A blog post about British map labels (plus free data)

I recently did a talk about the north of England, for which I created a few 'alternative maps' - i.e. maps that took an unconventional approach. The thing that was unconventional was that I inverted the normal labelling hierarchy so that small places had big labels and big places had small labels - an example is shown below for part of the north east of England. I have also shared some of this data for the whole of Great Britain - read on for more on that.

A new megaregion is born

To do this, I used Ordnance Survey open data, and specifically the OS VectorMap District product's NamedPlace layer. I created a complete version for Great Britain and then filtered it so that only populated places were showing (i.e. FONTTYPE = 2). If you ever use this data you'll know that it also has a FONTHEIGHT field, which goes from a low of 5 (generally very small places) to 15 (the biggest cities in the country). For all types of point, not just type 2, the height field goes from 4 to 18. This can be used to set the font height in software like QGIS or ArcGIS, and in the map above I've just inverted and enlarged the labels using this variable. When you do this for the whole country it looks something like the big mess below.

From Mid Yell to Hugh Town, we got all the best names

Some labels are in upper case and some are in proper case in the attribute table, but I wanted to see how much logic there was to the label hierarchy, so I did a little digging. I should also say that I believe FONTHEIGHT is based on cartographic placement principles, in addition to some other things like settlement size and/or importance.

But hold on a minute, what's all this... I've just re-downloaded the most recent OS Vector Map District data for Great Britain and Ordnance Survey have done away with the above typology and replaced it with something which is easier to understand. Truly exciting stuff. Okay, perhaps I need to calm down but it's still pretty nifty and will be useful for a lot of people. Not having a numerical font height field may make things a little bit more tricky at times though. And, what would be really amazing is if there were an option to easily download data for the whole of Great Britain, rather than for the two letter OS grid squares.

Anyway, I've just tried to add a little bit of value here through merging the data and explaining all this. The new dataset has 364,581 named place points for the whole of Great Britain, divided into the following classes: 'hydrography' (50,343 features), 'landcover' (9,987), 'landform' (32,479), 'populated place' (255,959), 'woodland or forest' (15,813). I'm only really interested in populated places here and they break down into the following categories.

But what is 'large'? Keep reading...

Users need to keep in mind that the classification of populated places is still listed under the 'FONTHEIGHT' field so I'm sure it's partly about cartographic placement and not just size of places, or their populations. An example of a 'small' place would be Skaw, with Pockthorpe as 'medium', Altrincham as 'large' and Leeds as 'extra large'. You can see the 'extra large' places in the map below. I also notice that the gaelic name for my home town (Inbhir Nis) seems to have been added as a new feature that I didn't see before.

Remember, it's not all about importance or size

Some further maps below, so that you can see how it works in practice with the different types of places - which I have shown in different colours and sizes on the maps. You may have to click these to make them big enough to read the labels.

I have no idea what 68 - 96 is

Edinburgh as 'extra large' and Leith as 'large' here

Only these three are 'extra large' in London

Newport: it's not a small Welsh town - it's 'extra large'

All that's left for me to say is that I hope some people reading this find it useful and, if you do and you have a need to label places in Great Britain then feel free to use the GB layers I put together. You'll find them in this Google Drive folder. I've done one version with just populated places and another version with everything.

Get the data here

Land Cover Atlas - Notes, FAQs and Data

The last post had some background information on my Land Cover Atlas of the UK. In this post I'll say a bit more about it, answer some of the questions I received, and share some of the data from the project. As I said in my previous post, this was really about me trying to understand the data better and seeing if I could produce a localised atlas of land cover for the whole UK in a way that was accessible and comparable between areas.

