Every Person in Great Britain Mapped

A follow up to my previous post: Every Person in Scotland on the Map. Winner of the 2016 OS OpenData Award for Excellence in the use of OpenData from the British Cartographic Society.

Full size interactive map.

The mapping process is pretty straightforward, and not accurate. I don’t know where you live. But I can make an educated guess.

I simply amalgamate the two sets of census data from the NRS (National Records of Scotland) for Scotland (2011 census) and the ONS (Office of National Statistics) for England and Wales (2010 census).

Postcodes were then created based on the ONS Postcode Directory, filtering for postcodes that were live in 2011 (which is the latest census data). The postcode centroids were turned into polygons using voronoi polygons.

Then we simply select all of the buildings in a postcode from Ordnance SurveyOpen Map product, filtering out most schools and hospitals. Then we put a random point in a random building for each person in that postcode.

I would have loved to include Northern Ireland, but the Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland do not have an equivalent open building outline dataset, like Open Map from the Ordnance Survey.

Rendered with: QGIS tile writer python script. Processing done 100% in PostGIS.

Crowdsourced City Extents

Following up from my Glasgow Regions Mapped Update.

Alasdair Rae recently started a crowdsourcing project for four cities in the UK: London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Glasgow. Write up of the results. The post was however very popular and resulted in responses from around the world.

Since the project was created with the excellent code from Nick Martinelli, the data can be downloaded by anyone.

So I created a breakdown of the number of responses in 1 km grids for each city that received at least 5 responses.

The full album, ordered by country name and then city name can be found:

Here.

Highlights

Glasgow

The west end is the true Glasgow.
UnitedKingdom_Glasgow_extents46

Edinburgh

Very inclusive.
UnitedKingdom_Edinburgh_extents33

Liverpool

Much larger and inclusive than Manchester.
UnitedKingdom_Liverpool_extents20

London

The M25 provides a very handy limiting barrier.
UnitedKingdom_London_extents29

LA

Far reaching urban sprawl.
UnitedStatesofAmerica_LosAngeles_extents10

New York

Probably some selection bias, with crowd sourcing more popular in Brooklyn.
UnitedStatesofAmerica_NewYork_extents32

Washington

DC.
UnitedStatesofAmerica_Washington_extents21

All cities.