Alternative Maps

This is a blog post about some maps of places that we don't often see on maps in Britain. I've had these stashed away for a while, since late 2017 when I wrote a piece called 'Alternative Maps and the Future of Brexit Britain', which you can see below. I've been thinking a lot more about this recently as part of my role in the UK2070 Commission, and also because I'm going to Redcar this week. But really this is just some personal musing about maps and in particular maps of the kinds of places that often seem to be left off the map, particularly in conversations at a national level. Scroll down for the maps. There's not too much more to it than that, but I thought looking at some of the less mapped places, with a bit of label re-sizing, was a good way for me to re-think my mental maps of the country, and that's really why I did them. Nothing profound.

You can probably read the text if you click to enlarge

I'm not asking for too much, am I?

I deliberately didn't add inset/locator maps to these

Too often we're blinded by the sun

Only peripheral if you're not paying attention

It's not that far away

A long way from London? 

Part of London?

Limited labels

I've gone crazy with the labels here

The Kingdom of Fife

I always think this part of the world is overlooked

Quite a big garden

So often overlooked

Definitely pretty central

Quite a bumpy landscape

A bit more label inversion here

Technically, this is not Shetland in a box

Greater Trowbridge?

Stafford and Cannock megaregion

There aren't a lot of maps of this area

There are a lot of people here

Like I said, this is just a few maps of places that we don't often see on maps. Or at least we maybe don't think of them as being nationally 'important' in the same we we do about major cities. In some ways that is understandable but I think it can't to any harm to change our mental maps and re-think how we think about the UK, where stuff is and where stuff should be.

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