Land, people and political maps

This is a final map wrap-up following the UK General Election at the end of 2019, but also a follow-on from my last blog post: Land doesn't vote but it does matter. I'll explain more below, but let's start with a little gif, which fades in and out between the new political map of the UK at the start of 2020 and a different version of the same map, but showing only where there are buildings (in an attempt to scale the data to the underlying population more closely). I've included some interesting facts about people and land below, so do keep reading. Teaser: only 4.4% of the UK land area is Labour constituencies, in contrast to the 32.8% of the population who live in Labour constituencies, which is very close to their 32.2% vote share at the election.

Land matters, but it's good to see both

Here are the individual frames from the gif, below, in case you want to look at them a little more closely. It's a bit of a balancing act deciding upon what line width to use for the buildings-only map - too thick and it's just massive blobs of colour. Too thin and everything disappears, so what you see here is a kind of compromise that is supposed to reflect the pattern of the underlying urban fabric that would be visible on a satellite view, for example.

Buildings file available here

The political map of the UK in 2020

How many people live in areas with a Conservative, Labour, SNP or Lib Dem MP?

This is an interesting question, but not one I came up with by myself. I was asked for an answer to this question, and because I'd compiled all the data already it was a relatively quick bit of analysis to arrive at some answers. So, here we go - below - based on the latest UK mid-year population estimates from 2018.

• 55.3% of the UK population (36.7 million people) live in areas with a Conservative MP. The Conservatives have 56% of the seats (365 out of 650). The Conservatives won 43.6% of the UK vote in the 2019 General Election.
• 32.8% of the UK population (21.8 million people) live in areas with a Labour MP. Labour have 31% of all UK seats. Labour won 32.2% of the UK vote in the 2019 General Election.
• 7.4% of the UK population (4.5 million people) live in areas with an SNP MP. But of course that's a bit of a silly statistic because the SNP only stand in Scotland, obviously. So, the relevant figure here is shown below. The SNP won 3.9% of the UK vote in the 2019 General Election. Note: obviously, the % population and % seat shares will be quite similar owing to the sort-of-equal population per constituency. For Scotland, both figures are 7.4% of the UK in terms of seats and population living there.
• 82.7% of the Scottish population (4.5 million people) live in areas with an SNP MP. The SNP won 45.0% of the Scottish vote in the 2019 General Election and have 81.4% of all Scottish seats.
• 1.7% of the UK population (1.0 million people) live in areas with a Liberal Democrat MP. They also have 1.7% of all seats. The Liberal Democrats won 11.5% of the UK vote in the 2019 General Election.

You can see the full spreadsheet here if you like - it includes all parties and has separate tabs for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and it has a map of the results. It looks like this (below). I've used total population here rather than electors because that was the question I was given and of course MPs are representative for all people.

More interesting than you may imagine, perhaps

None of this is of course particularly profound or surprising but I'm thinking about it in the context of the maps above and in relation to overall vote share, so I find it interesting. 

How much of the UK land area does each party 'hold'?

Describing this correctly is a bit tricky, but what I mean here is what percentage of the UK's land area does each party 'hold' or 'represent'? That is, what proportion of the new political map of the UK is shaded blue, red, yellow, orange, green and so on? I do like the different kinds of political maps we see these days (including the now-ubiquitous hex cartograms) but I also like to see things mapped in a more traditional manner, so long as we also have a different way of looking at it and are aware of the underlying numbers and settlement pattern (hence the gif at the very top of the page).

Okay, prepare to be blown away, or not, by this geographical trivia.

• 62.4% of the UK land area is covered by Conservative constituencies.
• 4.4% of the UK land area is covered by Labour constituencies - yes, 4.4% (but of course that's because they are mostly urban and therefore geographically small, but still this low figure surprised me).
• 19.5% of the UK land area is covered by SNP constituencies.
• 60.4% of the Scottish land area is covered by SNP constituencies.
• 5.6% of the UK land area is covered by Liberal Democrat constituencies (with thanks to Caithness, Sutherland & Easter Ross, clearly).
• The full spreadsheet above has the rest of the data, including the individual UK country breakdowns.

