Earlier in the week I posted
a map of London's 'economic hinterland' on Twitter because I've been working with commuting data and wanted to see what the economic footprint of London looks like. But, some people have been telling me that other cities exist - which is a fair point. Since I have the data and I'm just revising a paper on the topic I thought I'd look at a few others, but this time using lower level data -
MSOAs instead of districts for the origins. The maps below show the proportion of people from an MSOA who commute to a given area. Only MSOAs with 1% or more going to a particular place are shown and the darker the colour the higher the percentage. These aren't exactly the same as travel to work areas but they do give a reasonable approximation of each city's economic footprint. As you can see, I did quite a few maps - click to enlarge, as ever.
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| Birmingham has quite a pleasing concentric pattern |
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| Bradford has quite a wide footprint |
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| Bristol - quite a neat footprint |
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| Cambridge is a little wider than I expected |
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| Camden - one of a few London Boroughs I looked at |
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| Cardiff - clearly the major focus in South Wales |
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| Cheshire West - I wanted to see how far into Wales it goes |
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| Derby seems relatively tightly packed |
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| Leeds - the second largest local authority by population |
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| Leicester - another quite tight East Midlands labour market area |
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| Liverpool - extends into Wales and south to Cheshire, as you'd expect |
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| Greater London - the light areas are only 1% of commuters, but still! |
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| Greater London - same as above, but with some city labels |
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| Manchester - only the 'underbounded' district here, but still dominant |
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| Middlesbrough - an important northern labour market area |
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| Milton Keynes - I think it has quite a wide footprint |
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| Newcastle - clearly dominant in the North East |
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| Norwich - a good example of a large regional labour market area |
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| Nottingham is relatively symmetrical in labour market terms |
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| Oxford - a relatively large footprint here |
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| Plymouth is a major South West economic zone |
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| Reading - I had expected this to be a little bigger |
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| Sheffield is another major northern labour market area |
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| Southampton - somewhat overlaps with London's fringe |
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| Southwark - I wanted to see how this London Borough looked |
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| Swansea - quite a wide footprint here |
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| Tower Hamlets - interesting to see the dominance of eastern origins |
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| Warrington - a strategic hub in the North West |
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| City and Westminster - the ONS group these two together |
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| York - quite a wide Yorkshire footprint |
Should I patch all these together in one big animated gif? Of course I should.
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| Why isn't my city included? Good question. Sincere apologies. |
Birmingham doesn't get enough love, and is so often overlooked, so I did a zoomed in version of MSOA flows into Birmingham, with a few place labels.
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| Click here to see the full size version |
Notes: the maps give the impression that they are unclassified choropleths, but that is just for effect and because this is a quick map batch. The colour classification is the same in each (see below) and no areas with less than 1% commuting to a given place are shown. I used the
UK Data Service Flow Data website to extract the data and QGIS 2.14 for the maps. Bear in mind that they are a bit rough and ready and only really for comparison. Also, each 'city' here refers to the local authority area, not the wider city-region. But I think it's interesting to compare places. You just need to bear in mind the spatial scale and relative size of the destination places. Birmingham and Leeds ought to have much larger footprints that (e.g.) Nottingham and Sheffield because they contain more jobs. Where are Scotland and Northern Ireland? These datasets come separately and are not part of the English and Welsh MSOA geography so are not mapped here.
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| I used the same classification scheme for all maps |
