A bright portrayal of the darker side of London life

Each of the 24,000 dots on this map of London has been coloured according to its most frequently reported crime between May 2012 and April 2013. During this period, more than 250,000 crimes were reported – the equivalent of one every two minutes. Burglary, violent crime and vehicle crime were the most frequent and shoplifting the least. A pattern emerges, with theft in the city centre transitioning to burglary and vehicle crime in more residential areas. Areas with drugs as their most frequent crime tend to cluster around a few locations. You can view the street-level data on the police.uk website.

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James Cheshire is a lecturer at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. His special interest is in the analysis and visualisation of large population data sets.

His work can be seen on his website, spatial.ly – for instance, his mapping of the routes of British, Dutch and Spanish ships, 1750-1800.

He blogs at mappinglondon.co.uk, where the capital’s life is visualised in hundreds of different forms.