The centre of London is generally taken to be the statue of Charles I on the south side of Trafalgar Square. It sits on the site of the original Charing Cross and is also the point from which mileages are measured, as a plaque at its foot attests.
But the geographical centre of London is harder to define. Based purely on maps and boundaries, not historical precedent, where might the centre of the capital be? In today's post I'm going to visit some of the candidates, laugh at a suggestion made for marketing reasons and throw in a potential candidate myself. Without offering too many spoilers, the answer is probably in south London not far from Waterloo.
1) The centroid
In geometry a centroid is the average position of all the points within a figure, i.e. the centre of gravity. Possibly the best way to picture this is to imagine a flat sheet of metal in the shape of Greater London and then to identify the point where it would balance. The is what Londonist did in 2010, although they stuck a map to a packet of M&S cheese crackers, trimmed it with scissors and attempted to balance it on a knitting needle. This rough and ready method ended up poking a hole in the vicinity of Lambeth North tube station, and this it turns out is a pretty good estimate.
In 2014 a Londonist reader, Tom Hoban, set his AutoCAD software the task of determining a more accurate location. He traced an electronic map of the Greater London boundary, pressed some buttons and determined that the centre of the capital was at 51.500502N 0.109294W. If you want that in degrees minutes and seconds it's 51°30'1.81"N 0°6'33.46"W, if you want it as a grid reference it's TQ313796, if you'd prefer it as a postcode it's SE1 7RD, if you'd like a clickable map try here/here/here, and if you'd just like a photo here's one.
This is the Tanswell Estate in Lambeth, a horseshoe of council housing lurking just off Waterloo Road near Waterloo station. If you know Waterloo Millennium Green it's just behind that. These are typical LCC blocks erected in the 1930s on the site of demolished slums, indeed I can show you a photo from 1936 of the barrel works and former terraces that used to be here. Today the property in the corner is called Greet House, a five storey redbrick block with external walkways of the kind that coppers in The Bill were always running round. The centre of London lies in the parking spaces outside, perhaps within the blue bin shed or the raised shrubbery, in front of an impressive line of potted plants. One of the vehicles parked here is a black taxi and I'd like to suggest that this cabbie selected his home with rare precision. Perhaps more strategically impressive, the headquarters of the London Ambulance Service are located on the other side of Greet House facing Pearman Road. I have never seen so many ambulances parked up in a residential area, at least in the absence of a medical calamity.
Not everyone agrees with Tom Hoban's calculation. An architect called Michael Jack did a similar centroid calculation with his software and ended up with a slightly different location on Baylis Road, specifically 51°30'1.94"N 0°6'39.67"W. He even went to the effort of sticking a red cross to the pavement and taking a photo so he could show the location on his website, which I hoped would make locating the precise spot much easier. Unfortunately the cycle lane in his photo has been upgraded over the last decade so matching the image to reality took me a while. But by focusing on the trees and lampposts I found the correct spot by a BT inspection hatch over the wall from Johanna primary school, immediately opposite Cut Waterloo barbershop and Waterloo Food & Wine.
Reassuringly it's only a two minute walk from here to the previous centroid location at Greet House, a distance of barely 100m, but this just goes to show how a tiny difference in calculation can shift the intended result. Reassuringly Baylis Road and Pearman Road are essentially neighbours, and both are a short walk north of Lambeth North tube station so Londonist's needle-balancing stunt turned out to be pretty accurate. Weighting the calculation to take account of London's population shifts the centroid a bit, to the Shell Centre on the South Bank, because a lot of Bromley is quite empty. I also once calculated the average location of all the bus stops in London, courtesy of an FoI request, and that ended up outside St Thomas's Hospital a few streets away. Within an appropriate margin of error, therefore, it's a good bet that the geographical centre of London is somewhere in the streets round the back of Waterloo station.
2) An alternative centroid
Ten years ago London's media were agog with the news that the centre of London had shifted to a bench on the Thames Embankment near Temple station at 51°30’37.6”N 0°06’56.3”W. A new centre point for London, said the Independent. London's real centre point, said the Evening Standard. The really boring spot in London next to a park bench that is the exact middle of the city, said MyLondon eight years later, as befits a bunch of shameless scavenging peddlers of unchecked clickbait. I don't have a photo of the bench because the day of the London Marathon is not the time to get up close, plus this location turns out to be utter bolx.
