Rentonomy was very interested to see the great work done by the folks behind the 2009-10 Citizenship Survey which provides an in-depth examination of Community Spirit. It looks at how people feel about their communities (for example, whether they enjoy living in it and how strongly they feel they belong to it). It also explores the extent to which people feel they get on with people from different backgrounds and how and where people mix with each other. We picked out a few interesting things regarding London.

• When asked about satisfaction with local area, 83% of...
  

I like to think of myself as a fairly discerning sort of chap. The kind of person who prefers bijou delis to supermarkets, dusty book shops to the high street behemoths and edgy cafes to StarPretEatNeroBucks. However, as I get older I'm less inclined to do what I'm supposed to do and more inclined to do what I want to do. That's why I now spend a lot of time in London's malls. You might not think London is a mall kind of place but the covered shopping centres are fantastic.

The biggest and best is certainly Westfield in Shepherds Bush. It's amazing. Not only does it have the...

Getting from one side of London to the other by car can take hours. Getting the tube leaves you hot, sweaty and wishing you'd jumped in front of it rather than on it! But there are other ways to get about whether on foot, by scooter, bus, bike or boat. Here we look at the pros and cons of each and use a simple scoring method (in the table below) to come up with our favourite travelling method.

• Walking: If you have a short journey and the sun is shining walking wins hands down. It's free, good exercise and lets you take in the great sights of London....
  

Different parts of London serve specific purposes. For example much of the outer rim of London is purely residential, the City is for jobs in financial services, south-west London popular with young families etc. Some areas, however, are made for fun.

Using the Timeout website, we worked out how much there was currently to do in each Rentonomy area and came up with this map. It includes absolutely everything from club nights to museum exhibitions and restaurant parties to boating events.

Hopefully this will give our fun loving readers some knowledge as to where...

Almost since her very beginnings, London's role as a home for trade and finance has set her apart from her rivals. Many historians feel that the British Empire was created to serve the needs of British finance, the vast majority of which was administered within the square mile of the City of London. The "Big Bang" of the 1980s saw London become home to a number of large American financial institutions. We even built a whole new area of London to accommodate them, the Docklands, as things were getting a bit overcrowded in the City.

Even up to this week, the special status of...

In honour of St Patrick’s Day today, we looked at where Irish-born Londoners live in the capital. The census returns for 2001 and 2011 show that numbers have dropped from 157,556 to 129,807.

In terms of the top areas by Irish-born population, Cricklewood (2,690) comes top, followed by Willesden Green (2,644), West Hampstead (2,220), Islington(2,015) and Kenton (1760).

As a proportion of total population,...

A recent study by BBC Lab UK has created seven new social classes in the UK, saying that the traditional upper, middle, lower class model is outdated. The study measured economic capital - income, savings, house value, social capital - the number and status of people someone knows and looked at cultural preferences such as the preferred destination/activity for/of social pastimes.

The seven social classes are (from the top) Elite, Established middle class, Technical middle class, New affluent workers, Traditional...