An attempt to map the bombs of the blitz over London. The idea is to learn to use d3.js and have a video-like effect as in the the wealth of nations example. (Or make a stop motion video out of it...)
The nice article and datablog entry of The Guardian -- 'London Blitz 1940: the first day's bomb attacks listed in full' provides access to the historical records of the first air raid over London in 1940. It is a spreadsheet listing for 843 drops, the time, the address, the type of bomb and the damage caused. The times are for 7th Sep 1940. I converted it to CSV - with ';' as separator - and stored the result in this project.
I tried various approaches to geocode the addresses in the data set:
- using nominatim-python, a python library for Nominatim.
The lookup of the 73rd entry in the data file,
Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, SE18, London, UK
gives
>>> import nominatim
>>> import json
>>> address_lookup=nominatim.Geocoder().geocode('Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, SE18, London, UK')
>>> print json.dumps(address_lookup)
[
{
"display_name": "Royal Arsenal Woolwich Pier, Woolwich, London Borough of Greenwich, Greater London, London, England, SE18, United Kingdom",
"place_id": "2112469544",
"lon": "0.070824870400824",
"lat": "51.4956072184614",
"osm_type": "way",
"licence": "Data Copyright OpenStreetMap Contributors, Some Rights Reserved. CC-BY-SA 2.0.",
"osm_id": "103128361",
"boundingbox": [
"51.4951553344727",
"51.495906829834",
"0.0705746933817863",
"0.0711841061711311"
],
"type": "pedestrian",
"class": "highway",
"address": {
"city": "London Borough of Greenwich",
"state_district": "London",
"suburb": "Woolwich",
"country": "United Kingdom",
"county": "Greater London",
"pedestrian": "Royal Arsenal Woolwich Pier",
"state": "England",
"postcode": "SE18",
"country_code": "gb"
}
}
]It turns out that a lot of addresses are not geocoded by Nominatim, for example entry 225
128 Aylward Street, Stepney E1, London, UK
So I tried Google Maps v3 using pygeocoder library:
>>> import pygeocoder as geo
>>> import json
>>> drop = '128 Aylward Street, Stepney E1, London, UK'
>>> gm_lookup = pygeocoder.Geocoder.geocode(drop)
>>> print json.dumps(gm_lookup.raw, indent=4)
[
{
"geometry": {
"location": {
"lat": 51.5159781,
"lng": -0.0462063
},
"viewport": {
"northeast": {
"lat": 51.5173270802915,
"lng": -0.04485731970849797
},
"southwest": {
"lat": 51.5146291197085,
"lng": -0.04755528029150203
}
},
"location_type": "ROOFTOP"
},
"address_components": [
{
"long_name": "128",
"types": [
"street_number"
],
"short_name": "128"
},
{
"long_name": "Aylward St",
"types": [
"route"
],
"short_name": "Aylward St"
},
{
"long_name": "London",
"types": [
"locality",
"political"
],
"short_name": "London"
},
{
"long_name": "Greater London",
"types": [
"administrative_area_level_2",
"political"
],
"short_name": "Gt Lon"
},
{
"long_name": "United Kingdom",
"types": [
"country",
"political"
],
"short_name": "GB"
},
{
"long_name": "E1 0QW",
"types": [
"postal_code"
],
"short_name": "E1 0QW"
},
{
"long_name": "London",
"types": [
"postal_town"
],
"short_name": "London"
}
],
"partial_match": true,
"formatted_address": "128 Aylward St, London, Greater London E1 0QW, UK",
"types": [
"street_address"
]
}
]But even Google Maps fails, for example on entry 224
12 Jewel Street, Stepney E1, London, UK This street probably does not exist any more.
File addressesNotFound.txt lists the addresses I could not geocode automagically. I did spot some of them using scanned maps of London from 1908 and 1940 or guessed.
======== I would like to use d3.js like in the wealth of nations example, i.e. with an animation. The raid started after 16:14 when the German bombers entered British airspace. So the times from in the Guardian spreadsheet need to be date stamped.