The mid-2018 population estimates from the ONS put the UK population at about 66.5 million, with 56 million in England, 1.8 million in Northern Ireland, 5.4 million in Scotland and 3.1 million in Wales.

For land area, the UK as a whole is about 244,000 sq km (about the same size as Oregon, or almost exactly the same as the total area of the Great Lakes in North America). England covers 130,000 sq km, Northern Ireland 13,600 sq km, Scotland 79,000 sq km and Wales 21,000 sq km. The figures are in square miles as well as sq km in the spreadsheet.

What was that? You want more gifs, but different speeds and different sizes. Okay then, see below. 

More seriously - and there is a rationale here - switching relatively quickly between the two maps in this way helps highlight the ways in which the standard map view can, if we're not careful, give a distorted view of political representation. That's why I think in political mapping a mix of methods and numbers works best. Also, where we can use different kinds of approaches to explain this (like gifs) we probably ought to.

Fast enough for you? 

A mini version

This is a bigger version - click to zoom

Help

Okay, one last stat. 

What percent of the UK population lives in Constituencies where more than 50% of the votes went to the Conservatives? 

By my calculations the answer to that is 28,258,422, so 42.5% of the UK population which, it so happens, is not so far away from the 43.6% share of the vote. But that is definitely not a defence of first past the post!

Bye for now. 

The Shape of American Democracy, v1.0

The fifth Vice President of the United States, and 9th Governor of Massachusetts - Elbridge Gerry - has not been forgotten. His name lives on in debates about the shapes of political districts and specifically in relation to those very irregularly shaped Congressional Districts we often see in the United States. Thus, gerrymandering remains a hot topic, but it is often difficult to understand without maps. So, in an effort to simplify things, I've created a single graphic that shows the shape of every US Congressional District - or, as I've called it, 'The Shape of American Democracy'. I have put the massive full size version, plus smaller versions, on a dedicated web page, which I may update in due course. Read on for more details about this project.

This is a big version, but you can find a giant version here

What is this?

The graphic above is a single poster that shows all 435 US Congressional Districts of the 115th US Congress, arranged in 15 rows and 29 columns. This is quite convenient, because 15 x 29 is 435, so it allows for a nice, regular layout. The colours (sorry, colors), represent the party representing each district - blue for Democratic, red for Republican. The order of the shapes is also very important. From top left to bottom right, I have arranged the districts in order of their Polsby-Popper score, which is one measure of the compactness of a geographic area, among several. There are others, but I've used this one as I think it provides results that make sense and look right. 

A closer look at the layout

Congressional District table - so you can find them easily

On the right hand side, there is a list, in five columns of 87 rows (5 x 87 = 435, thankfully), which tells you where you can find any Congressional District in the main layout, where I have labelled the rows A to O and the columns 1 to 29. So, if you wanted to find Florida's 18th Congressional District, for example, you would look it up alphabetically on the right, see that it's in N-23 and then look up row N, column 23 to see what it looks like, as shown below. If you look closely, you'll notice that some Congressional Districts are actually whole states. This is because seven states have only one representative: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.

Why do this?

The reason I did this is because I'm interested in the subject and have written about it before. I lived in the US for a short time (OH-3) but I'm not an American and I have no vote. I do have an unhealthy interest in maps and stats, though, as you can see if you look at more of this blog. In previous attempts, I'd done things like make small multiple graphics or animated gifs, but I wasn't satisfied with them. This time I wanted to pack as much useful information into a single graphic as possible, yet I also wanted it to be easy to digest, and The Shape of American Democracy is the result. I'm reasonably happy with it as a first draft, yet almost as soon as I finished, Pennsylvania redrew its districts after the existing ones were struck down by their Supreme Court. I am definitely not doing this to say any single political party is bad or good, or that an irregular shape is necessarily a problem. But by putting them all in one place, where we can also compare and contrast individual districts, I think it gives us a good overview and is a useful conversation starter at the very least.


