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Decide Where To Live In London Using The Coffee And Chicken Method

You can tell a lot about an area from its shops. A surfeit of coffee suggests an upwardly mobile neighbourhood, while a preponderance of fried chicken says the opposite. So thinks Sam Floy.

With the help of some data-mining friends, he's put together a series of maps to help you find (or avoid) London's most rapidly-gentrifying areas.

First, he plotted the density of outlets selling chicken, using data from Google Maps API.

Holloway Road and Tottenham are particularly replete with deep-fried fowl, while Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs are almost bereft of such delights.

Next he mapped the capital's coffee shops, also using Google Maps data.

Naturally, the centre of town is a one giant brown patch, with Hampstead almost as beany. Not so much in Wood Green or Forest Hill, though.

He then took both datasets and merged them with house prices (from government data) to plot up-and-coming neighbourhoods. Sam assumes that areas ripe for gentrification will have a high density of coffee shops, a low density of chicken joints and relatively low house prices. Here's the outcome:

Purple patches show the sweet spots where lower house prices combine with a favourable chicken/coffee ratio — in other words, locations where house buyers might get most value for money (assuming anyone reading this can even begin to contemplate buying a property in the capital).

Sam's method is by no means infallible. He sent his findings off to the Annals of Improbable Research, but was turned down for lack of scientific rigour. The study does, however, offer food for thought. And literally so.

Read more about the research on Medium.com, or heckle Sam on @Sam_Floy.