Corine Land Cover data for Liverpool and Manchester area

As above, but for Northern Ireland and a bit of Scotland

Notes

If you really want to know more about what I did, and the results of my analysis, I strongly recommend you see my more detailed Land Cover Atlas of the UK, including the Appendices. The piece on the BBC was a simplified version of this work, because it had to be. You just can't have giant, detailed maps on the BBC website in the same way you can on Figshare, where the full set of maps are hosted. That's why, after some discussion, we created a simplified four-class Corine map set, with one set of maps optimised for desktop (640 pixels wide) and another set optimised for mobiles (350 pixels wide). My heart did sink when I found out I'd have to do this but then again it was a good way to learn a few more tricks and the BBC graphics and data team are brilliant to work with.

On the underlying classification itself, I decided to use Corine because I had always wanted to understand it better, but it's also open data and comparable across Europe, and over time - it goes back to 1990. This means that, in theory, you could repeat this kind of analysis for the whole of Europe over 20+ years. But don't hold your breath; I'm done with Corine for now. As I note in the Atlas, the categories themselves do require a little bit more investigation if you really want to make sense of things, as you can see in the extract below.

An extract from my Atlas

On the four-fold simplified classification used on the BBC website, there was quite a bit of debate about this. We moved from using 'Artificial' (as Corine uses) to 'Built on' after some testing at the BBC suggested there was confusion about what 'artificial' actually meant. For 'natural', I think Mark Easton's blog piece did a good job of explaining that this must be interpreted with care. 

'Natural' must be interpreted with care

Ultimately, I thought that producing a localised land cover Atlas would be a good way of showing that when it comes to national averages, they don't always make sense locally. That is, the UK might be mostly farmland and semi-natural, but doesn't mean much if you are surrounded by a concrete jungle and are always stuck in traffic jams. Having said that, I did discover that Midlothian was the local authority which most closely matched the overall UK land cover figures, almost exactly. Thus, 'the Midlothian question' is born.

The UK in miniature?

Just beside Edinburgh, in case your geography is rusty

FAQs

Doing something like this, if it will only be seen by a few interested boffins, is normally fine. But when it is on the BBC website millions of people might see it (and this was the case). That means you get a wide range of responses, from the 'oh cool, maps!' to the 'this is EU propaganda gone mad, the UK is basically a car park and I don't care what the numbers say'. But that's okay because most people are in the middle ground, though much closer to the first and, anyway, people are perfectly entitled to their opinions. What I thought I'd add here are some answers to common questions that were either asked directly or posted elsewhere online.

Why did you do this?

I wanted to know more about land cover across the UK. This was motivated by my desire to understand the country better in terms of land cover but also to see how much of it was actually artificial or 'concreted over' as some put it. The answer was about what I expected it to be but there is great variation locally and that's partly what I hoped to find - and to put some more precise figures on it. 

You really want to concrete over the whole of our beautiful countryside, don't you?

No.

But you're a secret housebuilding cheerleader, right?

I do think we need to built more houses, and we do have space to build them if we want to, but the housing question was not part of this project. If it was, I would have tried somehow to look at 'developable' land or something like that. A key question in this is that for housebuilding there needs to be enough infrastructure and it needs to be in the right place. This kind of analysis could potentially help with that, but it wasn't my goal here.

Was this funded by the EU?

The data I used are created through an EU programme but neither the BBC nor I received any funding for this. I started this in my spare time (evenings and weekends) and although I used the Corine data provided by the EU (it's free and open data) this project definitely wasn't funded by the EU.

How much did the BBC pay you?

Nothing. We decided to use what I'd already done and then create a bespoke map and data set for their news website but I'd done the vast majority of the work already - Mark Easton and colleagues just thought it would be interesting and I see this as a useful kind of public engagement activity that adds to knowledge. If it gets more people interested in land and maps, then great.

What do I think it tells us?

Lots of things, but three come to mind - 1. there is more space in the UK than some of us might imagine. 2. We can find space for more housing if we want to. 3. We should probably get out and about more and enjoy the space that's out there. On 1, this is a question of where we live (i.e. 83% in urban areas) vs lots of land that can't really be lived on (e.g. the 9.5% or so that is peat bog) but I wasn't thinking it being about space for any one particular use. On 2, I didn't begin with a housing question but inevitably it comes up and when you look at it objectively you can easily find space, if you are willing. On 3, that's mainly just a message to myself but it also serves as a useful reminder that the UK is full of amazing landscapes. Maybe, just maybe, it also tells us that the way the population is distributed is something that needs to be looked at.

