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Datasets

Civic facility location data for London, gathered borough by borough.

Layout

Each facility has its own folder. Inside it, one subfolder per borough holds that borough's raw data, and a single *-all-london.geojson merges every borough we have for that facility (each feature tagged with a _borough property).

datasets/<facility>/
├── <borough>/<facility>.geojson      raw data for one borough (some also .csv)
├── ...
└── <facility>-all-london.geojson     all boroughs merged, one file

All GeoJSON is WGS84 (longitude/latitude) point geometry, ready for "near me" queries.

Coverage matrix

Numbers are record counts. A dash means that borough does not publish that facility as open location data.

Borough Libraries Reception CCTV Schools Toilets Polling Grit bins
Camden 13 19 - 658 39 61 177
Lambeth 11 - 470 100 32 101 -
Wandsworth 11 - - 81 - 83 55
Kingston 7 - - - - 53 110
Kensington & Chelsea - 28 79 - 48 - -
Barnet - - - 161 26 91 -
City of London - - - - 71 4 34
Hammersmith & Fulham - - - - - 71 -
Total 42 47 549 1000 216 464 376
Boroughs 4 2 2 4 5 7 4

We checked all 32 boroughs plus the City of London. The other 24 authorities publish none of these as open location data (statistics dashboards or no portal).

Sources by borough

All released under the UK Open Government Licence (OGL) unless noted. Verify the licence on each portal before publishing.

Borough Portal / source Platform
Camden opendata.camden.gov.uk Socrata
Lambeth gis.lambeth.gov.uk (hub: lambethopenmappingdata-lambethcouncil.opendata.arcgis.com) ArcGIS
Wandsworth wandsworth.gov.uk "Location data" page Static CSV
Kingston od-rbk.opendata.arcgis.com ArcGIS Hub
Kensington & Chelsea RBKC ArcGIS services (rbkc-lbhf) ArcGIS
Barnet open.barnet.gov.uk DataPress
City of London mapping.cityoflondon.gov.uk (INSPIRE WFS) ArcGIS WFS
Hammersmith & Fulham LBHF ArcGIS services (rbkc-lbhf) ArcGIS

Camden libraries come from the Arts Council England libraries dataset (national, geocoded) filtered to Camden, not Camden's own portal.

Data preparation

The raw source data was transformed before being committed. The following steps were performed to produce the files in this repository:

  • Format and projection unification. All sources were converted to GeoJSON point geometry in WGS84 (lon/lat). Sources that published British National Grid eastings/northings (Wandsworth and Barnet CSVs) had their coordinates reprojected to WGS84. You can see the residue: a Camden library feature still carries Easting/Northing fields in its properties, but the GeoJSON geometry coordinate is already lon/lat.
  • Merging and borough tagging. Per facility, all borough files were merged into one <facility>-all-london.geojson. A synthetic _borough property was added to every feature (it doesn't exist in the source data).
  • Geocoding address-only sources. Barnet schools and polling stations publish addresses but no coordinates. Coordinates were generated by geocoding to the postcode centroid via postcodes.io, so those points are accurate to postcode level, not surveyed positions.
  • Source substitution. Camden libraries were pulled from the national Arts Council England dataset (filtered to Camden), not Camden's own portal, because the Arts Council data is richer and already geocoded.

What was not normalised on disk: field names are kept verbatim from each borough's source. Schema unification (resolving Establishment name / establishment_name / ESTABLISHMENT_NAME to the same field) is handled at read time by the civic-geo engine. This keeps the raw data inspectable and avoids lossy renaming.

Prep scripts: the transformations above were performed out-of-band (one-off scripts, not committed). Only the prepared outputs are in the repository. The refresh URLs in the section below can be used to re-download source data; the preparation steps above would need to be re-applied.

Caveats (read before relying on a layer)

  • Barnet schools and polling stations publish only addresses, so coordinates are postcode-centroid geocodes (via postcodes.io), accurate to postcode level, not surveyed points.
  • Lambeth CCTV is TfL traffic cameras, not council community-safety CCTV.
  • Kensington & Chelsea reception centres are emergency rest centres, the nearest match to "reception centres", not routine customer-service desks.
  • City of London polling is 4 polling places (tiny resident population); schools there are a catchment boundary, not points, so not included.
  • Each portal uses a different platform and field names. The unified files merge geometry and tag _borough; the raw per-borough property fields are kept verbatim (not rewritten to a shared schema on disk). Instead, the civic-geo engine normalises them at read time - matching name/address/highlight fields case- and punctuation-insensitively, so Establishment name, establishment_name and ESTABLISHMENT_NAME all resolve to the same logical field. Address-only sources with no venue name (e.g. Camden/Wandsworth polling stations) are labelled from their address ("Polling station, Stukeley Street, WC2B 5LL").
  • Camden schools is a London-wide GIAS extract (658 rows) that is all tagged _borough: camden even though individual rows carry their true local_authority_name (often another borough). Treat Camden's school count as London-wide, not Camden-only, until the file is re-split by authority.

A simpler route for three of these

For three facilities a single national dataset already covers all of London, with no borough stitching:

  • Schools - DfE Get Information About Schools (GIAS)
  • Libraries - Arts Council England (the source already used for Camden)
  • Polling stations - Democracy Club (UK-wide; changes per election)

The borough-by-borough approach is the only option for public toilets, grit bins, CCTV and reception centres, where no national source exists.

Not available

  • CCTV beyond Lambeth (traffic) and Kensington & Chelsea (community safety). Most councils withhold camera locations. Barnet lists cameras but with no coordinates, so it could not be mapped.
  • Reception centres beyond Camden and the K&C rest centres. Rare as open data.

Refresh

  • Socrata (Camden): https://opendata.camden.gov.uk/resource/<ID>.geojson?$limit=50000
  • ArcGIS (Lambeth, Kingston, RBKC, H&F): <FeatureServer or MapServer>/0/query?where=1=1&outFields=*&outSR=4326&f=geojson
  • WFS (City of London): https://www.mapping.cityoflondon.gov.uk/arcgis/services/INSPIRE/MapServer/WFSServer?service=WFS&version=2.0.0&request=GetFeature&typeNames=<layer>&outputFormat=GEOJSON&srsName=EPSG:4326
  • Static CSV (Wandsworth, Barnet): download the CSV and convert any British National Grid eastings/northings to WGS84.

See ../docs/london-structure.md for why facility data is split across boroughs.