“A PhD student named Anil Bawa-Cavia has created some lovely visualisations of the data from location-based social network Foursquare, showing where the greatest activity in London is in a number of different categories.
Bawa-Cavia created the maps as part of his research into cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. He sifted through the city’s Foursquare checkins, and then broke down the results into different categories.
For example, the nightlife map is well distributed among a number of venues, with the Hospital Club proving the most popular check-in location. There are far fewer arts venues, however, with the O2 arena proving the most popular.
Regent’s Park is the most difficult green space in London to become the mayor of, but it should be relatively trivial in comparison to get the top spot for Camden Lock, which was top of the listing of shops.
The dataset used contained 162,068 check-ins at 7,191 venues. That suggests that every location that’s been checked-in to at least once has an average of 23 check-ins — a surprisingly high figure.
As for locations, the most popular places to check in were Shoreditch, London Fields, Covent Garden, the South Bank, the O2, Angel, Regent’s Park, Kensington, King’s Cross and Camden Town. Areas south of the river were extremely underrepresented, with most of the activity taking place in central, east and north London. Of course, that probably says more about the demographics of Foursquare users than the demographics of Londoners.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
"
I am the Mayor of Regents Park.
Well, one of them. There are several listings for most large spaces in London and hundreds of duplicate listings for other places – which makes all of this analysis slightly tricky I imagine.