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

Suffering from Brexhaustion? Have some more maps

This is the latest instalment in my series of ill-advised mapping adventures. I really don't know why, so long after that EU referendum thing, I am posting this today but I think it must be a mixture of being on Brexopilot and the fact that nobody seems to have mapped all the ward-level EU referendum data that Martin Rosenbaum of the BBC published in February 2017. I say 'nobody' but Owen Boswarva did map Bristol at the time, so I've borrowed some of his ideas for my maps. Note: there aren't maps of everywhere - only some areas released ward-level results data. Here's a little screenshot of the folder with all the maps. Scroll down to see the big versions.

Some explanation first, to describe what you are looking at. I used the ward results file at the bottom of Martin Rosenbaum's February 2017 piece to make these maps. I used shades of yellow for remain and shades of blue for leave. In both cases I used the yellow and blue from the original BBC maps as most people are familiar with that colour scheme. I mapped all 61 local authority areas that had results for all wards (36 'Leave' areas, 25 'Remain' areas). This covers about 15% of the UK but there is a good mix of area types so it should be somewhat representative of the wider picture. Here's a little visual explainer of what the maps show.

I think the local patterns are pretty interesting

The best way to see if an area you are interested in is in the map set is just to scroll down, because I've put all the maps below, in alphabetical order. You can also get them from the Google Drive folder, which by the way you can also get to by using this shorter and easier to remember url: bit.ly/brexit-wards-2016. At the very bottom of this post I've added a few more words, should you be desperate enough to read them.

Notes: I thought I would do this when the data came out in February 2017 but other things got in the way. With the recent Brextension (sorry) I thought I might as well finish the job I didn't start back then. Why? Partly because I was curious about what the local patterns actually looked like on the ground - apparent anomalies, concentrations, strongholds, that kind of thing - but also because I wondered whether there ware many 'islands of Leave' or 'archipelagos of Remain' and that kind of thing. I think if you look at the maps you can see a bit of this. I have used local authority boundaries because that is how the vote was conducted and counted, but I did also have a look at it by constituency (and then thought better of it).

Three Nottingham constituencies (East - Ind, North - Lab, South - Lab)

I was also interested in whether there were neighbouring wards that are really different in their voting. It turns out there are a few but not that many. If you're interested in this subject and haven't already read Martin Rosenbaum's piece on these local results, do take a look - it's really good. I did do a bit of analysis using the same data at the end of 2017, but that was just a few scatterplots. I should note, as Martin Rosenbaum does in his article, that this data was obtained thanks to a major data collection exercise carried out by George Greenwood.

I really would quite like to never hear the word 'Brexit' ever again though. Not because I have warm, fuzzy feelings for the EU but because it's all we ever hear about. So I thought I'd join in the fun and do some almost entirely unnecessary local Brexit voting pattern maps, even if it is just for the historical record. Though, actually, all this might be useful to people over the next six months, even if it's only for national media vox pop location planning (on which note, the KFC on the A127 in Southend seems like a good spot). Happy Halloween etc.

One of a few spots where near things are not that related