Category: London

High Lines 3. Millwall Viaduct

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 29 November 2015
2 Comments on High Lines 3. Millwall Viaduct

This is one in a series of posts about possible High Lines for London. Look out for the next one tomorrow.

Before the DLR came along in the 1980s, there was an abandoned railway route (the Millwall Extension of the London & Blackwall Railway) running through the Isle of Dogs and ending on a viaduct just south of the current Island Gardens station, at a terminus station called North Greenwich – several miles from the station currently with that name. Almost whole route, including the viaduct, was then reused when the DLR was built, the new terminus “Island Gardens” being just north of the old one. When the DLR was extended under the River Thames to Greenwich, the route needed to drop down more quickly so that it could tunnel under the Thames, so this short section, at the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, was abandoned for a second time, but the structure remains to this day, running across Millwall Park, starting shortly after Mudchute Station and ending shortly before the old Island Gardens station.

It would make a lovely High Line if it wasn’t for (a) being a little too short, (b) not going anywhere unique, as there’s a public footpath beneath/beside it all the way, (c) being in a park rather than crossing over roads and around/through buildings, and (d) being quite a long way from the crowds and buzz of inner city London. Still, it would be lovely to be able to walk about up there again – not possible since the original Island Gardens terminus station (nee North Greenwich) re-closed in the 1990s. Aerial imagery suggests it’s just a nice strip of grass and shrubbery these days.

Top photo: Copyright (CC-By) Rod Allday. Bottom photo: Copyright (CC-By) Matt Buck. Map is Copyright OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL, with cartography CC-By OpenStreetMap.

Leisure London

High Lines 2. The Greenway

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 28 November 2015
2 Comments on High Lines 2. The Greenway

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This is one in a series of posts about possible High Lines for London. Look out for the next one tomorrow.

The Greenway is an existing “High Line” in east London, however it does not follow the route of an abandoned railway line, rather it runs along the top of the Northern Outflow Sewer, one of London’s huge Victorian sewer pipes (the odd vent in the path’s tarmac provides you with a reminder of what is below!) The route heads east from Hackney Wick, which certainly ticks the “High Line” boxes of a post-industrial, loft-living neighbourhood, before slicing through the still-evolving Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. However, the remainder of the route is through big industry sites and a low-density residential area – Plaistow – which doesn’t give quite the same feeling of slicing through an inner city fabric that the NYC High Line, or yesterday’s featured route, the East London Line Extension, does. Abbey Mill is a highlight if you do keep going further east though.

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The first part of the Greenway received a substantial upgrade just before the Olympics, as it provided two potential entry points into the Olympic Park during the Olympics themselves. (They were little-used in the end.) However a section was also blocked during the games, as the athletes’ route between the warm-up track and the main Olympic Stadium passing across it. However, the improvement works were designed with the legacy in mind too and the resulting path is of a good quality, lit and with good views to the Olympic Park structures and the various residential skyscrapers going up along Stratford High Street. Cyclists use it as a commuting link, however the path is wide and visibility good.

The route will be further improved when the Crossrail works finish in 2018 and a section near Stratford, which has been closed since 2007, finally reopens. If walking along this first part, a stop off at the “View Tube“, a coffee shop made out of lime-green shipping containers, perched at the point where the Greenway route descends to cross under a railway line, it has an excellent view from the top deck. There may be further buildings appearing in the future – such as the UCL East campus and other similar projects, which mean that this section might eventually form more of a “High Line” feel, but it will never be an oasis in a dense inner-city, simply because it is too far out from central London.

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Top: The Greenway in the Olympic Park, following improvements made in 2009-10. Bottom: One of the signposts installed before the Olympics. Map is Copyright OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL, with cartography CC-By OpenStreetMap.

Leisure London

High Lines 1. The East London Line Extension

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 27 November 2015
2 Comments on High Lines 1. The East London Line Extension

This is one in a series of posts about possible High Lines for London. Look out for the next one tomorrow.

