Developers & AI assistants

London open data, inside your AI assistant

WhereToLive.xyz runs a free, public, read-only MCP server. Add it to Claude or any MCP client and ask about any London postcode district or single postcode, or screen the districts all at once: what homes sold for, crime per resident, Outstanding schools, flood zones, official rents, deprivation, who lives there, council tax and commute times, each figure with its source, time window, sample size and caveats. No account, no key.

Server URLhttps://wheretolive.xyz/mcp

Connect

Claude (web, desktop and mobile apps): open Settings → Connectors, choose Add custom connector, name it WhereToLive and paste the URL above. No authentication is needed.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http wheretolive https://wheretolive.xyz/mcp

Other clients that take a remote MCP server (Streamable HTTP), for example Cursor's mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "wheretolive": { "url": "https://wheretolive.xyz/mcp" }
  }
}

What you get that raw open data doesn't give you

  • Rates, not raw counts. Crime is per 1,000 residents of the district's Census neighbourhoods, next to the London rate, with shoplifting and theft from the person left out because they follow shops and stations.
  • Prices that mean what they say. Land Registry medians use standard-price resales only: new builds and Land Registry's category B entries (repossessions, buy-to-let purchases identified by their mortgage, and transfers to companies and other non-private buyers) are left out, so one unusual sale cannot pose as a typical price, and nothing is published below 30 sales.
  • The caliber travels with the number. Every figure comes with its sample size, time window, definition, caveats and source, and a sentence that keeps them together.
  • London commute times. Door-to-door public transport minutes to 12 work hubs for every district.
  • Borough figures stay borough figures. Official rents are labelled as the borough's benchmark, never as a district's own rent; deprivation is explained as a ranking of small areas, not of people.
  • Every postcode figure says what it describes: the postcode's centre point, its Census neighbourhood, its postcode sector or its borough. A planning check where the council publishes no data says “unknown”, not “no”; Heathrow's neighbourhood gets no crime rate, because its crime happens at the airport.

When you quote a figure, please cite the district page URL that comes with it (wheretolive.xyz/area/…).

Tools

Seven tools, all read-only (annotated readOnlyHint: true). Answers are JSON; every block carries its definition, window, caveats, source and a ready-made sentence that keeps them together, plus a link to the district's page on this site.

find_london_district

Turns a place, borough, station or postcode into the postcode district(s) the other tools take.

Ask: “Which postcode is Walthamstow?”

find_london_districts

Screens every district on several criteria at once: a maximum median house price, a maximum commute to a work hub, crime at or below the London rate, a minimum number of Outstanding schools, a maximum share in flood zone 3, a maximum official borough rent for a number of bedrooms, and a borough. Each match carries the figures that qualified it; districts that cannot be checked are counted, not hidden. When nothing matches, it shows the districts that miss by one criterion and by how much.

Ask: “Where can I buy a house under £600k within 40 minutes of King’s Cross, with crime below the London average?”

check_london_postcode

One full postcode: the Environment Agency flood zone at its centre; whether its centre is in a conservation area, a listed building outline, an Article 4 direction area or a tree preservation order area (planning.data.gov.uk, “unknown” where the borough publishes nothing); its Census neighbourhood’s crime rate per resident, deprivation decile and housing tenure; the nearest state schools with their own Ofsted grade and the nearest stations; commute minutes from its postcode sector; council tax for its borough. Every block says which area it describes.

Ask: “Is E17 4QH in a flood zone or a conservation area, and which schools are closest?”

get_district_profile

One district: Land Registry median sold prices of existing flats and houses with sales counts and the London figures, and five years of yearly medians; police.uk crime per 1,000 residents against London; Ofsted grades of its state schools (Outstanding ones named); the share of its postcodes in flood zones 2 and 3; council tax bands and ONS official rents for its borough(s); and who lives there (Census 2021 tenure and age, and the share of residents in England’s most deprived areas).

Ask: “What do houses sell for in SE28, how has that moved, and how safe is it?”

get_commute_times

Door-to-door public transport minutes from a district to 12 work hubs (TfL Journey Planner, 09:00 weekday).

Ask: “How long is the commute from E17 to Canary Wharf?”

rank_london_districts

London districts ranked by lowest crime rate, cheapest houses, most Outstanding schools or shortest commute to a hub, with a borough filter, a minutes cut-off and reversed order.

Ask: “Cheapest London postcodes for a house within 30 minutes of the City?”

compare_london_districts

Two to six districts side by side with London as a whole: house prices, crime, Outstanding schools, flood zone 3, Band D council tax, the main borough’s official rent, deprivation, home ownership and renting, and optionally commute minutes.

Ask: “Compare Leyton, Walthamstow and Tottenham for a family.”

