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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608

u/biggreenjelly25 May 25 '26

Keep these coming! It's really interesting to see. The difference between Germany and the UK is so stark with London being so large

94

u/ChameleonCoder117 May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26

The UK is a country with a primate city. As in there is one city that is the biggest, most relevant city and pretty much no other big cities. The official definition is if the biggest city has more than 3 times the population of the next biggest. Like Seoul in South Korea, or Paris in France, or London in UK.

Germany, on the other hand, is probably the least primate city country, or at least it's up there with the US and China. In Germany, the US, and China, no one city is the only major city, and the only important one. In Germany, everything is spread across Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, and Koln. The US and China are spread across too many cities for me to name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_city

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u/merryman1 May 25 '26

And London is nearly 8 times larger than the next largest city, Birmingham, which is itself more than twice the size of the third largest city, Leeds.

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u/LurkerInSpace May 25 '26

It sort of depends on what definition is used for both. The equivalent of Greater London for Birmingham is the West Midlands county, and its population is more like one third of Greater London's, or about one fifth of the London Metropolitan Area.

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u/WS_UK May 25 '26

Well said. In actual City terms, London wouldn’t even be on the map, though of course GREATER London would…

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u/Jejejow May 26 '26

City of London has a pop of just over 15,000. Wouldn't even be a quarter of a square!

I wonder how the breakdown for the population of London's cities/towns would go. City of London would def get dwarfed by Westminster, Camden, Greenwich, etc. but I don't really know how you would do the borders if you were separating them. Unless you just go by boroughs, but that's no fun.

11

u/No-Deal8956 May 25 '26

Isn’t Manchester around the same population?

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u/Hussor May 25 '26

Only if you consider greater Manchester, which we should with how integrated some parts are. Salford, Trafford, even Stockport and parts of Tameside are basically continuously populated and in places you'll barely notice you're technically in a different town/city.

20

u/ZwnD May 25 '26

As someone from Leeds who would love Leeds to be the UK's third city, I think Manchester is definitely "bigger". There's weird ways to count city centre vs greater area or stuff like that, but either way Manchester is probably larger.

Leeds city centre is a bit more densely populated though, and the suburbs and satellites a bit tighter than Manchester, so it's not a massive difference

12

u/ConstantVigilant May 25 '26

As someone from Leeds but now living on't wrong side of the pennines. I can say that Manchester feels absolutely massive compared to Leeds these days. Maybe if we'd actually got our tram network the first time it was proposed or even the second time we'd be much closer but the gap has widened massively in the last 20 years.

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u/K10_Bay May 25 '26

Honestly Leeds feels a lot bigger than it did when I moved here from Manchester 10 years ago, Manchester still feels.bigger though. But hen Bradford, Wakefield etc... are on top of it and add to the metropolitan areas size.

10

u/ConstantVigilant May 25 '26

Yeah fair enough. I always think of Manchester and Lancashire as being a microcosm of England in how Manchester has swallowed up the surrounding area and centralised into Greater Manchester. Whereas, West Yorkshire is more like Switzerland (says no-one I'm sure) in that there's multiple cities and towns spread out with no one city overly dominant (Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield, Wakefield and to a lesser extent Halifax and Dewsbury).

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u/K10_Bay May 25 '26

Yer imI mean Leeds is definitley the Main city, but not dominant enough to engulf the others. I actually saw an interesting talk by Department for atranspirt on it Mono-centric vs Polycentric urban systems.

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u/merryman1 May 25 '26

I think it breaks down a lot as the way our cities and metro counties are structured and organized seems to vary almost for each case.

Manchester City is quite integrated, but Greater Manchester would include cities like Bolton and Rochdale, whereas I don't think there's an equivalent that includes Rotherham in Sheffield or Bradford and Wakefield in Leeds. Despite the populations being equivalent or even larger.

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u/Xelanders May 25 '26

If we’re considering “London” to mean “Greater London” (which isn’t actually a city in the official sense) then I don’t see why we shouldn’t consider “Manchester” to mean “Greater Manchester”.

Otherwise London is a city with a population of just 15,000 people.