What does it tell us?
Let's begin with the basics. It tells us that there are 435 Congressional Districts and that some are red and some are blue. By using the Polsby-Popper measure (which I learned about from my colleague Ruth Hamilton), and ordering them like as I have, it also tells us that some areas are much more irregularly-shaped than others. But of course we already knew this information. Where I think a graphic like this adds value is in its ability to pull all this information together into one information set that is, from a cognitive point of view, easier to digest. It provides a kind of at-a-glance summary of US Congressional District irregularity. This is not to say unusual shapes are inherently a bad thing because there may be good reasons for it. Likewise, more regular shapes may not necessarily be a good thing even if, on balance, most people would agree that this is the case. For more on this general topic, I recommend you read Garrett Dash Nelson's piece in Citylab, which asks the question of what a good electoral map would look like.

PA has since changed, but you get the idea

How did I do this?
In brief, I downloaded the latest US Congressional District shapefile from the US Census Bureau website, loaded it up in QGIS and then created an Atlas and then patched it all together in another open source application, called (ahem) GIMP. Creating the Congressional District finder table was a bit more tricky, so for that I used spreadsheets and pivot tables because it was the quickest way I could think of doing it, even if it was a wee bit clunky. I then exported different sizes of the graphic and put it all online in a dedicated single web page.

Click here to download the full size version

Am I saying US Democracy is in bad shape?
I realise the title of the graphic makes it sound that way, but it's not my intention. This is about shapes, and I toyed with the idea of calling it 'The Shapes of American Democracy' but in the end I went with Shape because I thought it sounded better and of course people can make their own minds up about what this might tell them about the state of democracy, if anything. Being from the UK (as a Scot living in England) it would be quite rich for me to criticise anyone else's democracy at present anyway! So, all I'm really saying is that the graphic gives you an impression of the shapes of US Congressional Districts, which form part of the democratic process in the United States, and from that you can make up your own mind about what it all means.


Other things
I originally put this together as a submission for the brilliant Atlas of Design, but it didn't make the cut, so I'm sharing it here instead, and on its own dedicated web page. I made it in January 2018, but then almost straight away the Pennsylvania Congressional Districts were re-drawn, but it still represents the correct information at a moment in time. I could update it if a) I ever find the time or b) someone commissions me to do it. So, that's already two kinds of fails with this project, but I think it is still useful to share it.

That's basically it for now. I haven't been able to obtain the very latest boundaries in the wake of the Pennsylvania re-draw but I might return to this in future if I can to create a version 1.1.


Technical information
When calculating the shapes of Congressional Districts, and their irregularity, there are a number of technical challenges, not least of which is the coastline. What we really want to measure are only those boundaries that can or have been manipulated by people rather than nature. A heavily indented coastline will give a district a very irregular shape, but this is not gerrymandering. So, when I was doing this I used an unclipped shapefile with, essentially, a smoothed coastline. Yet even when you do this you get some anomalies - e.g. Alaska and Hawaii's 2nd District end up on the top row, when really they are just quirks of geography - nobody would claim they were heavily gerrymandered! So this is a limitation but a relatively minor one.

Another thing that you might notice if you look closely is that some Districts might appear to be in the wrong place, based on what they look like. A good example of this is in Florida's 13th Congressional district, which is placed just before Wyoming as the second least irregularly shaped, even though it doesn't look right. But if we look at the portion of the boundary which could actually be modified through gerrymandering, given the coastline and the fact that this is St Petersburg (on a peninsula) it makes more sense. Wyoming does, thankfully, end up in the right place as the least irregular of all the shapes.

FL-13, surely some mistake?

Now it makes more sense - source

General Election 2017: some maps and data

It's 2017 and there has just been a General Election in the UK. In case you're reading this in the future, I'm talking about the first General Election of 2017. Today's post is a brief comment, plus a few maps, starting with one on the Labour win in Kensington in London. To summarise briefly: Labour won a seat that many people thought they couldn't, and won by 20 votes with Emma Dent Coad becoming the new MP in a gain from the Conservatives. 

