Comparing two London areas without a spreadsheet

Almost every London search ends the same way. You narrow it to two or three places, and then you stall — because the two areas are good at different things and there is no obvious way to trade them off.

One has better transport. The other has more green space. One is cheaper and further out. Every measure you look up adds a number and none of them adds a decision.

Why the spreadsheet does not work

The instinct is to build a table: areas down the side, measures across the top. It rarely survives contact with reality, for three reasons.

Twenty-one measures is too many to hold at once. You end up weighting them implicitly by which ones you happened to look up last.

The measures are not on the same scale. Offences per thousand, stations within a kilometre, percentage of households renting. There is no arithmetic that combines those honestly, which is why the temptation is to eyeball it — and eyeballing is where bias walks in.

Some measures have no good direction. More over-65s is not better or worse. Neither is a higher share of private renting. A spreadsheet quietly implies every column has a good end, and several do not.

A method that survives

1. Write down what would make you move again. Not what would be nice. What would make you regret the decision within a year. Usually two or three things: the commute, the noise, feeling unsafe walking back at night, no green space within reach, not getting into a school.

That list is short, and it is personal, and it is the only thing that should decide this.

2. Check those specific things, ignore the rest. If schools are not on your list, do not let a school figure influence you. The reason a comparison stalls is usually that you are weighing measures you do not actually care about.

3. Check them at the right resolution. This is where most comparisons go wrong. A borough figure covers somewhere very large — Bromley is bigger than several English cities. Comparing two boroughs tells you about two averages, not about the two streets you are choosing between.

The comparisons people actually make are usually between neighbours: Hackney and Islington, Lambeth and Southwark, Ealing and Hounslow. Those pairs are close enough that the borough averages sit near each other on most measures — which is exactly when the average stops being useful and the specific address starts mattering.

Use borough figures to eliminate. Use the actual address to decide.

4. Look up the two or three measures that are known to mislead. Some figures do not mean what they appear to. Recorded crime rates in central boroughs measure footfall as much as risk — we wrote about exactly that. Station counts miss frequency and choice entirely, which the transport post goes into. Green space by area and green space by number of places point in opposite directions, as the green space post shows.

Knowing which three figures are misleading is worth more than looking up another ten.

5. Walk both, at the hour you would actually be there. Sunday morning is not the test. Weekday evening, in the dark, walking from the station to the door is the test — and it settles most comparisons in about twenty minutes.

What we built for this

The reason AreaScore produces a single 1–10 score is precisely the problem in this post: twenty-one measures cannot be held in your head, and comparing two places measure by measure does not converge.

The score weights crime at 40%, transport at 30%, schools at 20% and green space at 10%, all as percentiles against every other London postcode. Those weights are a judgement, and we state them in full rather than hiding them, because a weighted score you cannot inspect is not evidence.

Demographics are shown but never scored, for the reason above — there is no good end of the age or tenure scale, and pretending otherwise would be us deciding what kind of neighbourhood is better on your behalf.

The app also compares postcodes side by side, which is the version of the spreadsheet that actually works: one score each, then the breakdown underneath for the two or three things on your list.

The shortest version

Decide what would make you regret it. Check those things, at the address rather than the borough. Know which figures mislead. Then walk both on a weekday evening.

Everything else is a spreadsheet you will not finish.

Every borough has a page with all 21 measures ranked, and the map covers all 283 postcode districts — both good for eliminating, neither sufficient for deciding.

Compare two postcodes properly

One 1-10 score each, then the full breakdown — crime, transport, schools and green space, down to the street.

Open app (Beta)