Anna picks up her AtoZ SplashMap after a great presentation at Geomob at UCL, London

Our latest SplashMaps award winner exposes who REALLY owns London!  Think you know our beautiful capital city? Think again.  Using Freedom of Information requests, some natty coding and some great map technology, Anna Powell-Smith created an interactive property ownership map for magazine Private Eye.

Private Eye use the map as a rich source of investigative journalism

Her presentation showed how the map exposed the level of money being laundered in the capital by businesses operating out of tax havens. Many of these businesses are linked to undesirables like Robert Mugabe and the Gadaffi family. The most worrying story (for me) was how a property business linked with Mugabe was buying-up pubs to turn into flats! Don’t mess with my beer Mugabe!

And what did Anna win? An AtoZ SplashMap of London of course! Now the genius map-maker can mark in the money-laundering hot spots using a felt tipped pen.

Anna used the INSPIRE data sets as a common framework to pull together disparate data sets.  Now the Land Registry have release the data of properties owned by foreign companies. Well done Anna, your map may change the world!

Every 2 months we award a SplashMap to the very best map project in our network.  They come to us thanks to our sponsorship of Geomob in London under the skillful management of Ed Freyfogle, one of our investors and head of Open Cage the open data and geocoding business behind many location service businesses.