But this is an immensely wealthy area, isn't it? Yes and no. There is a lot of money here but also a good deal of poverty, as you can see from the map below, where the red areas are among the 20% most deprived in England. As with most things, however, it's not a simple story and the result is perhaps not that shocking when you look at the map, even if some have named it the 'UK's richest constituency' (and there is an argument for that view). It's also definitely not 'London's Richest District', as one report puts it.

Kensington is a very different area north to south - click to enlarge

Some numbers, to help put things in context... If we rank the 533 English constituencies by deprivation, using the Indices of Deprivation 2015 measure calculated by the House of Commons Library, the Kensington constituency ranks 178 out of 533 - just on the edge of the most deprived third in all of England. One look at the map tells us that within the area there is considerable variation, with some parts much more deprived than the national average and some parts less so. In total, 22 of Kensington's small areas (LSOAs) are in the 20% most deprived in England - and none are in the 20% least deprived. The picture is very similar if you look at other indicators, particularly those related to income.

However, in London and beyond, the name 'Kensington' has it seems become synonymous with wealth, opulence and 'the elite'. This may be part of the Kensington story, but it's by no means the full story. I just wanted to take a closer look at what the data say in order to figure out if this is really such a surprise. As I did so, I also homed in on a few other constituencies. In addition, I attempted to look at the correlation between Conservative vote share and level of deprivation by constituency. I did this for 2015 and 2017 and although the results are not that surprising - i.e. the more deprived an areas is, the lower the Tory vote - some of the outliers are quite interesting. Here are the two charts - below. I've labelled some of the interesting ones as you can see below. 

A pretty strong relationship in 2015, as you'd expect

The correlation is a bit weaker here - everyone has ideas about why

Let's take a look at Sheffield Hallam because it's such an outlier - and also I live in Sheffield (but not there). It was Nick Clegg's constituency but is now Labour (Jared O'Mara MP). It's also the 9th least deprived constituency in England so is something of an anomaly, though of course not so much when you look at voting history and demographics. Still, the map is interesting in itself - it bucks the general pattern of the least deprived areas voting Conservative.

It has a high student population, among other factors

I then wanted to look at a couple of other places to see what things looked like on the ground. First up is Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn MP) and Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry MP). Note the little patch of blue around Highbury in an otherwise quite deprived area. This also contrasts with stereotypes of Islington as some kind of land of milk and honey. There is considerable wealth here but it sits beside large areas of deprivation.

Note the little blue patch near Highbury

Then I looked at the most deprived Conservative-voting constituency. This is currently Walsall North, which is ranked 31 out of 533 constituencies on the deprivation measure. Again, there are local and historic explanations for this but I don't want to dwell on those now.

Surprising? Maybe, maybe not.

Last of all, I wanted to look at a constituency where a Labour win truly would be a shock - for this, I looked at the least deprived constituency in all of England: North East Hampshire. When Labour win here I think we can all agree that it would be a shock, just as if the Conservatives won Walton in Liverpool (85.7% Labour, 8.6% Conservative in 2017). Actually, the latter might just be the biggest shock in the history of the world. Mind you, these days you never know what's going to happen next.

The Conservatives got 65.5% of the vote here.

Addendum: I saw a great histogram by Owen Boswarva looking at party by median age in each constituency so I attempted something vaguely similar for deprivation deciles and party. It's not at all surprising but I did find it interesting so am posting it here too.

Click to enlarge - the pattern is to be expected, but quite interesting

Notes: I do know, of course, that there will always be a strong linear relationship between deprivation and % voting Tory - or Labour for that matter. The point here is that because this is true, and because Kensington is actually quite deprived, the result there is less of a shock than some are claiming. Also, ranking deprivation at the scale of constituencies masks lots of underlying variation - but that's partly why I mapped it at LSOA. If we had LSOA General Election results that would be interesting. The scatterplots were interesting to me not because of the obvious linearity but because a) the relationship changed a good bit between 2015 and 2017 (UKIP effect?) and b) the big residuals - e.g. Sheffield Hallam. The ones which defy the general pattern are the ones I'm interested in. Basically, Kensington is right on the trend line and maybe it's because many more people from the deprived parts of Kensington voted this time - plus rich remainers. Finally, a lack of deprivation is not the same as affluence but on any measure you'll find they correlate strongly.

