Spare a thought for the East Coast…
I think @bea is right! Our old office on City Road used to have a lot of trendier places 
but the Moorgate/Liverpool Street area is full of chains, which tend to get pushed down in these lists because they are so popular. If you have any good recommendations, I’d love to hear them!
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Your definition of East London is interesting. Stratford is the furthest out you go, and you only have a single place there. If you compare “East London” in your initial picture with where you actually have pins, you’ll see how big the disparity is - it’s basically east central London.
Couldn’t you lower the numerical threshold for inclusion once you get east of Tower Hamlets and Hackney, say? It would be good to see at least one place in Redbridge, Havering and Barking & Dagenham, and some more in Newham.
Great point (sorry for seeing this late!).
The main criteria we used to define areas is based on post codes of merchants - one day I’d love to move away from this explicit delineation. Some researchers looked into this a few years ago, using Foursquare data - they defined neighbourhoods based on where people went instead of using postcodes!
Here’s the academic paper (if you’re interested)
But that doesn’t explain why “East London” doesn’t include areas like Woodford, Ilford, Romford, Barking, Upminster, etc, does it?
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This is a very cool idea! Looking forward to seeing more of these
Is it possible to do a similar thing but with average spending habits/savings? I would very interested in seeing how I compare with other Monzo users in my area.
Sorry, forgot to mention one thing: we also filter out many merchants if they don’t have a lot of Monzo customers - so this biases everything towards central London. My hunch is that this may explain why some areas are missing!
Great idea! @bea is collecting feedback on what other types of things people would like to see, we can definitely add this one to the list!
