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Trash Can Shortage
Worth adding that a chunk of what looks like a bin shortage is actually a capacity problem, not a count problem. A lot of London's street bins hold maybe 90 to 110 litres, which is nothing when you've got a busy high street, so they fill by mid morning and everything after that gets stacked beside them. Westminster and the City have moved some to 240 litre solar compacting bins that squash waste and signal when full, but they're about 5k a pop plus maintenance, so most boroughs won't touch them.
If you're near a park rather than a street, that's a different pot of money entirely, usually the borough's parks team, and some friends groups actually fund and empty their own bins.
its also a money thing. councils cut street cleaning and bin budgets hard after 2010, Westminster spends way more per head on this stuff than most boroughs so you get this weird postcode lottery. also worth knowing you can report a missing or overflowing bin through the council's app or fixmystreet and they sometimes actually act on it, just takes a few weeks. the bins near me in Camden vanished for like two years then reappeared after enough people complained.
The bins that did survive are often the old cast iron ones with the tiny opening, and thats partly a design thing. Modern bins get specified with small apertures to stop people shoving bin bags of household waste in, which is a big problem in places like Camden and Islington where residents treat public bins as free tip runs. downside is you cant fit a coffee cup and a meal deal box in at once so rubbish ends up stacked on top or on the pavement next to it.
If you want to actually do something, the rubbish in your area is the councils responsibility but TfL handles stations and bus stops, so report to the right one or it just bounces around.
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What are some innovative ways to anonymously compare rental prices in a city?
SpareRoom's "rooms wanted" ads are underrated for this. people post what they're currently paying alongside what they want next, so you can scrape a rough sense of going rates by postcode without anyone knowing you looked. it skews young and flatshare heavy tho, so not much use if you're after 2-beds in zone 2.
Another one is just the depozit or tenancy deposit scheme data. not public-facing, but your council's housing officer can tell you median rents from deposit registrations if you email them under FOI. takes weeks, but its proper anon and nobody clocks u.
Rightmove and Zoopla only show asking rents, which are often 10 to 15 percent above what a place actually goes for, so they're a poor benchmark. The trick I've used is the ONS Price Index of Private Rents, which breaks things down to borough level and is genuinely anonymous since it's aggregate data, no listing or account needed. For something more granular, the London Renters Union runs a rent reporting tool where you submit what you're paying with your postcode and it maps it against others nearby, though the coverage is patchy outside the inner boroughs.
the openrent "rent check" thing is decent for zones 3-4 where the unions tool barely reaches. also worth checking the london.gov.uk planning portal for new build applications, they list "affordable" and market rent figures per unit in the viability assessments, which is basically the developer telling the council what they expect to charge. bit of a faff to dig through but its public, anonymous & nobody knows ur looking