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Comment by walthamstow | Hacker News Reader

That's a much harder project IMO. In order to determine which is the main shopping street in a community, you have to start with drawing the communities. That's a tall order in London as the lines are blurry and change over time.

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It doesn't really work like that, some people have access to more than one high streets and some aren't in walking distance from any high street.

You could probably pull records like alcohol licensing or food hygiene certificates to identify all streets with a certain number of shops, then use Google Street View to refine the criteria. Eg if a street is mostly residential on the ground floor, adding some shops doesn't make it a high street imo.

My gut reaction was that you’re wrong and it’s easy but actually thinking more about it, even in a small area like my side of London there are a lot of what could be considered high streets, even with different parts of the same street acting as different separate high streets for different communities. A more concrete example is Uxbridge road near Shepherd’s Bush and the section near Shepherd’s Bush Market being two distinct high streets, and then a couple k’s down the road it turns into Acton High Street (Acton itself having multiple distinct high streets). It’d definitely be a challenge to map something like this if you’re not familiar with the area.

Rather ironically the main “High Street” for the whole of London is normally regarded to be Oxford Street, which happens to be very well connected, with 4 stationd on the Central Line, maybe 5 if you include Holborn just beyond New Oxford Street.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Street

Fun fact, the Roman’s called it “Via Trinobantina“.

(Trinobantina = "tri" meaning three + "bantina" meaning inexplicable American candy shop)

Obviously a far younger city, but when I moved to seattle, satellite view on maps was just starting to be a thing, and you could spot all of the areas that were interesting to go to versus residential neighborhoods by the way the light reflected off the roofs. Lighter color along a street usually meant older, flat-roofed buildings where the market streets of the original towns were.

Or do the reverse? Identify streets with a certain category of commercial business, with quantity above a certain threshold. The area/community can be derived after.

Pretty sure you'd just end up with a map of public transportation lines. All major shops have to be where people regularly pass by on their commute to work in the inner city.

This is probably very different in US suburbia, but it should be true for London and other densely populated areas.

If that happened you probably haven’t refined your whitelist of commercial businesses that would qualify a high street. It’s pretty much the same stuff nationwide.. A McDonald’s, some banks, a foot locker. Etc etc.

I don't think you know how London districts work at all.

London is old enough that it will still reflect patterns from hundreds of years ago. You get old town and villages that have been joined together with newer development. Old roads that used to be a main road and retain some of the inns and shops. Also, development can be separated by parks, walls, administrative boundaries, rivers, canals, railways, new roads etc. Often the effect will persist after those things have vanished.

Google Maps shows such 'commercial corridors' in yellow.

I agree I'm sure the quantity of Nando's, pizza express and Starbucks within a given area is a probably a fantastic starting point for a heuristic to detect this.

Could start with a postcode approach. Not as accurate but it provides for a consistent and easy to verify methodology.

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