The Council has sent me a spreadsheet of street works in Islington in 2009 in response to an FOI request.  There are over 13,000 entries or about 50 every working day. Street works encompasses a range of activites – not all is digging up the road, but a fair bit is. Such works are mainly about the utility companies' and the council's own works to repair or improve the road. You can find out more about street works here.  They are mainly 'excavation works' but many are 'non excavation works', 'pavement works', 'works for road purposes', manhole replacements etc.

Analysis of the data is tentative at this stage.  The data set is so large I had to ask our neighbours at the Guardian for help – I am most grateful to Simon Rogers for his help.  Neither of us are experts on street works terminology.  But I thought it best to share the working so far and see if anyone can help correct it.  There are no doubt some street works anoraks out there who can help make sense of this – please drop me a line or comment below.

Taking the council data at face value, the grand totals are 13,000 individual sets of street works going on between them for 81,000 days.   Some 2,500 works are recorded as 'abandoned' – it isn't clear what this means.

People go on about road works a fair bit and as a cyclist I have frequently been endangered by them.  But it is salutary to see these large numbers spelled out in black and white.

Here's the top 20 roads for number of street works for the 2009 calendar year.  Inevitably the longest, busiest roads and those in commercial areas score highly.

And here is a list of the roads with the highest number of street work days, you can see some local Kings Cross roads top the list.  The higher numbers tend to arise where several sets of works are recorded as in place for a whole year. There are quite a few instances of works finishing before they have begun – these have been omitted, possibly a data entry error or an early start.