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LONDON | DEEP-DIVE | VIBRANCY

Modern Restaurant Kitchen

There are few things in this world more gorgeous and intoxicating than the gaudy swish and swirl of a big city.

"The crowd is his domain, as the air is that of the birds. For the perfect flâneur, it is an immense joy to take up one’s dwelling among the multitude, amidst undulation, movement, the fugitive, the infinite." (Charles Baudelaire).

 

In our Polymap and in the Gallery, you ​will have seen just one metric for "vibrancy". But this measure is actually a composite of the twelve different metrics illustrated below.

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Follow the links below to delve deeper into each of these metrics.​

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From Brixton to Barnet, Hackney to Hammersmith, Kensington to Kingston, each London borough has its own, quite distinct, cultural patina. And yet, within each borough, there are zones that appear to be soaked in the same muddy palette of grey and beige i.e. long stretches of residential housing or commercial property that have no truck with gastropubs, gourmet coffee shops, art galleries, artisan bakeries or any other hipster manifestations. Whilst at the opposite end of the spectrum are dozens of little geographic clusters bursting with Epicurean efflorescence: the cafes, the museums, the bookstores, the bakers, the cheese-block makers.

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But surely there are many different ways by which to measure the vibrancy of a neighbourhood. So why we have concentrated on the twelve measures shown above? For example, why haven't we included restaurants, gyms, tennis clubs, nightclubs, florists, barber shops, etc.? The simple answer to these questions is that we have to start somewhere and we have to stop somewhere. We mustn't allow ourselves to drown in our own data.

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We acknowledge that one person's definition of metropolitan vibrancy can be slightly different to another's. You say tomato(e), I say tomato(h); you say coffee, I say sushi. But the truth is that any district that scores highly on our twelve metrics is likely to score highly on any vibrancy metric, simply by virtue of the law of cross-correlation. Districts that have a profusion of good coffee shops are likely to be blessed with a corresponding density of restaurants. Areas that are proximate to lots of good pubs and bars are also more likely to host thriving nightclubs than their less bibulous geographic cousins.

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But knowing the dimensions along which vibrancy is measured is not the same as knowing how, exactly, these measurements are computed. For that, you'll need to bear with us as we get a little bit technical.

 

Let's take the example of the 622 delicatessens (or "delis") that were operating in London in mid 2020. There are 178,651 postcodes in our Greater London database. For each of these postcodes, we calculate both the distance to the nearest deli and the distance to the second nearest deli (after all, if your doorstep deli has run out of taramasalata, it's helpful if the second closest deli is only a short walk away). We then rank all the 178,651 postcodes in terms of deli proximity (in each case assigning greater weight to the closest deli than to the second closest deli).

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After we have calculated the deli proximity ranking for every postcode, we then move to the hexagon level. If you recall, we have divided London into 2,915 hexagons, each of which contains multiple postcodes. So the deli proximity score for any single hexagon is the average of the deli proximity rankings of all the postcodes contained therein.

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We then repeat this exercise for each of the other eleven metrics i.e. bakery proximity; bookstore proximity; cinema proximity etc. And once we have hexagon-level scores on all twelve metrics, we use a simple unweighted average thereof to derive each hexagon's aggregate "vibrancy" score.

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