London Riots Maps

James Cridland has created and is updating a map of verified reports of looting and rioting in London – and elsewhere.

I much prefer this to another map which is automatically updated from postcoded tweets (similar to the UK Snow map) as Twitter is as much a source of disinformation as information, particularly for emotive subjects like this (false rumours propagate just as quickly as true news) and also information that is not relevant – the cluster around Tottenham for example is by-and-large relating to offers of assistance rather than reports of trouble.

I’ve combined James’ data (as at 3pm today) in KML form, with a choropleth map from the London Profiler showing London-only deciles of the 2004 Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), and overlaid both on an OpenStreetMap map, using MapTube. You can see this here. Please note I’m not suggesting there is any correlation or causality between the IMD and the locations of the disturbances.

The riots have affected me slightly, in-so-far as it is difficult to find any supermarkets in north/east Zone 2 (i.e. inner-city London) open in the evenings, and I’m taking a long way round to home, via Tower Hamlets rather than Hackney, to avoid a couple of flashpoints on the way (and going home during daylight hours.)