Half of London's street theft fits in fifty-seven wards
No open dataset counts stolen phones, so this maps the crime category they live inside — and below the borough line, London's street theft turns out to sit almost entirely in a handful of wards.
Published · Data as of
No open dataset counts stolen phones. Not one. The Office for National Statistics said so in terms, answering a freedom of information request on 8 December 2025: it does not hold police recorded crime data that specifically identify offences in which a mobile phone was stolen.
So this is not a map of phone theft, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in
a footnote at the bottom. It is a map of THEFT FROM THE PERSON and
ROBBERY OF PERSONAL PROPERTY — the two categories a stolen phone is recorded
in, along with the wallet, the bag and the cash. A labelled proxy, and the whole
question is whether the label is worth anything.
Here is the test I can run on it.
Over January to May 2026 the proxy category fell 21.6% across London where the Met reported 20.6% for phone-flagged offences, and 45.4% in Westminster where the Met reported 45.8%.
Show the numbers
| Area | This category | Met, phone-flagged |
|---|---|---|
| London | -21.6% | -20.6% |
| Westminster | -45.4% | -45.8% |
Source: MPS Recorded Crime: Geographic Breakdown (OGL-2.0) — full attribution
The Met published those two figures on 11 June 2026, counting offences its own officers had flagged as involving a phone. I never see that flag. I counted the whole category, in the same boroughs, over the same five months, and got within a point of the first number and within four-tenths of a point of the second.
A proxy that tracks the flagged series to within half a point on a single borough is measuring substantially the same thing.
InterpretationThat is as close to a validation as an open dataset allows, and it is the reason the rest of this piece is worth reading.
The borough is the wrong unit
Every published account of London phone theft stops at the borough. The borough is where the data was easy to get, and it is also where the finding goes to die.
Theft concentrates in a tight cluster of central wards around the West End, St James's, Bloomsbury and the South Bank; eight wards are in the top band, while 467 of London's 685 wards record under 100 offences in a year. The blank shape at the centre is the City of London, policed by its own force and absent from Met data — not a place without theft.
- under 25 143
- 25–49 177
- 50–99 147
- 100–199 121
- 200–399 65
- 400–999 24
- 1,000 or more 8
What this map shows
The 12 wards with the most recorded offences, of 685 in the file. Together they hold 28% of London's total.
- West End Westminster 8,970
- St James's Westminster 5,538
- Bloomsbury Camden 1,638
- Waterloo & South Bank Lambeth 1,350
- Borough & Bankside Southwark 1,338
- Holborn & Covent Garden Camden 1,173
- London Bridge & West Bermondsey Southwark 1,172
- Vauxhall Lambeth 1,143
- Hoxton East & Shoreditch Hackney 902
- Hyde Park Westminster 810
- Marylebone Westminster 797
- St. Georges Southwark 784
The hole in the middle is the City of London, which the Metropolitan Police does not police. Boundaries: ONS Wards, May 2024, super generalised.
Show the numbers
| Ward | Borough | Last 12 months | 12 months before |
|---|---|---|---|
| West End | Westminster | 8,970 | 16,842 |
| St James's | Westminster | 5,538 | 9,120 |
| Bloomsbury | Camden | 1,638 | 2,369 |
| Waterloo & South Bank | Lambeth | 1,350 | 1,856 |
| Borough & Bankside | Southwark | 1,338 | 1,660 |
| Holborn & Covent Garden | Camden | 1,173 | 2,010 |
| London Bridge & West Bermondsey | Southwark | 1,172 | 1,098 |
| Vauxhall | Lambeth | 1,143 | 1,062 |
| Hoxton East & Shoreditch | Hackney | 902 | 1,117 |
| Hyde Park | Westminster | 810 | 895 |
| Marylebone | Westminster | 797 | 974 |
| St. Georges | Southwark | 784 | 784 |
| Stratford Olympic Park | Newham | 761 | 1,234 |
| North Walworth | Southwark | 757 | 657 |
| Chaucer | Southwark | 753 | 687 |
| Regent's Park (EK) | Camden | 736 | 811 |
| Camden Town | Camden | 672 | 984 |
| King's Cross | Camden | 664 | 734 |
| Clapham Town | Lambeth | 628 | 611 |
| Finsbury Park | Islington | 594 | 774 |
| Stratford | Newham | 518 | 695 |
| Spitalfields & Banglatown | Tower Hamlets | 509 | 544 |
| Bunhill | Islington | 498 | 606 |
| Clerkenwell | Islington | 495 | 633 |
| East Ham | Newham | 464 | 519 |
The twenty-five highest of 685. Every ward is in
ward-totals.json, which the piece is built from.
