Kitcatt Nohr Digitas

Inspired by the tremendous work he did for National Geographic when creating their surname map of the United States, James Cheshire has now done the same for dear old London town with this typographic map of surname distribution. It's based on the data from the 2001 census, so we can be sure it's genuine.

It's based on a simple premise: the more common the name, the bigger it appears on the map.

The most amazing thing is how few names show up. Until you're down to the level of very uncommon names, the map is amazingly homogeneous. Indeed, all of the names shown on all 15 individual maps can be traced to 38 origins. And it's both surprising and not surprising that so many similar names appear close to each other.

You can find the full map at http://spatialanalysis.co.uk/2011/01/24/mapping-londons-surnames/ - it's well worth a visit.

I wanted to write about this last month, but the maps were so popular that James's website stopped working. (Hope that never happens to ours).