If you’re looking for a new place to live, and want to live more greenly at the same time, Londonist has discovered the perfect tool to help you: Walk Score. A cunning twist on Google Maps, give it a postcode and it’ll calculate how many useful things, such as shops, restaurants, cinemas, schools and parks, are within a mile of your house. Meaning you can use your car less, get fitter, save money and make your ‘hood more sociable all at the same time. Other perks are the possibility of discovering a few things in an area that you’d previously missed, and using it competitively to see who’s the most eco-friendly out of you and your mates.
Londonist, living in Whitechapel, got a score of 80% (‘very walkable’), a fraction behind the Queen, who gets 82% when staying in her Buckingham Palace pad (see pic). Living behind Selfridges on Oxford Street achieves ‘walker’s paradise’ status of 95%.
Housing by the Millennium Dome scores 85% too, even if it is a way out of town. Hendon does okay with 65%, but Lordship Lane in Dulwich, with a score of 58%, still requires a car for many everyday trips.
One tiny drawback is that although it works for UK addresses, it automatically assumes you live in the US, so have the postcode to hand rather than the street name. But this minor point aside, it’s a great little piece of enlightenment.
By Cate Trotter