Sources: MPS Recorded Crime: Geographic Breakdown (OGL-2.0) · Wards (May 2024) Boundaries UK BSC (OGL-3.0) — full attribution
The map is mostly empty, and that is the finding rather than a failure of the map. Sorted by count, the wards fall away so fast that half of London’s total is held by 57 of them.
Cumulative share rises almost vertically: the top ward alone holds 10% of London's total, and 57 wards of 685 hold half of it.
Show the numbers
| Top wards | Offences | Share of London |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8,970 | 10.0% |
| 2 | 14,508 | 16.1% |
| 5 | 18,834 | 20.9% |
| 10 | 24,034 | 26.7% |
| 20 | 31,180 | 34.6% |
| 50 | 42,986 | 47.7% |
| 100 | 54,933 | 61.0% |
Source: MPS Recorded Crime: Geographic Breakdown (OGL-2.0) — full attribution
One ward, the West End, holds ten per cent of London’s recorded street theft. Add St James’s next door and the two of them hold sixteen per cent. There are 685 wards in the file.
What “Westminster” hides
Westminster is the borough every one of those articles named. Inside it, the spread is eleven to one.
Within Westminster the West End records 8,970 offences and Hyde Park 810, an eleven-fold spread across wards of one borough.
Show the numbers
| Ward | Last 12 months |
|---|---|
| West End | 8,970 |
| St James's | 5,538 |
| Hyde Park | 810 |
| Marylebone | 797 |
| Pimlico North | 461 |
| Knightsbridge & Belgravia | 446 |
| Regent's Park | 340 |
| Lancaster Gate | 318 |
| Vincent Square | 209 |
| Church Street | 170 |
| Bayswater | 122 |
| Westbourne | 85 |
| Pimlico South | 80 |
| Abbey Road | 79 |
| Harrow Road | 64 |
| Queen's Park | 54 |
| Little Venice | 51 |
| Maida Vale | 48 |
Source: MPS Recorded Crime: Geographic Breakdown (OGL-2.0) — full attribution
The fall is real, and it is not displacement
The Met has been running an operation against phone theft, and the numbers have moved a long way. Across the twenty-four months in this file the direction is not subtle.
Theft from the person peaks at 10,413 offences in November 2024 and falls to 5,620 by July 2026, a drop of 46%. Robbery of personal property is flat by comparison, moving from 2,175 to 1,931.
Show the numbers
| Month | Theft from the person | Robbery of personal property |
|---|---|---|
| 202408 | 7,403 | 2,175 |
| 202409 | 7,060 | 2,193 |
| 202410 | 9,133 | 2,461 |
| 202411 | 10,413 | 2,275 |
| 202412 | 9,956 | 2,225 |
| 202501 | 7,845 | 2,028 |
| 202502 | 7,971 | 1,961 |
| 202503 | 8,582 | 2,106 |
| 202504 | 7,578 | 2,041 |
| 202505 | 7,108 | 2,103 |
| 202506 | 7,000 | 2,078 |
| 202507 | 6,870 | 2,056 |
| 202508 | 6,221 | 1,943 |
| 202509 | 5,848 | 1,820 |
| 202510 | 6,274 | 1,927 |
| 202511 | 7,610 | 2,013 |
| 202512 | 7,252 | 1,901 |
| 202601 | 5,958 | 1,810 |
| 202602 | 5,750 | 1,670 |
| 202603 | 6,142 | 1,990 |
| 202604 | 5,848 | 1,899 |
| 202605 | 5,645 | 1,979 |
| 202606 | 5,596 | 2,004 |
| 202607 | 5,620 | 1,931 |
Source: MPS Recorded Crime: Geographic Breakdown (OGL-2.0) — full attribution
The obvious objection is that the thieves moved rather than stopped. They did not. Over the twelve months to July 2026, thirty of London’s thirty-two boroughs recorded fewer of these offences than in the twelve months before. Two did not: Southwark rose 0.4% and Barnet rose 3.8%. Westminster, where the operation concentrated, fell 39.8% — but so did Kensington and Chelsea, by 33.1%, and Camden by 27.6%, and Islington by 14.5%.
The fall is London-wide in direction and extremely uneven in force.
FactWhat is missing from this map
The ward file does not have a row for an offence whose ward is unknown. The borough file, counting the same offences over the same months, keeps it. Over the twelve months to July 2026 the ward file accounts for 93.2% of the borough file’s total, and the shortfall is not spread evenly: it is 9.0% in Westminster, 8.1% in Camden and 2.9% in Sutton.
That works against everything above, not for it. The offences this map cannot place are missing most heavily from exactly the boroughs whose wards top the ranking, so the concentration it draws is, if anything, understated.
