Housing in London 2010

In my day-job at the Greater London Authority, I have just completed the 2010 edition of Housing in London, which is our annual housing statistical digest and the evidence base for the Mayor's London Housing Strategy. You can get it here (warning, 10mb pdf). A few things stood out for me this year (note, these figures are copyright GLA and Ordnance Survey for map boundaries - see Housing in London for full details):



Going back to old Greater London Council records I was able to extend our house building trend back to 1961. The data is split by tenure, with council housing on top, housing association supply in the middle and market housing on the bottom. Obviously the big change here is the end of the huge council house building program which dominated supply into the 1970s.



Also from old GLC documents (this one a Greater London Development Plan 'Report of Studies' from 1969) comes this wonderful map showing the growth of London between the 1850s and 1950s, with lighter areas developed earlier. This was originally painstakingly constructed from a series of Ordnance Survey Maps. I'd love to update it sometime.



The pattern of much more recent housing supply is shown here, based on data from the London Development Database which I have aggregated on a 1km square grid. LDD data is incredibly detailed and I am currently working on a long-running paper trying to summarise some of the more interesting patterns.



Changing tack, this chart shows per capita carbon emissions from housing (as opposed to from transport, industry etc) on a regional basis, analysed from DECC data. The chart cheats slightly by shortening the Y axis but even if we hadn't London still really stands out from the rest of the country.



Finally, this chart attempted to summarise the impact of the government's proposed cuts to Local Housing Allowance (housing benefit in the private sector) on the English regions. More households are affected in London than anywhere else, and much more of them are hit hard, to the tune of £20 or more a week. Anyone who has been following the news will know that these proposed changes are causing quite the political storm at the moment.