Coverage: the London postcode districts with an area page on this site and enough open data to publish (about 220, all in Greater London). Figures describe a whole district, never a single home or street. Work hubs: Canary Wharf, the City of London, King's Cross, Westminster, Oxford Circus, London Bridge, Paddington, Stratford, Hammersmith, Victoria, Waterloo, Farringdon.

Data and sources

  • Sold prices: HM Land Registry Price Paid Data. Standard-price sales of existing homes between £50,000 and £20 million over the latest 12 complete months, new builds left out; flats and houses apart, at least 30 sales. Houses only are ranked and compared across districts, because Land Registry doesn't identify retirement flats. Same figures as the cheapest postcodes page.
  • Crime: police.uk street-level crime for the Metropolitan and City of London Police over 12 months, per Census 2021 resident, shoplifting and theft from the person left out; town centres with many visitors read high. Same figures as the safest postcodes page.
  • Schools: DfE Get Information about Schools and Ofsted monthly management information; each school's own current grade. A school in a district is not a catchment. Same figures as the Outstanding schools page.
  • Flood risk: Environment Agency Flood Map for Planning, zones 2 and 3 (rivers and the sea, flood defences not counted), at each live postcode's centre.
  • Council tax: MHCLG council tax levels set by local authorities, including the Greater London Authority precept; boroughs from the ONS Postcode Directory. Same figures as the council tax page.
  • Commute: TfL Journey Planner (Powered by TfL Open Data), from the centre of each postcode sector at 09:00 on a weekday; the district's figure is the median of its sectors. Same figures as where to live for your commute.
  • Price history: the same Land Registry definition over five back-to-back 12-month windows, the newest being the one above; a window with fewer than 30 sales shows its count but no median. Medians move with the mix of homes sold.
  • Official rents: ONS Price Index of Private Rents (PIPR), monthly price statistics, latest month: the average rent across all of a borough's private tenancies, existing ones included, by number of bedrooms. A borough benchmark, below the rents asked for homes advertised now, and never a district's own rent. ONS publishes no figure for the City of London.
  • Who lives here: ONS Census 2021 (usual residents, household tenure, age) and the English Indices of Deprivation 2025 (MHCLG), over the same Census neighbourhoods as the crime figure. Deprivation is the share of residents living in neighbourhoods ranked among England's most deprived 10% or 20%; it ranks areas, not people.
  • One postcode: its centre point, borough and Census neighbourhood from the ONS Postcode Directory (PO boxes and other large-user postcodes get no location figures, because ONS often places them at the Royal Mail delivery office); the Environment Agency flood zone at the centre; conservation areas, listed building outlines, Article 4 direction areas and tree preservation order areas from planning.data.gov.uk, which not every borough publishes yet; the neighbourhood's police.uk crime rate, IMD 2025 decile and Census tenure; open state schools (DfE, Ofsted) and stations in TfL's fare zones by straight-line distance; TfL Journey Planner minutes from the centre of its postcode sector.

Not served: anything from property listings or portals (homes for sale, asking prices, price cuts, advertised rents), single addresses or homes (a postcode answer describes its centre point, neighbourhood, sector and borough), or personal data. Figures are recomputed from the official releases; each answer states when (data as of) and over which window. See data methodology.

Licence and credit

Our figures are free to use under CC BY 4.0: credit “WhereToLive.xyz analysis of official open data” with a link to the district's page. The underlying data keeps its own terms: Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. This data is licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (police.uk, DfE and Ofsted, the Environment Agency, MHCLG council tax and the English Indices of Deprivation 2025). Census 2021 and the Price Index of Private Rents: Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2026. Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0. Powered by TfL Open Data. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database rights 2016. Geomni UK Map data © and database rights 2019. Planning designations from planning.data.gov.uk: © Crown copyright and database right 2026; conservation areas © Historic England 2026, contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, and the most publicly available up to date Historic England GIS Data can be obtained from HistoricEngland.org.uk.

Privacy

No account, no cookies, no tracking. The server does not store the questions, tool arguments or answers. It keeps daily counts of requests by method and tool name and the name of the client software (for example “claude-ai”), nothing else. Your IP address is held in memory for a few minutes to apply the rate limit and is not written down. Traffic passes through Cloudflare, as for the rest of the site. Full policy: privacy.

Limits and changes

  • 60 requests a minute per IP address (shared AI platforms get more); over the limit you get HTTP 429 with Retry-After.
  • Streamable HTTP, stateless, JSON responses; MCP protocol versions 2024-11-05 to 2025-11-25.
  • Tool names and output fields are stable within a major version; new fields may be added.
  • An argument name a tool does not know is an error that names it, suggests the closest valid one and lists them all, so a misnamed filter is never silently ignored.

Contact

Support[email protected]
MaintainerTroy Tang, Founder, WhereToLive.xyz