One problem with a High Line for London is that we never had very many abandoned, elevated railways in London. The capital largely escaped the so-called Beeching cuts of the 1960s, when many rural and other little-used lines were closed. After these cuts, laws were changed to make the closing of railway lines much harder to do, so even when railway usage reached its nadir in the 1980s, few additional lines were closed. Since then, number of peoples of trains have soared, particularly in London, and there is virtually no prospect of any existing lines being closed in the foreseeable future.

Perhaps the most promising candidate for a High Line was one of the few lines that were closed – the elevated railway between Broad Street (beside Liverpool Street Station) and Dalston in north inner-city London. In fact, the line survived Beeching, but succumbed to closure in 1986. The route lay abandoned for many years, with some of its bridges removed but otherwise being largely intact. However, instead of turning into a High Line type walking route it has in fact recently (2006-11) been turned back into a railway, the East London Line Extension (ELLX), arguably more useful and certainly acting as a catalyst for the regeneration of the Dalston/Haggerston/Hoxton area that it runs through.

The new line has a different characteristic to many of London’s lines that act just to get people in and out of the central core. Instead of its central London terminus beside Liverpool Street Station, the line takes a sharp left across a set of new bridges in Shoreditch (see below), linking up to the old East London Line. This is part of a new orbital London railway, the London Overground, and is already very heavily used. So, while London’s best candidate for a High Line was lost, the benefits of turning back into a real, working passenger railway have been quickly realised.

A short abandoned elevated link remains between the Broadgate Tower/Estate – now built across where the old central terminus station was – and where the turn across Shoreditch is – now blocked by Village Underground, a popular music and arts venue which notably has some old Jubilee Line tube carriages on its roof (see below on left) as workspaces. The link however it very short, barely 100m long, so not really viable for the creation of a High Line. You can the remaining link as the patch of green in the foreground on the left below.

You can still experience the “High Line” feel, passing by the second floors and roofs of old industrial buildings and loft apartments, with excellent and unexpected views across to central London, by travelling along the East London Line Extension between Dalston Juction and Shoreditch High Street – just that it’s in a train rather than on foot. The new stations, particularly Hoxton – have developed a “High Line” style coffees-amongst-brickwork feel to them. The trains are modern and airy, and run every few minutes. It’s not quite the same but it’s probably, in terms of area and feel, the closest that we have right now.

High Lines in London

London has been looking for its High Line, the elevated abandoned railway line in inner-city New York City (above) that has become a pleasant linear park, huge tourist attraction (I made a specific point of visiting on my recent trip) and regeneration stimulus in a brick-warehouses-and-cyclists part of Manhattan. Gliding peacefully above the busy traffic, moving through buildings and alongside wild flowers, the experience is rather surreal, and, on experiencing it, it’s easy to see why it’s been such a big hit.

What are the options?

Over the next twelve days, starting today, I’m going to outline twelve ideas for London “High Lines” – some of which already exist, some of which had a chance of being a genuine High Line but recent events took them in a different direction, and some which have potential. On the last day I’ll unveil the one which I think has the most potential, for a number of reasons, but which, curiously, little has been written about so far.

What is a High Line?

A “High Line” needs to be a route which is traffic free, not broken up by road or railway crossings. It is a route which is not designed to be a commuter link or an otherwise “fast” route, so with no opportunities for cycling at speed along it. And it is a route which allows to see a densely populated part of a city in a new way, the novelty and theatre of the route created by maximising the contrast between the mean, traffic-choked city streets below and soaring buildings above, and the green oasis of the route itself.
But with the winning entry in a recent competition being an underground walk, we probably need to go back to the drawing board.

Here’s my first idea.

Top photo: The High Line in New York. Old rails embeddded in wooden planks and surrounded by wildflower gardens, all two storeys above the Manhattan streets. Lovely. Bottom photo: The street “theatre” view, created by the line kinking across a street by a junction.

Cycling London

Traffic Calming Bank Junction

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 26 October 2015
No Comments on Traffic Calming Bank Junction

An idea from the City of London – to ban through traffic (except buses) from the seven-way junction at the very heart of the City, modelled on the part-pedestrianisation of Times Square in New York It’s a no-brainer, surely.