But England has the highest population density in Europe so this data is meaningless, isn't it?

Overall, in global terms, the UK is quite densely populated and within Europe the UK is now said to be the most densely populated. This data does not challenge that. It is about land cover, not people cover. The goal here is to show land cover, and it does show that some areas are very built up in percentage terms. Some areas may feel very crowded, but this is not just down to population numbers - it's also got to do with infrastructure, services and housing. And density is best thought of locally in my view, not at the national level. A simple national arithmetic average where you divide population by land area isn't very helpful. But I'm working on a more nuanced, meaningful metric for this that is based on a local density measure based on 1km squares. London is the most densely populated area in the UK - with an average of about 5,500 per sq km - and a high of about 25,000 - but it is much less dense than Manhattan or central Paris, for example.

If I complain that the country is full, am I wrong?

No. Yes. Maybe. Take your pick. The answer to this question depends upon people's perceptions, experience, and sometimes biases. I prefer to think about this question in relation to infrastructure, services, housing and international comparisons. But if you were born in 1930, when the population of the UK was around 20 million lower than it is now, I can understand the point of view that the country is 'full', though I don't agree with it. However, my aim was to look at land cover, not population. It's inevitable that the population question comes up but I think some data on land cover is helpful in helping people understand the UK better.

What does it all mean?

It means that someone looked at the EU's Corine data, turned it into localised maps for the UK's 391 local authorities and collaborated with the BBC to produce a simplified set of maps for the same areas. It is an attempt to take raw data and turn it into more meaningful information. The 'knowledge' bit will largely come from what people think to begin with or, in some cases, perhaps change people's perspectives. But for me it's about understanding how local areas compare to the national picture.

Can I have the data?

Yes, see below.

Data

Last of all, if you're looking for the underlying data, I've made it available in an open Google Drive folder. Here's what it looks like if you open it up in QGIS - and there are a few more screenshots in the folder. I have also put a 'Shapefiles etc' folder in there, which contains a QGIS project file you can open and see it styled as below (there's a qml style sheet in there too). If you're an ArcGIS user, you can use the layer file included in the same folder. There is also a UK local authorities file that I made, which should come in handy in providing a bit of context.

Take a look yourself if you're a GIS user

The other thing I've added to the folder is a spreadsheet with a summary of how much of each local authority is 'built on', etc. This just provides an opportunity to see the all map data in a single place. If you want to know how the land cover categories in this table translate to the original Corine classes, well it's relatively simple. Although Corine has a 44 class nomenclature, at the most basic level it covers 5 classes - 'Artificial surfaces', 'Agricultural areas', 'Forest and semi-natural areas', 'Wetlands' and 'Water bodies'. In the simplified classification, 'Artificial' became (1) 'Built on', but without 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 ('green urban areas' and 'sport and leisure facilities'), which became their own class of (2) 'Green urban'. 'Agricultural' became (3) 'Farmland', and the rest were put into (4) 'Natural', though of course some of it is certainly not 'natural'. 

A single file with all the data from the BBC maps

Final words

I hope some of this is useful and that it makes people think. But really, of course, I'd rather you look at my more detailed Atlas because that's where all this started. I'll end with a small sample of comments from Mark Easton's blog because I think they are a reasonable representation of the kinds of reactions there have been, and they also highlight the fact that land, population and statistics can sometimes be an intoxicating combination. 

Beware positive internet comments

Nick Faldo, is that you?

There were lots of these

The lowest rated comments - a mixed bag overall

A good few people worried about how this data will be used

Right, enough on land cover for now.