The 8 English Regions of a Federal UK

The political geography of England can be a contentious topic, particularly when it comes to the craft of drawing boundaries on maps. In fact, people can get quite agitated about it, and probably with good reason. But it’s too important to ignore, particularly at a time when the very nature of the UK as a political entity is being questioned and challenged. In this short essay I outline what I think new regions of a Federal England could look like, based on a combination of cultural, historic, administrative, economic and geographic factors. The boundaries you see below are my interpretation of ideas sent to me by Philip Brown and Nathan Pearce, two former students of the then Department of Town and Regional Planning in Sheffield (since re-named) who now work in professional planning practice. This doesn’t mean they are right, but they do at least have some grounding in the subject, and an unhealthy interest in regional maps and planning. I do too, so I have taken their note and turned it into a series of maps. The final map is shown below, to kick things off. Read the full text to see how I got there. You can see high resolution images of all maps here. You should also be able to right-click maps to open them in larger format in a new browser tab.

Read the rest of the post for the full story

Let’s put the names to one side for a minute because I'll come back to that later. Let’s forget too the big differences in size you can see in the first map. There is some logic there too, I promise. The question of what the English regions should look like is not one with a single correct answer, but I think it is possible to arrive at some kind of best fit compromise where everyone is happy. Okay, that was a lie. But I do think we can draw lines that people can live with and that make sense and work well for governing, planning and economic activity that also reflect historic and cultural factors - and without the need to re-draw local authority boundaries once again. 

Previous regional boundaries have made some sense, but I feel they have never been quite right, for a number of reasons. For example, when I did my PhD it was about the North West region of England, which at the time had recently inherited Cumbria from the old ‘North’ region. Westmorlanders may have been aghast, but it happened anyway so I think we need to revisit a bit of the history of all this before going any further, lest we repeat the mistakes of the past.

Background

I recently co-authored a paper on US megaregions with Garrett Nelson, and after seeing the level of interest it generated, it struck me once again just how much people care about this kind of thing. In England, I think people may care even more, particularly because there has never really been a suitable regional structure - and because pre-existing geographies are layered through the centuries and embedded in our minds. In the context of devolution for other parts of the UK, I can understand why there is unease in parts of England - particularly when there is the perception of ‘London vs the rest’ - though I won’t dwell on that here. What I will say is that the idea of the English regions as ‘the dog that never barked’ by Christopher Harvie (1991), is one that resonates strongly today. Some kind of federal arrangment makes sense, but the question of how to make it work is a vexed one.

I saw in the news recently the leader of the Scottish Labour Party raise the question of a future Federal England within a UK and giving more power to the English Regions. It’s a sentiment echoed elsewhere and in the context of the post-Brexit/Indyref 2 question of what the UK will look like in the future it’s a very important one. On the whole, I’m in favour of this kind of federal arrangment, if only we can just figure out what shape the regions should take, how such a system would function and who would decide how it all works. This structure could provide a useful political and economic counterbalance to London, going beyond the current ‘powerhouse’ or 'engine' style plans for the North and Midlands in England and making permanent a decentralised, fairer political power structure across the country.

As I said above, though, this is a difficult topic to discuss because boundaries drawn the ‘wrong’ way can end up threatening people’s identity, among other things. I was reminded of this recently when Jonn Elledge of the New Statesman and CityMetric published a small English Regions map and Twitter responded somewhat impolitely. So, it’s a difficult topic, but that shouldn’t stop us discussing it. That’s why I waded in to a Twitter discussion between Jonn Elledge, Duncan Weldon and Chris Cook the other day to offer my thoughts, as you can see below.

See some more comments on this on Twitter

Before going any further, though, I think it is useful if we look briefly at some historic, ceremonial and administrative boundaries to see a little bit of what has come before. 

Old boundaries

At this point, I could post any number of different maps that define English ‘regions’, but I’m going to stick to three geographies. You can see lots of others via a quick search, including some interesting telephone call-based ones for the entire country. I use the term ‘region’ somewhat loosely here of course.