Here’s how I would do it – opening up the attractive space around the Royal Exchange for pedestrians only, adding a SW-NE cycleway through the junction as an extension/diversion of CS7 (which currently ends up at the less-well-located Guildhall), and allowing traffic (taxis) very near to the junction from four of the seven radial streets, while cutting out all through-journeys. Lothbury/Gresham Street is a quiet street and certainly able to take the east-west traffic, along with Cannon Street.

Data Graphics London

Living Somewhere Nice, Cheap and Close In – Pick Two!

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 14 August 2015
2 Comments on Living Somewhere Nice, Cheap and Close In – Pick Two!

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Skip straight to the 3D graph!

When people decide to move to London, one very simple model of desired location might be to work out how important staying somewhere nice, cheap, and well located for the centre of the city is – and the relative importance of these three factors. Unfortunately, like most places, you can’t get all three of these in London. Somewhere nice and central will typically cost more, for those reasons; while a cheaper area will either be not so nice, or poorly connected (or, if you are really unlucky, both). Similarly, there’s some nice and cheap, places, but you’ll spend half your life getting to somewhere interesting so might miss out on the London “experience”. Ultimately, you have to pick your favoured two out of the three!

Is it really true that there is no magic place in London where all three factors score well? To see the possible correlations between these three factors, I’ve calculated the ward* averages for these, and have created a 3D plot, using High Charts. Have a look at the plot here. The “sweet” spot is point 0,0,0 (£0/house, 0 score for deprivation, 0 minutes to central) on the graph – this is at the bottom left as you first load it in.

Use your mouse to spin around the graph – this allows you to spot outliers more easily, and also collapse down one of the variables, so that you can compare the other two directly on a 2D graph. Unfortunately, you can’t spin the graph using touch (i.e. on a phone/tablet) however you can still see the tooltip popups when clicking/hovering on a ward. Click/touch on the borough names, to hide/show the boroughs concerned. Details on data sources and method used are on the graph’s page.

The curve away from the sweet spot shows that there is a reasonably good inverse correlation between house prices and deprivation, and house prices and nearness to the city centre. However, it also shows there is no correlation between deprivation and nearness. Newington is cheap and close in, but deprived. Havering Park is cheap and a nice area, but it takes ages to get in from there. The City of London is nice and close by – but very expensive. Other outliers include Merton Village which is very nice – but expensive and a long way out, while Norwood Green (Ealing) is deprived and far out (but cheap). Finally, Bishop’s in Lambeth is expensive and deprived – but at least it’s a short walk into the centre of London.

Try out the interactive graph and find the area you are destined to live in.

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p.s. If you are not sure where your ward is, try clicking on the blobs within your borough here.

* Wards are a good way to split up London – there are around 600 of them, which is a nice amount of granularity, and importantly they have real-world names, unlike the “purer” equivalent Middle Super Output Areas (MSOAs). Using postcode “outcodes” would be even better, as these are the most familiar “coded” way of distinguishing areas by non-statisticians, but statistical data isn’t often aggregated in this way.

London OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap: London Building Coverage

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 24 July 2015
1 Comment on OpenStreetMap: London Building Coverage

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OpenStreetMap is still surprisingly incomplete when it comes to showing buildings for the London area, this is a real contrast to other places (e.g. Birmingham, New York City, Paris) when it comes to completeness of buildings, this is despite some good datasets (e.g Ordnance Survey OpenMap Local) including building outlines. It’s one reason why I used Ordnance Survey data (the Vector Map District product) rather than OpenStreetMap data for my North/South print.

The map below (click to view a larger version with readable labels and crisper detail, you may need to click it twice if your browser resizes it), and the extract above, show OpenStreetMap buildings in white, overlaid on OS OpenMap Local buildings, from the recent (March 2015) release, in red. The Greater London boundary is in blue. I’ve included the Multipolygon buildings (stored as relations in the OSM database), extracting them direct from OpenStreetMap using Overpass Turbo. The rest of the OSM buildings come via the QGIS OpenStreetMap plugin. The labels also come from OS OpenMap Local, which slightly concerningly for our National Mapping Agency, misspells Hampstead.

