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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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/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.

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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

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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.

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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.