First, let’s look at what are termed ‘ceremonial counties’, available from Ordnance Survey. These counties include modern-day Greater London but also a big mix of other, less familiar shapes. These counties have an important history so I wanted to make sure I took them into account and referred to them when making the Brown-Pearce regions of England you see below and above.

These should be pretty familiar

Second, we have what are considered ‘historic counties’, such as Westmorland. These have largely disappeared from our maps, but not from our minds, and this is important. In fact, they often retain a special significance in people’s minds and it’s common to see letters addressed, or goods labelled using these historic names. This kind of emotional attachment is both logical and understandable, so we should pay attention to it in any regional rejig. For example, Middlesex is a name that pops up regularly but it’s much rarer to see it on a modern map. Nonetheless, it is an important mental and historic geography, even if it is no longer an official administrative one. I mention this to highlight the fact that the sense of identity tied to historic place names is powerful and significant. The way modern Greater London intersects with these historic counties is particularly interesting because it has mostly been forgotten, though not by many who live there or who are from there.

Yorkshire is as big as ever

Note the Middlesex/Hertfordshire 'wiggle'

The two examples above may not be ‘regions’ in a formal administrative sense, but they fit my definition here, which is basically bounded spaces that go beyond the local. That sounds a bit waffly, but we must remember that ‘region’ is a term we could apply to Uttar Pradesh, with over 200 million people, or to the old North East Government Office Region of England, with 2.6 million people. Talking of which, the first map below shows English Government Office regions before they were abolished in 2010. As you can see when I add in some of the earlier boundaries in the second map, these align with historic notions of regions in places, but not in others. It’s also worth remembering that ‘region’ itself is often an extremely loaded term. Try arguing that Scotland is just another region, for example, and you’ll see what I mean.

Ye Olde Regions of England

Once again, with meaning

These GOR boundaries weren’t loved; and most administrative geographies aren’t. They were at times a useful governing device but they are not the kind of regions we could get excited about, or angry about; unlike, say, the 1974 reorganisation of local government in England. One issue that strikes me here is how London is too ‘small’ from an economic geography point of view - for more on this, read this excellent piece by Barney Stringer. That is, it’s ‘underbounded’. Greater London contains about 8.6 million people but its economic power and orbit stretches much further beyond the boundary, into and beyond the metropolitan green belt.

I mention this here not to annoy everyone in Berkshire or Surrey, but because it features as one of the guiding principles in the Brown-Pearce regionalisation below. I also agree that if there were to be some kind of Federal England with new regions, then London should be bigger. But how big? 13.42 million people big, that's how big. Read on.

After watching the ‘regions of England’ Twitter exchange from the sidelines, Philip Brown got in touch to say that he and Nathan Pearce (a proud Janner) had something up their sleeves on this subject. Here’s a little extract of what Philip wrote.

"Basically Nathan Pearce and I, when we probably should have been studying for our coursework or something, once had the exact same discussion you, Chris Cook, Duncan Weldon and John Elledge have just had on Twitter."

"Except we were in a University computer room so spent far too long on it as we tried to solve the question of English devolution on cultural ties, geography, and also whilst largely respecting history too, lol! Hopefully these factors combined would make it tolerable to most in modern day England too."

The Brown-Pearce plan splits England into eight ‘Kingdoms’ and promises to ‘solve UK wide devolution forever’… (I like their confidence, albeit tongue-in-cheek). Thankfully, Philip still had the original Word document from when he did this in about 2010, so he sent me it and I republish it below for everyone to marvel at. Please don’t send him hate mail. He’s a very nice chap and a proud Yorkshireman.

"Each Kingdom to have an Assembly of similar powers to those presently in Greater London or Wales, but Parliament shall remain sovereign.

Dumnonia: The counties of Cornwall & Devon.

Wessex: All of the South West England Government Region bar Dumnonia.

Thames & Solent: The counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire.

Southern: The counties of Surrey, Sussex & Kent.

East Anglia: The East of England Government Region.

