of the E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC postcode areas. I guess when those postcode areas were created, that may have been considered the extent of London, but I don't think anyone would think that now, Wembley Stadium and Heathrow Airport are both outside it. It's the red area in the map.

The larger black area above is the area covered by the Greater London Authority, which is probably what most people would consider as London these days. You can download data for this area here

But even that may not be enough. Maybe you think anything inside the M25 is London. Certainly London's urban sprawl now extends beyond the boundary of the GLA. I don't currently have data for this but it's on my To Do list. It's the blue area above.

But the urban sprawl extends beyond the M25 in places, so maybe that doesn't really define the boundary. What about the area where people mostly work in London? The London Travel to Work Area data is here and is shown above as the blue shaded area. That gives a completely different area than the others, with a big chunk taken out of the Western side by areas where people work in Slough and Heathrow, rather than London.

So to answer the original question, where does London end? It's not really clear. Sorry I've not been more helpful, but maybe it will help you decide which specific London data you should download

The latest data from the Land Registry is now available on the site. The annual change in prices is still negative but looks to be heading back to positive territory. Sales are still in the doldrums

A little late but I've just uploaded the latest postcode data to the site. The biggest change is that new built up areas (from 2024) are included in the data. 

I've run my usual sanity checks and not found any issues, but let me know if you find anything amiss

I've uploaded the latest house price data for England and Wales to the website. I've also added a map showing the average prices in the different postcode areas, which unsurprisingly highlights that London and the South East are the most expensive parts of the country

If you're a fan of British train stations (and who isn't?) then you'll be excited to learn I've uploaded the latest station usage data to the site. Liverpool Street in London retains its position as the busiest station, thanks to the extra traffic from the Elizabeth line. Overall usage still hasn't quite reached pre-Covid levels, presumably due to WFH becoming a bigger part of people's lives.

In other news, I'm on Bluesky, since it looks like it may remain a sane place dues to its ownership model. Follow me there if you want to read the same things you can read here

Tagged: Stations Website

The latest house price data has landed and has been uploaded to the site. Little has changed, prices continue to fall, sales volumes are still low. 

I've nearly finished uploading the latest house price data for England and Wales to the website. Prices continue to fall and sales volumes still look very low. The falls are affecting pretty much all areas, but a special shoutout to my hometown, what is happening in Blackburn?

I've started to include road names in the UK postcode CSV downloads. Let me know if you spot any problems or if you want them included in any other downloads

I've uploaded the latest ONS postcode data to the site. There have been some changes to the data provided. Built up areas have been updated to the latest 2022 areas and built up area sub-divisions no longer exist. Constituency boundaries are now from the 2024 election. This means the layout of the CSV files has changed and there will be more changes as I clean up any other references to the old data.

As usual, let me know if you see any problems