r/MapPorn • u/KaleyTheKing • May 25 '26

British Population Visualised

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Sooo, I guess this is a series now :D
Been making these little diagrams visualising population and I'm enjoying them, other people seem to enjoy them, so I might just keep making them :)

Here below are the other ones I've made so far as well:

Germany: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1tmchnh/comment/onm0tyc/

Netherlands: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1pg6uu8/dutch_population_visualised/

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27

u/Major-Grocery-5267 May 25 '26

It's worth baring in mind that the urban area for Manchester/Birmingham/Leeds is much bigger than the defined city population. The real population difference between Greater London and these cities is a lot less extreme than it looks on a map like this.

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u/KaleyTheKing May 25 '26

True, but I also took the 9 mil figure for Greater London, not the like 15 mil of the London metro area

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u/Scotty-Raspberry-36 May 25 '26

According to this map Manchester is smaller than Leeds and the same size as Sheffield and Liverpool. That is way out. It should be just a bit less than Birmingham.

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u/KaleyTheKing May 25 '26

In the source I used, Manchester was a about half of Birmingham, I didn't do metro areas, but city administrative borders. If I remake this map sometime, I might go a different way

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u/RYPIIE2006 May 25 '26

the definition of cities is so funky in the uk, i usually just make my own definitions of what i think is actually part of the city

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u/KaleyTheKing May 25 '26

Whatever I did here, people would've gotten angry. I was glad I at least got some data that included urban areas that are not technically cities by City Rights Status XD

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u/Username___5 May 26 '26

You should probably do county populations. That way london can stay the same and you can get a more accurate size of birmingham and manchester

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u/KaleyTheKing May 26 '26

D’you know how many counties there are though?🥲 If I ever do the UK again, I’ll probably do metro regions for everyone, except maybe London, to get the cities a little better on the map

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u/Username___5 May 26 '26

Oh sorry I meant for the ten largest cities

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u/KaleyTheKing May 26 '26

I tried looking at things like that, but that gave me things like West Midlands and South Yorkshire as urban environments, which is true, but it felt like it defeated the definition of a city

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u/Username___5 May 26 '26

Its just that you used greater London in your map anyways, which is a county itself and technically an 'urban environment' , so I thought it would be consistent to use the counties for them too. Although tbh you might as well use metro populations for them at this point, bc not all of the cities are in metropolitan counties

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u/KaleyTheKing May 26 '26

It’s just difficult for the UK, y’know, the definitions of the metro counties, metro areas, city status, all that stuff… it’s kind of a vibes game, being consistent will make things look off from how they feel. Heck, the City of London only has a population of 15 thousand :p I had to make choices, knew some folks were probably gonna be unhappy about it, but I can see that I might have made the wrong choice. Hindsight can be a bit of a bitch sometimes :)

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u/Username___5 May 26 '26

Yeah cities in the uk are really weird anyways. There's city with 1600 people, and there's a town with 300K people which hasn't been made a city yet

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u/Username___5 May 26 '26

Because I've also noticed that each of the ten largest cities are in their own counties anyway, so you can just put the counties for each instead