The London Building Age Map

In my continuing quest to document every building age map in the world it has been very apparent that towns and cities in the UK do not have many interactive maps showing the ages when buildings were built. While many other countries seem to routinely collect data on the age of individual buildings, national and local governments in the UK really don't seem very interested in documenting the age or construction date of buildings.

This is one of the reasons why Colouring London was created. Colouring London is an open data project from University College London which is being used to collect statistical data on individual buildings in London. Using the Colouring London interactive map anyone can add information about individual buildings in London, including data on building age, the building's original type (residential, commercial etc) and its current use.

Using the Coloring London interactive map you can explore the open data already gathered on London buildings. For example if you select the 'Age' layer you can view a map of all the building ages already crowd-sourced. This map shows individual buildings colored by the year that they were constructed. Some areas of London have so far had more crowd-sourced data collected than others. The building age map at the moment is pretty comprehensive in the West End and the East End. At the time of writing it has little data for South London and most London suburbs.



You can view the ages of buildings in the rest of England & Wales using the CDRC Maps 'dwelling age' layer. The UK doesn't have any open data showing the ages of individual buildings. CDRC Maps has therefore used data from the Valuation Office Agency which does publish building ages in ten year bands (e.g. 1960-70).

The CDRC Maps dwelling age layer allows you to study the geography of residential building ages in towns and cities throughout England & Wales. Buildings built before the 20th Century are all classified by the Valuation Office Agency in one catch all pre-1900's band. Therefore while CDRC Maps is very good for exploring building developments in the 20th Century it isn't particularly useful for exploring the age of buildings built before 1900.