Last year someone drew a banana on a map of London and it went viral.
The banana starts in Barnet and aims for central London keeping east of the Edgware Road. It includes pretty much all of Camden, Islington and Westminster, but only the affluent western slice of Haringey. It then swings southwest through Kensington & Chelsea and Fulham before crossing the Thames into (most of) Lambeth, Wandsworth, Merton, Richmond and Kingston. The eastern half of London doesn't get a look in.
Initially it wasn't so much the map that went viral but the incendiary accompanying comment.
A brutal generalisation, demonstrably false, but with a hint of truth to it.
People agreed.
» "There is a lot of truth and accuracy in this, it must be said"
» "Has been the case for 30/40 yrs. You just noticed?"
» "Move it over slightly to the left to include Kilburn and Willesden and eliminate Battersea and Wandsworth and it's probably pretty accurate overall."
People also disagreed.
» I am not sure everywhere in this banana is so nice as you claim"
» Harrow, Maida Vale, lots of Surrey, Epping, Canary Wharf & Dulwich should be inside the banana"
» Most of my adult life has been spent outside the banana and has been just fine, thanks."
It's plainly bolx to divide London into two parts and claim that everything in one part is great and almost everything in the other is horrible. Nothing in geography is that cut and dried, not unless you're a provocateur over-generalising to get a reaction.
"It seems I accidentally perfected minimal-effort tongue-in-cheek rage bait for English people."
Amid the replies Saul did say "it's not an exact science" and that the banana has "a fuzzy border" but obviously that nuance got lost in the pile-on. Instead all that twenty million people saw was a bald statement of dubious certainty which either confirmed their prejudice or was inherently incorrect, which is essentially how social media warps minds these days.
The London Banana was alloverthepress last summer because they love stuff like this, mainly because divisive content turbocharges engagement. The Standard did at least top up their pointless voxpops with some research into the origin of the map.
Sadka told the Standard he was inspired to create the map after “seeing a person in a balaclava menacing someone with a stick quite openly on a high street just outside the banana". Although Sadka admitted the banana was “randomly made up based on personal experience,” he argued it “actually aligns pretty well with a number of quality-of-life proxy maps, such as violent crime rates, property prices, and more”.[The Standard, 3rd September 2025]
And I mention all this because, after following up his London Banana multiple times over the last year, Saul's pinned tweet now references something I created.
I'm not used to my blog content being seen over a million times, especially something I knocked off in an hour on Saturday morning. But if you look at my map of Waitroses it does appear to provide convincing evidence of a banana-shaped curve of affluence across west London.
And I can do better than that. Saturday's map used four colours to categorise the posh supermarkets, but see how it looks with three...
The stripe of nine dark green boroughs with five or more Waitroses is an incredibly strong approximation to the London banana. Really astonishingly good, as if that's where all the disposable income for buying higher-priced groceries is. However Bromley is also dark green because it has five Waitroses, specifically in Beckenham, Biggin Hill, Bromley South, Green Street Green and Orpington. Bromley is nowhere near the banana, not even close, so is a counterexample that negates the rigidity of the concept.
Let's take a look at four more maps and play spot the banana. You can click on each to see where I got it from.
These are Gail's bakeries, purveyors of prestige-priced pastries. The graphic shows that 79 of the 113 Gail's are inside the banana making a 'banana share' of 69%, which is incredibly high for a shape that covers only 20% of Greater London. But if you tweaked the edges very slightly another ten of the Gail's would fall within the boundary, also the two tips are very sparse, suggesting a banana isn't truly the perfect shape here.
This is average property price across Greater London, with darker reds being the most expensive. This is very convincing bananawise, with the darkest colours stretching out along two axes from central London at roughly eight o'clock and eleven o'clock. That said there are also two other broad property price hotspots, namely the northwest and southeast edges of the capital, with Bromley again a screaming outlier. We have to be careful not just to see what we want to see.
This is deprivation, as determined by the latest government statistics, which you'd think would be a good indicator of how "horrible" an area is. The least deprived areas are the greens, and again they splay out from central London along the two arms of the banana. But greens are spread far more widely, particularly in the outer suburbs, and you'd be hard-pushed to identify a banana here unless you'd been prompted to look for one. More intriguingly a clear arc of oranges spreads down the Lea Valley and along the Thames estuary, which we could perhaps describe as the London croissant. We could also throw in a smaller croissant from Heathrow to Kilburn, another curve of deprivation, were we in the mood to draw further food-shaped conclusions.
This is crime rate, where the oranges and reds denote levels of reported crime above the national average. This is perhaps the map where you'd most expect to identify areas that are "horrible" and to "avoid". But this time the banana's barely there at all, the safest areas instead forming an approximate doughnut around the city suburbs. Most of the outer ring is green, a huge area where crime rates are in fact lower than the national average, which isn't the scary impression trolls on social media generally give about levels of safety in London.
There is definitely some truth to the notion of a London banana, two distinct spokes of relative affluence radiating northwest and southwest from central London. But it's not well defined, also it only applies in certain data categories, also several areas outside the banana's border display very similar traits. Holloway and Vauxhall arguably shouldn't be inside the banana, similarly Chiswick, Orpington, Pinner, Purley, Upminster and Wanstead aren't all miserable places to be. A simple outline on a map can't tell you for sure whether somewhere's great or horrible, only suggest a general trend.
It is thus patently untrue that "as long as you stay within the Banana, you'll have a great time", also that "almost everything outside the Banana is horrible these days, best avoid". The banana maps are fascinating and hold a number of truths, but the accompanying claims are just provocative hyperbole because London's nowhere near as grim as some might gleefully suggest.
