Our general London post already showed that Westminster (349.9 per 1,000 residents) tops the Met’s 2024 borough ranking and Richmond upon Thames (60.7 per 1,000) sits lowest — and explained why that gap is mostly about footfall, not danger. Here we take that a step further: a real, small, one-month sample for Richmond, checked against the five London areas we already verified for that post.
What one month actually showed
Each figure is every recorded crime within a small area (roughly 250–300 metres across for the four smaller samples, wider for Westminster to keep the ratio the same relative to its footfall) around one representative postcode, for July 2026, counted by hand from the raw data.
Richmond upon Thames
Shoreditch
Camden Town
Canary Wharf
Westminster
Where the reputation and the sample agree — and where they don’t
Westminster came out clearly highest, five times Richmond’s count, which matches the borough-wide ranking well. But Richmond’s 13 incidents landed on exactly the same number as Shoreditch, one of the capital’s busiest nightlife and tourist quarters — and both were comfortably below Camden Town and Canary Wharf. That does not mean Richmond is secretly as busy as Shoreditch, or that Shoreditch is secretly as quiet as Richmond’s reputation suggests: these are two very different kinds of place (a residential, low-footfall borough against a small, extremely dense entertainment district) landing on the same raw count by coincidence of sample size and month. It is exactly the point our original London post made about the boroughs generally — a headline number, high or low, is built from a lot more than any single street can show, and two very different places can produce the same small-sample number for completely different reasons.
See it for yourself
These open live with both postcodes already loaded, using twelve months of data rather than the single month above:
- Richmond vs Westminster — the officially lowest and highest-rate boroughs, head to head.
- Richmond vs Shoreditch — the pair that tied in our one-month sample.
- Richmond vs Camden Town — the quiet borough against a nightlife district a short ride away.
The limits of this data
This is recorded crime — what was reported and logged, not everything that happened — from one month, in small areas chosen to stay well under the police API’s reporting cap. It is not a verdict on any of these boroughs or the people who live there. For the full borough-by-borough picture, see our London post and the police force crime rate ranking. And as always: none of this replaces calling 999 in an emergency.