Thursday 30 August 2018

10x10km City Squares

I've been thinking about little projects I could do with the Great Britain buildings GeoPackage I shared previously on here and have come up with the idea of comparing the urban fabric across the country. For this I drew inspiration from previous work by Geoff Boeing, though instead of 1 square mile of urban fabric, the images below are 10x10km squares. Look at the gif first, then I'll explain the method and share all the static images. All images are ordered roughly from north to south so we start in Inverness and end in Canterbury. Update: 1 Sept 2018. I decided to manually select 144 towns and cities and do a 12x12 version of the original city mosaic below, just to make it more interesting. if the image below crashes your browser, try this smaller one. Want all the individual tiles? I put them all here in a Dropbox folder.


Click to enlarge - huge version (12,000 x 12,000) here


65 cities, at two seconds per frame (squares are 10 x 10km)

What I did here was take some Ordnance Survey open data on places in Great Britain and then filter it so that only places with an 'Extra Large' place label were visible. See this blog post for an explanation of what that means. This left me with the 65 cities you see in the graphic above. The image below has 64 just because I wanted to do a 8x8 version. In all these images all I have shown is the most detailed buildings layer available as open data from Ordnance Survey - you can download the lot from my buildings page


10 x 10 km squares for 64 British cities

The centre point of each square is where the Ordnance Survey place label is located. If you moved things north or south, or east or west in some cases you'd get a bit of a different picture but the points are generally in the centre of these places.

I've posted all the individual images below in case anyone is interested. This was also a bit of a test for QGIS and I did actually do about 1,600 of them just to see how my computer would handle it so if you're really sad that your town or city isn't on here let me know and I'll share it.

Method: in case anyone is interested this was done in QGIS Atlas with Ordnance Survey open data, and ImageMagick for the layout. I tend to use IrfanView for batch resizing and so used that here. The font - Raleway - is from the free Google font pack available online. The colour is #222222 (RGB 34, 34, 34).

That's all for now.