Mike

Out of curiosity, how were the successive network constructed?

Was the OS Mastermap ITN cut according to the different London urban edge at
the different historical date, or was the network reconstructed using
historical maps for each date? It seems to be the former as the paper
mention that the analysis of a unique dataset. The classification used seems
also to be the one of the OS Mastermap ITN. 
 
Alain 

-----Original Message-----
From: Complexity & Planning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Batty, Michael
Sent: 15 July 2012 19:13
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: London evolution anecdote

here is a paper that we did recently - last week - on London and street
network evolution viz Chris's comment on networks in London

Enjoy

Mike

_____________________________
Michael Batty
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) University College London (UCL)
90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TJ, UK

Tel  44 (0) 20 3108 3877 Mobile 44 (0) 7768 423 656
http://www.complexcity.info

t @jmichaelbatty

________________________________________
From: Complexity & Planning [[log in to unmask]] on behalf
of Chris Webster [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 15 July 2012 17:45
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: London evolution anecdote

Inspired by Professor Baykan Gunay's keynote AESOP talk on the history of
Ankara -  peppered with sepia photos of his relatives at various periods of
the city's history and the only keynote at such an event I've witnessed that
commanded an ovation and encore - I offer my own London anecdote relating to
the current discussion theme:

My great (x5) grandfather Samuel Ashley was a prototypical suburbanite,
moving from the then suburban village of Hackney, (currently inner
north-east London, not far from the Olympic Stadium) to the then ex-urban
village of Greenhithe (near Dartmouth)  in 1849, the year the new commuter
rail running from North Kent along the south of the Thames to London Bridge
Station was opened. Born in 1798, he was a typical Londoner: a mix of French
Huguenot immigrants, the dispossessed offspring of landed gentry,
rural-urban migrants from other parts of Britain and urban-urban middle
class migrants seeking betterment in the capital. His mother was a younger
female cousin of philosopher and parliamentarian Edmund Burke sent to London
from Dublin by her lawyer father to find a suitable husband; and his father,
the suitable husband, was an unidentified member of the Ashley-Cooper family
from Dorset (which begat contemporaneously with Samuel, the philanthropist
Lord Shaftsbury).

Samuel was a lawyer operating from an office just behind the bank of England
and commuted there from No. 1 the Triangle, Hackney. The Triangle is still
there today but No 1 is not - it was demolished in 1849 to make way for a
passenger extension to the North London line that opened in 1850. Samuel's
early victorian and georgian middle class commuter village was cut asunder
by retro-fitted transport infrastructure so he moved to a village in the
country, as Hackney had once been. The new rail line that forced him to the
further suburbs south of the Thames linked Hackney to the docks and made a
daily commute possible for thousands of dock and other lower-income workers,
just as the new line south of the thames made Greenhithe and other exotic
country villages with a view of the Thames estuary commutable for middle
class city workers. The social fabric of Hackney started to change, houses
were subdivided and development densified with smaller worker cottages in
the second half of the 19th century and then a suburbanisation of industry
and tenements in the 20th century. Property rights fragmented and gross land
values and land consumption per capita rose. Space filled more efficiently
and land uses diversified along with the knowledge-base of the local
population of Hackney.

The new commuting line following the south bank of the Thames that Samuel
now used to get to work, first joined a sparse necklace of commuting
villages (the house that Samuel moved to was one of a terrace of just 10 mid
victorian four storey town houses built in the same year that the station
opened - it is still standing). In the years that followed, more stations
opened along the line and industries and workers' housing estates filled in
the space between the stations. In turn, bus routes developed to service the
space between the railway line and other lines coming out of the London
Bridge Terminus and thus the fractal dimension of developed space in this
part of London, along with that of its property rights 'space' and its land
value and GDP all increased.

One gets the feeling reflecting on London's history like this, that there is
a certain orderliness about the sequencing and balance by which demand for
and supply of greater accessibility evolved. An interesting part of the
equation is the distribution of risk between people relocating, private
infrastructure and service providers and local governments. The risk is
distributed differently at different stages in the development and growth
process.

If you're wondering what became of Samuel - his demise was rapid after his
move to the exurbs. It was the drink not the commute that got him it seems.
He is buried in the neighbouring village of Swanscombe (railway station
opened July 6th 1930,  continuing the incremental radial extension of
commuting possibilities, gains from trade and fractal and economic
deepening).

Chris Webster