The spotty nature of the OSM coverage reveals individual contributions. For example, Swanley in the far south east of the map is comprehensively mapped, thanks presumably due to an enthusiastic local. West Clapham is also well mapped (it looks like a small-area bulk import here from OpenMap) but east Clapham is looking sparse. Sometimes, OpenStreetMap is better – often, the detail of the buildings that are mapped exceeds OpenMap’s. There are also a few cases where OSM correctly doesn’t map buildings which have been recently knocked down but the destruction hasn’t made it through to OpenMap yet, which typically can have a lag of a year. For example, the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle is now gone.

The relative lack of completeness of building data in OpenStreetMap, for London, where the project began in 2004, is – in fact – likely due to it being where the project began. London has always an active community, and it drew many of the capital’s roads and quite a few key buildings, long before most other cities were nearly as complete. As a result, when the Bing aerial imagery and official open datasets of building outlines became more recently available, mainly around 2010, there was a reluctance to use these newer tools to go over areas that had already been mapped. Bulk importing such data is a no-no if it means disturbing someone’s prior manual work, and updating and correcting an already mapped area (where the roads, at least, are drawn) is a lot less glamorous than adding in features to a blank canvas. As a result, London is only slowly gaining its buildings on OSM while other cities jumped ahead. Its size doesn’t help either – the city is a low density city and it has huge expanses of low, not particularly glamorous buildings.

An couple of OpenStreetMap indoor tracing parties might be all that’s needed to fix this and get London into shape. Then the OpenStreetMap jigsaw will look even more awesome.

Click for a larger version. Data Copyright OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL) and Crown Copyright and Database Right Ordnance Survey (OGL).

BODMAS Data Graphics London

The City of London Commute

Here’s a graphic I’ve made by taking a number of screenshots of DataShine Commute graphics, showing the different methods of travelling to work in the City of London, that is, the Square Mile area at the heart of London where hundreds of thousands and financial and other employees work.

All the maps are to the same scale and the thickness of the commuting blue lines, which represent the volume of commuters travelling between each home area and the City, are directly comparable across the maps (allowing for the fact that the translucent lines are superimposed on each other in many areas). I have superimposed the outline of the Greater London Authority area, of which the City of London is just a small part at the centre.

There’s lots of interesting patterns. Commuter rail dominates, followed by driving. Car passenger commutes are negligible. The biggest single flow in by train is not from another area of London, but from part of Brentwood in Essex. Taxi flows into the City mainly come from the west of Zone 1 (Mayfair, etc). Cyclists come from all directions, but particularly from the north/north-east. Motorbikes and mopeds, however, mainly come from the south-west (Fulham). The tube flow is from North London mainly, but that’s because that’s where the tubes are. Finally, the bus/coach graphic shows both good use throughout inner-city London (Zones 1-3) but also special commuter coaches that serve the Medway towns in Kent, as well as in Harlow and Oxford. “Other” shows a strong flow from the east – likely commuters getting into work by using the Thames Clipper services from Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs.

Try it out for your own area – click on a dot to see the flows. There is also a Scotland version although only for between local authorities, for now.

Click on the graphic above for a larger version. DataShine is part of the ESRC-funded BODMAS project at UCL. I’ll be talking about this map at the UKDS Census Applications conference tomorrow in Manchester.

Data Graphics London Mashups OpenLayers OpenStreetMap

Tube Line Closure Map

[Updated] The Tube Line Closure Map accesses Transport for London’s REST API for line disruption information (both live and planned) and uses the information there to animate a geographical vector map of the network, showing closed sections as lines flashing dots, with solid lines for unaffected parts. The idea is similar to TfL’s official disruption map, however the official one just colours in the disrupted links while greying out the working lines (or vice versa) which I think is less intuitive. My solution preserves the familiar line colours for both working and closed sections.

My inspiration was the New York City MTA’s Weekender disruptions map, because this also blinks things to alert the viewer to problems – in this case it blinks stations which are specially closed. Conversely the MTA’s Weekender maps is actually a Beck-style (or actually Vignelli) schematic whereas the regular MTA map is pseudo-geographical. I’ve gone the other way, my idea being that using a geographical map rather than an abstract schematic allows people to see walking routes and other alternatives, if their regular line is closed.