Northumbria: Everything from the Scottish border south to the southern borders of Cheshire, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire & North Lincolnshire with the Dark Peak of the Peak District National Park also included within Northumbria (see Peak District Core Strategy for map of the Park's three regions, namely the Dark Peak, White Peak and South West Peak).

Mercia: Largely the Government Regions of the East Midlands and West Midlands, minus the Dark Peak. Notes on Mercia: the former coalfields of North Derbyshire/North Nottinghamshire are welcome to join Northumbria if they wish. Similarly Lincolnshire is welcome to join East Anglia if they wish - perhaps via a referendum.

County of London: The present county of Greater London plus approximately 10 miles in all directions, pending appropriate boundaries, but with the Mayor of London given strategy over the entire Metropolitan Green Belt. Any modifications outside of the County of London must be made in conjunction with the appropriate local authority and Kingdom. If existing District Councils fall approximately within this 10 mile extension, they shall become new London Boroughs by right, other areas shall either be subsumed within existing or newly created Boroughs, pending appropriate boundaries.

Reflecting on this 5 years on it still largely works so feel free to create it as a map for Messrs Cook, Elledge and Weldon; if you genuinely are so inclined."

Unless you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of English administrative geography, this is quite hard to visualise, so here’s a second map of the Brown-Pearce regions, this time with population figures for each region, which I calculated using 2015 mid-year estimates from the ONS, plus some towns and cities. A brief word or two on methods follows this.

I've added in a few towns and cities this time

Methods

This is not a serious policy proposal for the re-establishment and re-organisation of English regions, but I am serious about provoking discussion on the subject. So, for practical reasons, I used existing local authority boundaries as the basis for creating the regions you see above. There are 326 in total across England and in the map legend you can see how many local authorities fall into each region.

For Dumnonia (from the Brythonic kingdom in Sub-Roman Britain), Wessex and Thames & Solent I followed the spirit of the Brown-Pearce plan to the letter. Dumnonia covers the same area as the present counties of Devon and Cornwall, for example. Their Southern region and East Anglia are as described but minus those local authorities which are within 10 miles of the Greater London boundary. This may seem like an arbitrary cut-off, but when you look at where the metropolitan green belt is and the wider commuting patterns of the area, it makes a lot more sense. This can be seen reasonably well in the County of London zoomed-in map below.

The bright lines are commuting flows. The dark green is green belt.

Mercia and Northumbria are more straightforward - I kept these as described but made sure to put High Peak in the Northumbria region, rather than in Mercia - as I think this makes sense on a number of fronts, including the geographic. Note Philip’s generosity when he writes ‘the former coalfields of North Derbyshire/North Nottinghamshire are welcome to join Northumbria if they wish’. I’m not massively keen on some of the names, so I’ve had a go at re-branding them at the end.

Following their instructions and using precise measurements with my GIS toolbox, I ended up with a pleasingly round shape for the County of London, apart from a couple of areas which I thought shouldn't be in the ‘County of London’ (for fear of civil war, but also functional economic reasons). One example was Royal Tunbridge Wells, so I removed this and put it back into the Southern region. Once I’d sorted this little tweak I was left with something I was happy with. I also calculated the land area of each region, as you can see in the third iteration of the map, below.

This time with area metrics, in square kilometres

At first glance, this map might seem somewhat odd, but I think it is actually a pretty good representation of what a Federal England could look like. For example, we have three very large regions in terms of population, with the County of London (13.42m), Mercia (10.34m) and Northumbria (15.28m) the big hitters all with more than 10 million people. Northumbria has the most local authorities, at 73, one more than the County of London which could be thought of as some kind of symbolic gesture, but it’s just a coincidence. The Brown-Pearce plan threrefore increases the number of ‘London Boroughs’ from 33 to 72. I'm sure that won't cause any political problems.

The County of London is quite a nice shape but of course it kind of tramples over some important historic and ceremonial boundaries as you could see above. But I would argue - and have before - that on a functional economic basis London is actually much bigger than Greater London. Things like commuting, housing and economic growth need appropriate economic geographies if they are to be governed and planned properly. Too many important issues are stifled by inappropriate boundaries - a topic not unrelated to the wider political turmoil we find ourselves in here and in the United States. 