The new data had in fact come from estate agents Knight Frank who had property to sell. "With mapping technology used by the British army we calculated the exact centre of central London," they said, "and this point is the bullseye of the bullseye." It turns out what they'd actually done was find the centroid of the inner London ring road, not the capital itself, because that gave them an answer closer to where they wanted it to be. That's because their research had been commissioned to promote a new report on the Midtown area, central London's most impressively unsuccessful rebranding project, and this blind-copied rubbish is why you should never believe everything you read in the papers.
3) Furthest from the boundary
This one comes courtesy of Ollie O'Brien, a Lead Data Scientist at UCL who's assisted this blog with data queries before. In 2014 he contributed to the ongoing discussion about London's centre by calculating the point furthest from the Greater London boundary as the crow flies (by doing a few negative Buffer operations in QGIS). It turned out the most distant spot was 10.42 miles from Stirling Corner in Borehamwood, 10.42 miles from The Brook pub in Worcester Park and 10.42 miles from the Central line junction near Roding Valley station. And it's to be found at 51°30'47.30"N 0°8'3.37"W, aka TQ295809, aka W1F 0DN, which is just off Wardour Street in Soho.
By chance the equidistant point lies up a narrow alley, namely Tyler's Court, a dingy slot along the side of a fancy dress shop on Berwick Street. This wiggy emporium (called So High Soho) recently moved out for a refurb so the whole place is sheathed in scaffolding and the alleyway is even less welcoming than usual. The walls are scrawled with graffiti, you'd think twice about nipping through to Wardour Street after dark and the inevitable smell of urine hangs in the air (or at least it did after a heavy Saturday night). Facing all this grime is Kemp House, the gentrified replacement for what I remember 20 years ago as a 'proper' row of interesting shops but which now sells prissy facial cleansers, designer beanies and overpriced accessories to brandwhores who wouldn't have been seen dead in Berwick Street Market back in the day... and maybe this dichotomous spot isn't such a bad representation of 'central' London after all.
4) Where the diagonals cross
This is my personal contribution to the ongoing debate. Obviously Greater London doesn't really have diagonals but if I pretend it does and see what happens it turns out to give a very good answer. What I did was draw a line from the northernmost point in London (the M25 near Crews Hill) to the southernmost point (between fields near Chaldon) and join them with a straight line, then do the same with the westernmost point (M25 junction 14) and the easternmost point (a marshy ditch beyond North Ockendon). You can see my working on a Google Map I've knocked up and zoom in to see the precise point where the diagonals cross... which it turns out is here, just beyond the ticket barriers.
Welcome to the new bit of Waterloo station, bolted onto the side, which was of course the original Eurostar terminal before trains were transferred to St Pancras. It's now used for suburban departures, mostly via Wandsworth and Putney, and is a bit of a walk from the remainder of the concourse. If I've counted the ribs in the roof correctly the crossover point is on the grand sweep between platforms 23 and 24, roughly where the front carriage of a train pulls in, beside the little grey cabin where staff hide away. And because we've hit a properly special spot, we can also head down the escalators and experience the crossover point on the floor below.
This is The Sidings, an attempt to create a hospitality destination in the former customs and processing halls of the ex-Eurostar terminal. It was greatly promoted by its developers and scored one big hit when Brewdog moved in at the far end with their enormous craft beer playground. The remainder of the space, however, hasn't attracted many tenants and generally resembles retail tumbleweed. A coffee shop, a salon and a bloke trying to sell designer trainers are still trading but beyond them are hoardings which promise great things but have never been removed, and generally hardly anybody walks past the toilets. Things are even quieter one level further down where most travellers would never think to go. The WH Smith at the crossover point is now closed, its shelves emptied, and the Rosarium restaurant claims to be "taking a short break in the new year". This centre of London is an economic disaster zone, akin to walking around the corridors of a gleaming starship while bored security guards eye you up for target practice.
In all this cartographical juggling we haven't really done any better than in part 1, identifying London's centroid, which appears to be the Tanswell Estate in Lambeth. And don't forget that all these measurements are potentially subject to change, for example if Slough were ever incorporated into the capital or Havering decided to make a run for it. Best I think to stick with the historical definition of London's centre being Charing Cross and leave Waterloo as a middling curiosity.