A Land Cover Atlas of the UK

This blog post provides a bit more detail and background information about my new publication A Land Cover Atlas of the United Kingdom. It's basically a 23 page pdf accompanied by a set of 392 maps of land cover - one for each local authority in the UK, plus an overview map of the whole UK. The publication date kept getting pushed back because I was also working with the BBC on the topic and we wanted to ensure things went online at the same time. I have once again chosen Figshare to host this as it's an excellent platform for dissemination of this type of data. The Atlas uses Corine Land Cover 2012 data and was the result of a spare time summer project that I recently finished. See below for an example of one of the local authority maps, from Tonbridge and Malling in Kent, in the South East of England.

Tonbridge and Malling - a fairly fruity landscape

There are plenty of other land cover maps, and this is not new data, but I wanted to show what it looks like at the local level in a set of static maps and I hadn't seen it presented like that before; so it's kind of a new take on existing data. I did this partly because I wanted to be able to understand how areas differ but also because I wanted a better idea of the diversity of land cover at the local level across the UK in a way that was easy to digest. That's what I've attempted here. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if it works, but I quite like the results as it give me a better understanding of land cover nationwide.

The rest of this post just provides a little bit more background detail to the Atlas project itself and some of the decisions I made in producing it, including a few pictures.

First of all, I wanted this to cover the whole UK. I thought it would be interesting to be able compare all 391 local authorities in terms of their land cover. It's always a bit annoying when you see some great data but your part of the country isn't included! The Corine classification has a total of 44 land use classes but since it covers the whole of Europe there are some categories that don't appear in the UK - such as Glaciers. This leaves a total of 39, though some of these 'land cover' categories are actually water. 

Anyway, each map legend lists all possible land cover categories so that you can easily compare places and the proportion of different land types in them. I thought it was also important to be able to identify what land cover types areas don't have, that's why you'll see a legend entry for a category even if it doesn't appear on the map.

I also wanted the project to be based on open data and open source software, so I used Corine (open), Ordnance Survey data (open), Source Sans Pro font (open) and QGIS (free, open source). See the images below for a bit more on this kind of thing.

Not that it really matters, but I do like an open font

This map extract is from the Angus council area in Scotland

This was a spare time project that got out of hand

The full resolution maps are quite big - see permanent link 

I also wanted to show what land cover areas do not contain

Values <1% are shown in light font

Scale is always shown, but areas differ hugely in size

Some slight boundary line mismatches - later maps will have a fix

This all started with me wanting to investigate what percent of the UK is 'urban' and how much is 'golf course' using the new OS greenspace data. I got to the bottom of the latter but in relation to the former it really does depend upon how you measure it. I don't believe there is a definitive answer but if I was pressed, I'd always say less than 10%. Corine data suggests it is about 6%. 

Take a look at the Atlas document itself if you're interested - and then check out the map for your area. You can also see more about this in a related BBC story, for which I produced a set of simplified Corine maps that are much easier to digest because they only show four categories.

In the BBC piece, I also decided to show building footprints, as a way to add a little more detail and legibility to the maps. This meant I had to create a set of files with all UK buildings in it. For Great Britain this was pretty time consuming, but straightforward. For Northern Ireland I had to create it using open data. But the end result was quite satisfying and after a bit of to-and-fro with Tom Armitage from Digimap to confirm my figures I was ready to go. As it happens, the total area of the UK covered by buildings amounts to about 1.3%. In Great Britain overall it's about 1.4%, which is much higher than, say, the land covered by golf courses: 0.54%. I have also calculated these figures at local authority level, but that's one for another day.

Mind you, if you are stuck for something to say during a lull in conversation, you might want to interject with "I say, did you know that Islington is 30% building, and that Birmingham and Manchester are both 15% building?".

Notes: I have done my best to map this as accurately and clearly as possible. If you do spot any mistakes, please feel free to get in touch. Like I said above, there are other methods for mapping land cover and there are other data sources so don't take this as the definitive account. Having said this, I think it provides a good overview of land cover in the UK at a local level. There are some further notes on these kinds of things in my Atlas document, on page 3. The Appendices also contain data tables on land cover for each part of the UK.