The evolution of the road network in the entire GLA area was reconstructed using OS historical maps downloaded from Edina. We traced the road centrelines starting from the present using our own updated version of Meridian 2 roads (not ITN) and going backwards. This turned out to be easier than going from the late 1700s forward as we could utilise the spatial accuracy of the current network and ignore slight shifts in the networks across time due to geo-referencing errors, road widening or alignment. We adopted the national road classification.

Kiril


On 15 Jul 2012, at 23:03, Batty, Michael wrote:

> Kiril stanislov digitised the whole lot i believe from old maps - mixture of digitisation- scanning and os vector stuff - he has massive historical data on london for our ca work
> 
> Copied to kiril who will explain
> 
> Mike
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On 15 Jul 2012, at 22:48, "Alain Chiaradia" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> 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
>>