LONDON -- The English capital has long been a cartographer's dream. From Charles Booth's famous poverty maps in the 1890s to Harry Beck's classic design for the London Underground in 1931, London has always been ripe for visualisation.
Created by geographer and big-data fanatic Dr. James Cheshire and designer Oliver Uberti, a new book has plotted London in 100 new maps and graphics, showing how we live and interact. London: The Information Capital uses Twitter data, satellite imagery, Strava figures and a whole host of other inputs to visualise life in the city.
To anyone on the ground, commuting in London is a carnival of chaos at the best of times, but zoom out of the fray, and all those Oyster taps and grumpy jostles merge into a beautiful graphic, below. The image highlights the most-exited rail stations by origin location between 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. during July and August in 2012.
The following image uses data from the 2011 census, which asked respondents for the first time which passports they held. The map on the left shows where London's 5.8 million British passport holders were born. The map on the right reveals where residents holding foreign passports hail from.
These faces, which show varying degrees of happiness, are derived from answers to a survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). UK residents were asked to rate their feelings of life satisfaction, purpose, happiness and anxiety. As is pretty evident, where you call home seems to have quite an impact on your well-being. Check out the average London face in the middle:
The following map presents 9.4 million tweets, which show the location from where the tweet was sent, as well as the hometown of the person who sent it (the latter is based on where the majority of the user's tweets are sent). Grey tweets mark the path of British commuters alleviating boredom along the railways.
