Evening all,

It frequently strikes me, when considering the geography of the terra
incognita called 'South London', that there is an amazingly large region
with no railway stations in the Walworth area. If you draw a line through
Elephant & Castle, Kennington, Oval, Stockwell, Brixton, Loughborough
Junction, Denmark Hill, Peckham Rye, Queen's Road Peckham, South
Bermondsey, Bermondsey, Borough, and back to Elephant, you have an area
within which there are no other railway stations of any sort (other than
disused, anyway) [1]. That's a huge area, about equal to the area
encircled by the Inner Ring Road, and densely populated. It's shocking
there's no railway service there - but perhaps not suprising when you
consider that it's also largely a very deprived area. When the stations on
the Holborn line were open, it was a lot smaller, but still pretty huge.

Anyway, are there any other notable rail deserts like this? There's one
around Dulwich, but a lot of that's open ground, so it probably has fewer
people in it. There's another huge one in the Thames Gateway, south of the
District line, north of the Beckton branch of the DLR, east of the
Stratford branch (a year ago, east of the NLL), and west of, crumbs,
Dagenham Dock? Twice the size of the Walworth desert, although currently
containing a lot of industrial land. Most of the outer suburbs of London
are like this, i suppose - the surprising thing about the Walworth one is
that it's so central.

I'm trying to figure out how to program a computer to find these
automatically. And then overlay them on a population density map or
something.

tom

[1] You can of course draw arbitrarily large shapes like that wherever you
like, by avoiding stations, but this is no such trick - as evidenced by
the fact that the polygon you've drawn is convex, at least roughly.

--
Come on thunder; come on thunder.