When people ask how safe London is to visit, I usually say it’s a safe as any large city. This makes the crime stats released today, and reported here by the Daily Mail to be interesting. The worst crime area turns out to be a huge shopping centre in East London, close to the site of The Olympics. Here, it is reported, 3,440 offenses were reported. The most popular being ‘Theft’ accounting for about half, with Shoplifting being about 15%. The second highest number of offenses are reported from Westfield’s other Mall in leafy West London with 2,524 offenses.

These aren’t really significant numbers and may be a result of higher numbers of people and more advanced security in shopping centre.

However, when reading the report, it was interesting to notice that Belfast Airport was the third highest, behind a mental health hospital and the Westfield centre mentioned above.