London Banana

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What is the London Banana Area?

In early September 2025, a curious phrase started trending across London media: the London Banana. The Evening Standard, Daily Mail, The Times, and Metro all reported on a colourful map that carved a banana‑shaped swathe through the capital, supposedly outlining the most desirable places to live. Depending on which headline you read, the Banana was either London’s “loveliest” zone or a snub to all the areas left outside the yellow curve.

The shape stretches from Kingston in the southwest, curving through Richmond, Wandsworth, Kensington, Westminster, Camden, Islington, before arcing northeast to Barnet. It is essentially a horseshoe hugging the wealthier, greener, and historically pricier boroughs of inner and outer west London. The idea: if you live inside the Banana, you’re in a “good” part of the city.

But how much truth is there in this outline? Is the Banana simply a catchy headline, or does the data back it up?

Data Overview

I used QGIS and the original Banana image circulating on X.com to georeference and map the Banana outline onto real London coordinates. This step allowed for postcode-level comparisons rather than just eyeballing borough shapes. Let

Using Area360 datasets (Land Registry, ONS, Police.uk, TfL, EPC and more), we compared neighbourhoods inside the Banana to those outside. This allowed us to calculate property prices, income, deprivation levels, social housing proportions, and crime rates.

What is inside the Banana?

Comparing Inside vs Outside

Here’s a summary of the contrasts:

The results show differences, but also reveal that the Banana is more a product of cherry‑picking than a fundamental geographic truth.

At a glance, the Banana does pick up wealthier and less deprived areas. Median incomes are higher, deprivation scores are stronger, and property prices are ~36% higher. But the narrative breaks down in several ways:

• Crime rates appear worse inside the Banana — largely because it includes Zone 1 boroughs like Westminster and Camden, which naturally record very high crime volumes due to tourism and nightlife. Once Zone 1 is excluded, crime actually levels out.
• Social housing is present in significant proportions across both inside and outside the Banana, undermining the idea of a purely “leafy elite” enclave.
• Deprivation and income differences, while clear, aren’t unique to a banana shape. They could just as easily be drawn as a circle around central London or along transport corridors.

Deep Dive with Charts

To illustrate, here are breakdowns by TfL Zone

Property price

Social rented housing

Deprivation index

Income level

Why the Banana is Cherry‑Picking

The appeal of the London Banana is its simplicity. It gives journalists an easy visual metaphor: a bright yellow curve through the “best” parts of town. But the shape is arbitrary. With the same data, one could:

• Draw a London Diamond connecting prosperous boroughs north, south, east, and west.
• Sketch a Central Circle that simply captures high‑value Zone 1 and 2 postcodes.
• Or even a Ghost who is trying to avoid Camden as hard as possible.

In every case, you’d find similar results: higher prices, higher incomes, lower deprivation. The Banana is not a fundamental pattern — it’s a branding exercise.

Conclusion

The London Banana has captured media attention because it’s simple, visual, and a bit cheeky. But from a data perspective, it is just one way of carving London’s inequalities into a memorable shape. The Banana isn’t destiny. Plenty of areas outside it have high incomes, low crime, and soaring property values. Likewise, some Banana boroughs contain pockets of deprivation and council estates.