The real curve is at least as steep as the one plotted here.
InterpretationThe other thing this map cannot tell you is how many of these offences were phones. It is not proof that the category is mostly phones — although the Met’s own arithmetic implies it is. The same release put the fall at 14,000 offences, or 18%, over the twelve months to May 2026, which puts the phone-flagged count at about 63,800; the whole category over those months was 99,504.
Roughly two in three of these offences involve a phone.
InterpretationBehind the data
Method. Two files from the Metropolitan Police’s geographic crime
breakdown on the London Datastore, ward and borough, each covering the
twenty-four months to July 2026. Two SubGroups are read and nothing else:
THEFT FROM THE PERSON and ROBBERY OF PERSONAL PROPERTY. Ward totals are
the last twelve months against the twelve before. London and borough series
come from the borough file, which is the complete one. The choropleth joins
ward codes to Office for National Statistics ward boundaries, super
generalised, and the pipeline refuses to run if any ward code fails to find a
boundary other than the six retired ones described below.
Caveats. The categories are a proxy: no open dataset identifies a stolen phone, and these two hold wallets, bags and cash alongside handsets. Recorded crime measures reporting as well as offending, and phone theft is reported disproportionately because an insurer wants a crime number — a fall in the count is not automatically a fall in theft. The ward file places 93.2% of the borough file’s offences and has no bucket for the rest. Counts are offences, not devices and not victims. The window begins after the Met’s move to CONNECT in February 2024, so no series here crosses that break. Boundaries are Wards (May 2024), super generalised; six retired ward codes still carrying ten offences between them over the last twelve months have no boundary in any current release and are not drawn. Eight offences recorded under a code meaning “another force” are excluded from the ward totals and kept in the borough ones. The City of London is absent because the Metropolitan Police does not police it.
What would change my mind. A release of phone-flagged offences at ward level, by the Met or in answer to a freedom of information request, would replace the proxy at the centre of this and the piece would be rewritten rather than corrected. So would an independent measure of reporting rates by area: if people in the West End report a theft far more readily than people in Barking, then this is a map of who calls the police.
Sources
- MPS Recorded Crime: Geographic Breakdown — Metropolitan Police Service, via the Greater London Authority (London Datastore). OGL-2.0. Retrieved . Monthly counts by Group and SubGroup at ward and borough level. This piece reads two SubGroups only: THEFT FROM THE PERSON and ROBBERY OF PERSONAL PROPERTY. Neither identifies a mobile phone: no open dataset does, and the Office for National Statistics said so in terms in FOI-2025-3264 on 8 December 2025. The counts are recorded crimes, so they measure reporting as well as theft, and phone theft is reported disproportionately because an insurer wants a crime number. Ward download slugs on the Datastore change with every monthly refresh, so fetch.py resolves them from the dataset page rather than hard-coding a URL. One property of the source matters to the map and was measured on 2026-08-23 rather than assumed: over the same twenty-four months the ward file accounts for 93.2% of the borough file's offences in these two SubGroups, because it has no row for an offence whose ward is unknown while the borough file keeps it. The shortfall runs from 2.9% in Sutton to 9.0% in Westminster, so it is largest where the counts are largest. transform.py prints the figure and refuses to run below 80%.
- Wards (May 2024) Boundaries UK BSC — Office for National Statistics, Open Geography Portal. OGL-3.0. Retrieved . Ward polygons for the choropleth, super generalised to 200 m and clipped to the coastline. Which vintage was a live question — ISSUES #036 — and it was settled by joining six candidate releases against the 685 ward codes the Met publishes. December 2022, December 2023, May 2024 and December 2024 each left exactly the same six codes unmatched, and those six are the retired wards the Met still carries, so the test cannot separate them: London's wards did not change across that span. This release was chosen because it is the most recent super generalised one that is both populated and queryable. The December 2024 super generalised service is published and returns zero features; the May 2025, December 2025 and May 2026 releases exist only as MapServer and WFS and their query endpoint refuses. The December 2024 generalised-clipped release does work and was rejected on size: 25,843 points for London against 7,156, for detail this map cannot resolve at roughly 100 m per pixel. The envelope covers Greater London with a margin; wards outside the 32 boroughs are dropped in transform.py. The City of London's 25 wards are in this file and carry no data here, because the City is policed by a different force.
Attribution
- OGL-2.0 MPS Recorded Crime: Geographic Breakdown
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v2.0. The GLA cannot warrant the quality or accuracy of this data.
- OGL-3.0 Wards (May 2024) Boundaries UK BSC
Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2024.
Data as of . Last fetched . Pipeline code is available on request.