The way spaces are divided has very significant implications in the real world. In the same way that political gerrymandering can skew the balance of power in elections, economic underbounding can limit growth and opportunities for development. This is not a new argument, of course, and I’m making it simplistic here, but there is a need to engage with this question more seriously, particularly for London.

Set in contrast to the three big regions are five others with varying characters, histories and identities. The large variations in population I don’t consider to be a problem. So long as the structures are right, this can work well. The examples of US states or German Lander may offer useful comparators here even if they are far from perfect.

But, like I said above, this is really just food for thought for now because I was intrigued and impressed with the regions set out by Philip and Nathan. One thing I wasn’t so keen on was the names, so I’ll end by addressing that.

Summing up

The slightly experimental, playful nature of this piece got lost somewhere above when I began talking about gerrymandering and economic underbounding, so to bring it back down to earth and in the slightly frivolous pre-Christmas spirit that I approached this in, I decided to take the liberty of re-naming and/or re-branding some of the regions. I’ve therefore posted the map below, followed by some further explanation.

Definitely not entirely serious

Northumbria becomes The North of England, because I think it fits better. I know that the historic area of Northumbria covers a much wider region than what we think of today, but it would be a stretch for me or anyone else in South Yorkshire or Merseyside to accept this. I think most people could live with this new name, particularly if they still have a local authority or city region to cling to.

Mercia suffers slightly from the same issues as Northumbria so I have re-named this rather grandly as The Heart of England. There is some historical basis for this and I think it sounds nice, so that’s that.

Dumnonia? Well, I give Philip and Nathan credit for knowing this but it’s just too obscure for me. So, I’m going to go with The Sunshine Coast. Hmmm. What about the inland bits? That is a good point, but I couldn’t think of anything better so I’m happy to receive suggestions but I like the positive vibes generated by the word and the image. And, also, as a native Highlander it's always seemed a very sunny place to me.

Wessex is a difficult one because it’s so fixed in the popular imagination without people really having a precise idea of where it is. Somewhere near Bristol? Something to do wtih Thomas Hardy? That’s why I’ve changed it to Greater Wessex. Including Great or Greater in things always seems to work as people like to be Great. But, slightly more seriously, I think it adds a nice bit of fuzziness that helps soften the blow for non-Wessexian Wessexers.

Thames and Solent works for me and I can’t think of an improvement so I’m leaving it at that. I may just change the ‘and’ to ‘&’. This may actually have been part of the original plan anyway.

For East Anglia, I’m going with Greater again because I think this helps highlight its size and scale. It means that we have Greater Anglia the region and also the train operating company but that’s unavoidable. Greater Anglia it is. This 'Greater' thing really is a winner.

Southern is just bit vague for my liking as it could just refer to the south of England so since it draws from the existing historic counties there I have just added that to the end to make it Southern Counties. I like the way this sounds and we need one that pays homage to historic counties in this way by actually having the word 'counties' in the name.

Finally, we had County of London. If London is going to trample over existing or historic county boundaries that people know and love, I think we at least have to respect that and not use the county designation for the name of a new region. For that reason, and drawing upon international examples, I simply re-named this Metro London. This partly gets to the fact that these areas are definitely not ‘London’ proper but part of its wider economic sphere of influence. They may still be in (e.g.) historic Buckinghamshire but they retain very powerful, important ties to the London metropolitan area. We also have the Metropolitan Green Belt here, which made me think the name was a good fit. Here are those regions one final time, then, with the old Government Office Regions overlaid on top.

New ones are better than the old, I feel

So, that’s that. As I’ve said, this is entirely experimental and is intended to provoke discussion. I’d be very keen to see what other people come up with, either in relation to drawing different boundaries or re-naming the ones presented here. The reason I used the year 2020 in the maps and title of the blog post is that, post-Brexit, we might actually need some ideas on all this. Maybe, if it happens.

Also, in case you were wondering, Wales remains Wales, Scotland remains Scotland and Northern Ireland remains Northern Ireland. This was deliberately just about England. 

If you made it this far, thanks for reading.