Sunday 26 May 2019

Did you realise wards were actually very interesting?

More map and data fun today. I know there's a massive market for blog posts about administrative geographies, so here I am. It's partly inspired by the fact that I look at this kind of data all the time and get to know it quite well, and partly because of this Twitter exchange some time ago with Mags Hall and Allan Faulds, who truly do know too much about this kind of thing.

Did you know that the UK's biggest ward accounts for 2% of the total area of the UK? You did? Ok then, did you know that only one UK ward out of more than 9,000 begins with 'z'? Perhaps you did. But did you know that 'Plumpton, Streat, East Chiltington and St John (Without)' is the longest ward name in the UK, and also perhaps the best? How about the fact that there are 11 UK wards bigger than Greater London and the smallest ward in the country (in the City of London) is not very big at all - 0.044 square km (about 6 football pitches). The ward that you'd most like to drink? Why, that's the ward of 'Speyside Glenlivet' (in Moray), surely.

Time for some maps now. They all have the name of the local authority they're in in the top left, with the ward name along the bottom.


Not quite as big as Trinidad and Tobago, but close enough

It's small, ancient and has about 320 people

Zetland ward, in Redcar and Cleveland

If you're a local Councillor in the UK's biggest ward you have an awful lot of ground to cover, as you can see below for the journey between Achiltibuie and Kinloch Hourn, which are both in the same ward. Extra points if you can pronounce Achiltibuie (I can but I have a bit of an advantage on the Highland-place-names-as-Shibboleth thing).

The route between Achiltibuie and Kinloch Hourn (in same ward)

There are two really, really big wards in the UK. One is shown above and it's Wester Ross, Strathpeffer and Lochalsh, and the other is North, West and Central Sutherland. Both are in the north west Highlands, and are more than 4,800 sq km in size (that's over 1,800 sq miles, which is close to 3x Greater London or 18 City of Edinburghs). The biggest ones in other parts of the UK are a good bit smaller, and here they are below. Overall, the 10 biggest UK wards account for more than 10% of the land area of the UK, and the 100 biggest account for just over 30% of the UK's land area. You could fit almost 3,000 of the smallest UK wards in Wester Ross, Strathpeffer and Lochalsh but I don't think it's a very sensible idea so I'd advise against it.


By far the biggest ward in England

Just a smidgen bigger than Torr Head and Rathlin

The biggest ward in Wales is also a donut ward

The other humongous ward 

All this isn't supposed to be profound or anything like that, just a bit of map trivia, so read on for a bit more about the little wards. The smallest wards in the UK are all in the City of London, and we've seen the smallest of those above (Queenhithe) so let's look at smallest ones in different parts of the UK instead.

Northern Ireland's smallest ward

Scotland's smallest ward

The smallest ward in Wales

Not the street of Charles Booth fame, but it is small

Wards are actually very important though, and they represent a very important part of local democracy in the UK, so there are some practical implications to this kind of thing, particularly when you consider the different areas people represent and how widely they can vary, even within a single local authority. For example, in Northumberland the biggest ward is more than 1,100 times the size of the smallest. In the Highland Council area in Scotland the biggest ward is over 1,300 times the size of the smallest.

But did you know that wards can also be mapped with a basemap in greyscale? You didn't? Okay, here's proof, with a selection of wards covering more than 100 sq km.

Lots of big wards in this neck of the woods

Not anywhere near Bolton

Another donut ward - I'm not sure how many there actually are

10th biggest ward in Northern Ireland

Yes, the Isle of Skye is a single ward (pop about 10,500)

I like the name of this ward


Notes: I used ward boundaries for 2018 from the ONS Open Geography Portal. This file contains 9,114 wards for the UK, with 7,446 in England, 462 in Northern Ireland, 354 in Scotland and 852 in Wales. Scotland has relatively few wards compared to Northern Ireland and England but I won't go into that here. My favourite ward? Not sure, but Aird and Loch Ness is definitely a contender - see below. It contains all of Loch Ness, is pleasingly-shaped and is only a little bit smaller than Luxembourg. Then there is 'Highland' ward which is not in 'Highland' (the council area) but is in the Highlands but in the Perth and Kinross council area. I have loads more of these maps but that's enough for today.


The midgie capital of the world (at least in my experience)

Hmm


Monday 13 May 2019

All populated places in Great Britain in a single file

A data-sharing post today with details of a new file I've made to share with the world - or at least anyone who's looking for a comprehensive place names file of Great Britain to use in their maps. The short version: I've taken the 'populated places' from Ordnance Survey's massive Open Names dataset and made it available as a single shapefile, geopackage and geojson. You can see all the files, including a ready-made QGIS project file, in the project repository. I've also added this file to the Resources section on my personal web page, where you'll also find (e.g.) all buildings in Great Britain, parliamentary constituencies, and more. Here are some examples of what the file looks like. 

More than 42,000 places in a single file

You can have Gaelic or English place names

You can filter to show different kinds of places

You can also use Welsh place names, or English ones

In addition to the layers and QGIS project, I've also included some comments in the expression boxes in QGIS to explain how you do various things - like using different font size or CASE for different types of place name (e.g. for 'City' or 'Town' or 'Village'). See the screenshots below for more on this and look at the QGIS project if you want to see it in more detail and to change any settings.


This is how you make some labels bold

This sets a different label buffer for different types

This filter is used to show only some places

This determines the font size for different label types

This determines the CASE (e.g. upper/lower) for the labels

This sets the symbol size


That's all for now. Hope you find this useful. I've pasted below the text (including comments) that I've used for the labelling, just in case you want to copy/paste it quickly. As you can see, I've also used this to change 'Kingston upon Hull' to 'Hull' in a kind of find/replace way.

wordwrap((

CASE


WHEN "NAME1_LANG" = 'gla' THEN  "NAME2"

WHEN "NAME2_LANG" = 'gla' THEN  "NAME2"
WHEN "NAME1_LANG" = 'cym' THEN  "NAME1"
WHEN "NAME2_LANG" = 'cym' THEN  "NAME2"
WHEN "NAME1" = 'Kingston upon Hull' THEN 'Hull'

ELSE  "NAME1"


END


),14)


--If you want to show English place names in place of Welsh or Gaelic ones, or vice versa, or any combination of this then you just need to change the variables above.


--For example, in the first WHEN statement we are saying that when the language in the "NAME1_LANG" column is specified as 'gla' (for Scottish Gaelic) then we want to show the "NAME2" (English) label instead of the "NAME1" label (Gaelic).


--The wordwrap function at the start - and end with the 14 and brackets - just wraps place names on more than one line when they exceed 14 characters. Just delete this bit at the start and end if you don't want to do this.


-- You'll also notice that instead of displaying the default name of 'Kingston upon Hull' (which hardly anybody would use) I have used a WHEN/THEN statement to replace it with 'Hull' (which people actually use).