What is Mapumental?

It’s a tool that uses lovely maps to help you work out where in Britain you might like to live, work or visit for a holiday.

How do I use it?

At the moment Mapumental is best at helping you work out where else you might live to have a better daily commute. This will change in the future, but for now, here’s how to use it.

First, enter a postcode for a place of work, a college, or anywhere you have to be regularly.

Mapumental will then create and show you a map of a few miles around the postcode you entered, with a big splodge in the middle. That splodge represents every location you could live if you needed to get to your workplace by 9am, assuming you want to travel less than an hour by public transport.

Now for the clever bit. Let’s say you don’t want to commute for an hour, but you’d be happy with half an hour. What you do now is grab the slider and slide it to the right, until it says ‘Departing at 8.30’. As you do this you’ll see the splodge change size and shape to show only those places half an hour or less away from your chosen destination.

What about the house prices slider?

It isn’t much use knowing that an area is an acceptable commute to your chosen destination if you can’t possibly afford to live there.

Grab the slider and slide it up and down to hide places that are too expensive.

Now you can see places which are both 30 minutes or less away, AND which cost an acceptable amount.

Sorry — we don’t have house prices for Scotland. They wanted to sell them for an outrageous price, so we said no.

And scenicness — what’s that?

Some people like to live in or near places that are pretty. The scenicness slider lets you hide places with a low ‘scenicness’ score.

How do the sliders combine?

All the sliders can be set to different positions, and they always produce a single map for you to look at. What the sliders do is effectively hide places that are too far in time, too expensive and too ugly, leaving you with a map of what’s left.

If you set the sliders to an impossible combination, it’ll simply show you nothing — that’s because there isn’t anywhere you can live 10 minutes from Mayfair and pay under £25k for a house, sorry :)

What comes next?

Ooh, lots of things, including:

  • Building the system to scale industrially, so we can make it fully public. It is a very high bandwidth and computationally intensive website, so this will take a little more time.
  • Allowing you to choose journeys arriving at more times than just 9am.
  • Allowing you to choose journeys that leave after a specified time, rather than arrive (good for planning holidays).
  • Allowing multiple centres, so you can see places to live within 40 minutes of two different places of work (for couples, say).
  • More stuff that our users suggest...

Behind the scenes

Who built this?

mySociety, in partnership with Channel 4’s 4IP.

Francis Irving, the genius who worked out how to find over 20,000 journeys a second will post on the immense technical challenge overcome, soon. My thanks go massively to him; to Stamen, for their lovely slidey, zoomy, splodgey Flash UI, and to the ever brilliant Matthew Somerville, for all his work and a lovely design. The scale of technical challenge this project represented was simply awesome, and they rose to the occasion.

Nearly 15,000 people who played ScenicOrNot, who helped create the scenicness data layer.

And Chris Lightfoot, of course, pioneered the whole thing.

Where do the background maps come from?
They’re OpenStreetMap, made by their wonderful, insanely hard-working magical internet pixies.
Where does the public transport data come from?
Traveline, it’s called the National Public Transport Data Repository. It costs about £9000 inc. VAT, if you’re in the market yourself.
How accurate is the transport data?
The journey times shown are a moderately good reflection of reality, but with lots of caveats and you should not use them for planning actual journeys. We take absolutely no responsibility if you do something stupid like buy a house in the middle of a lake because you thought it looked like a sensible option on our maps. Check first!
When was the transport data captured?
One Tuesday in October last year.
What modes of transport are covered?
Trains, buses, coaches, the underground, trams and ferries. Air travel is not included at all, because NPTDR only contains flights connecting to Scotland. International sea and rail journeys are not included, either.
What are the interchange times and walking speeds?
My — you really do want to know details, don’t you? The public transport journey times assume you can walk at 3mph as the crow flies. 10 minutes walking is allowed between stations and to/from your final destination. 30 minutes walking is allowed at the other end of the journey, partly so it displays clearly on the map. 1 minute is allowed to change buses at the same stop, and 5 minutes for changing train, coach, underground and ferry at the same station.
How are the house prices calculated?
We bought a list of every actual domestic property sale recorded with the Land Registry for England and Wales between the start of January 2008 and the end of March 2009. They are being displayed with a weighted, inverse distance decaying mean (see GDAL documentation). No attempt has been made to deflate house prices forward to one time period.
Why are there no house prices in Scotland?
It turns out that to find out the cost of a house in Scotland costs about ten times more than to find one in England and Wales. Maybe they’re ten times nicer houses? Who knows, but we ain’t paying.
Where is the scenicness data from?
People vote on the scenicness of photos of Britain on ScenicOrNot, a site we made specially to create the data for this one. Please go there and help improve the data! The photos ultimately come from Geograph. The scenicness is display on the map with a similar weighted, inverse distance mean to the one used for house prices as described above.
Who are you?
We are mySociety, a charity that builds useful websites. For example, you can report potholes (or abandoned mozzarella cheese) using FixMyStreet, and check up on your MP’s expenses using TheyWorkForYou.
Who provides the hosting?
mySociety’s hosting is kindly supplied by Easynet.