London Datastore & Data for London Library
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means
The Greater London Authority opened the London Datastore in 2010, one of the world's earliest municipal open-data portals; it still publishes over a thousand datasets. On 8 July 2025 the Mayor launched the Data for London Library, which links roughly 5,100 datasets held by Transport for London, the ONS, DHSC and four boroughs rather than collecting them. Licences are not set catalogue-wide: the GLA says conditions vary for each data package, and sampled datasets carry Open Government Licence v2 or no licence title at all. The Datastore remains live as the Library's first module.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →📊 Impact
The Datastore's own API returned 1,301 datasets on 6 August 2026; the Data for London Library links around 5,100. Catalogue sizes are operator-reported, and no independent evaluation of the Datastore's use or economic value has been published — unlike TfL's separately commissioned open-data study.
🎓 Lesson
A catalogue that federates rather than collects inherits its partners' licence terms: discovery improves, reusability does not.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “London Datastore & Data for London Library” — London, United Kingdom. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/london-datastore-data-library/ (last verified 2026-08-06). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.