Technical details: I extended my OpenStreetMap-based network map, breaking it up so that every link between stations is treated separately, this allows the links to be referenced using the official station codes. Sequences of codes are supplied by the TfL API to indicate closed sections, and by comparing these sequences with the link codes, I can create a map that dynamically changes its look with the supplied data. The distruption data is pulled in via JQuery AJAX, and OpenLayers 3 is used to restyle the lines appropriately.

Unfortunately TfL’s feed doesn’t include station closure information – or rather, it does, but is not granular enough (i.e. it’s not on a line-by-line basis) or incorrect (Tufnell Park is shown only as “Part Closed” in the API, whereas it is properly closed for the next few months) – ~~so I’m only showing line closures, not station closures.~~ (I am now showing these, by doing free-text search in the description field for “is closed” and “be closed”.) One other interesting benefit of the map is it allows me to see that there are quite a lot of mistakes in TfL’s own feed – generally the map shows sections open that they are reporting as closed. There’s also a few quirks, e.g. the Waterloo & City Line is always shown as disrupted on Sundays (it has no Sunday service anyway) whereas the “Rominster” Line in the far eastern part of the network, which also has no Sunday service, is always shown as available. [Update – another quirk is the Goblin Line closure is not included, so I’ve had to add that in manually.]

Try it out

Tube Line Closure Map

London

Engineering Tour: The Thames Barrier

Post author By Oliver O'Brien
Post date 5 May 2015
No Comments on Engineering Tour: The Thames Barrier

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I was recently able to have a behind-the-scenes tour of the huge Thames Barrier structure in east London, thanks to the IET London branch – I’m not a member of the IET (although I used to be) but spotted a tweet from them advertising the tour, so was able to sign up.

As an “engineering” tour, we were able to get right onto the barrier itself, onto one of the “piers” in the middle of the river. Accessing this is fairly involved. The operational site is under very high security indeed, as befits the importance of the barrier during a flood event and the impact that an uncontrolled flood would have on various critical parts of central London, including the Canary Wharf financial district and the South Bank. Once in, getting to the pier involves crossing a short bridge over the first barrier section that is in fact completely dry at low tide) and then accessing one of two tunnels that run almost completely underneath the Thames, with stairs (for the west tunnel) or lifts (for the east tunnel) linking to the piers themselves. The two tunnels are completely separate from each other, for redundancy/safety reasons, so if one of the tunnels was breached, full access to all the piers would still be possible. The tunnels are fairly small, they have reinforced rings like a tube tunnel, but are quite a bit smaller, and contain numerous ducting cables and pipes. They are dead straight, so looking down one makes for quite an eye-catching vista.

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tbt3 Each pier has two “hull like” buildings which are silvery on the outside, but surprisingly made of wood on the inside. The smaller one houses the top of the aforementioned lift shafts, while the larger one houses the machinery for rotating the huge barrier pieces. Normally, a close or open event takes a couple of hours – in fact, the barrier is quite capable of closing in a couple of minutes, but this is never used, partially because tidal events are fairly predictable with around 24 hours notice (being based on tide, wind direction, upstream flow and air pressure) and partially because a sudden closure/opening would have a negative impact on the ecosystem of the river – likely impacting flora/fauna in the river, and structures on the the banks (I presume this is from sudden changes in water salinity, level or pressure).

The larger pier building also has an attractive circular window, facing upstream. From the river, it is quite a distinctive feature of the barrier as you approach it. The circular shape again is a play on the barrier piers having a boat theme.

The equipment in the piers is large and impressive. Some of it looks pretty old – the Thames having been built in the 1980s but designed in the 1970s, based on 1960s technology that had to be “proven” for a decade before, so harking back to the 1950s. But it is kept in great working order and does the job well – which is just as well, as the barrier had to close during the Spring 2014 floods nearly 50 times – almost as many times as it had closed in the preceding 30 years.

Anyway, it was a fascinating tour, and thanks to the IET London branch for organising. The tour guides were retired engineers who had worked on the barrier itself for many years, so it was very informative visit.

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