Data scientists
Bring the tools to find the pattern in ten thousand planning applications that no one could see by reading them one at a time.
London has a housing crisis. Most of the arguing about it happens with opinions, not evidence.
House London is a monthly data sprint at Newspeak House. We hand a room full of data scientists, urban planners, and policy people the actual housing datasets, and ask for the truth.
No toy problems. Real data, aimed at policy briefs, dashboards, and models that could actually shape how London gets built.
Three ways of seeing the same city
Every team mixes people who read the city differently. That friction is where the good analysis comes from.
Urban planners
Bring the ground truth: which patterns are real, which are artefacts of how a borough happens to file its paperwork, and what a finding would actually mean for a street.
Policy thinkers
Bring the question that matters and the discipline to turn a finding into something a councillor, officer, or developer could actually act on.
House London #0
Eight teams spent one day with London's housing data and came back with eight different arguments about where the housing crisis actually bites, which parts of the planning process quietly reject applications that should succeed, and what a better dataset would need to look like. The room is full of brilliant ideas; the winner is whoever can tell theirs in under two minutes. £150 went to the best of them, voted by the room.
This is the first in a monthly series. Prizes run across #0 and its September and October follow-ups, all voted by fellow hackers.
Two ways this is meant to work
Legible data, better policy
Analysis-ready planning and housing data, plus the policy briefs built on top of it, feed into national and local planning policy. That increases housebuilding and brings down the cost of renting or buying, reducing housing stress and homelessness downstream.
Shared evidence, better debate
Hackathons, published analysis, and a growing knowledge base build a shared, evidence-based understanding among the policymakers, planners, and data scientists who argue about London's housing. That makes the public debate itself better informed.
What's next
- September 2026House London #1
- October 2026House London #2
Get involved to hear when registration opens.
The data behind it
Every House London event runs on Foundations, a continuously scraped, cleaned dataset of London planning applications (borough, application type, decision, dwelling count, consultation activity, and more), served as a free, filterable API and CSV/Parquet download.
foreman.house-london.uk →Get involved
Hack at the next one, use the dataset for your own analysis, or just follow along as the findings come in.
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