Yesterday the government released data about the size of the central civil estate. The infographic shows this (green box) compared to well-known geographic features in Britain. The government press release stated that the data are a snapshot of the estate and shows that at 1 September 2011:

• the estate covered by this data is 16, 411, 676 sq m – almost six times the City of London. This does not include the wider public sector estate or parts of Central Government’s operational estate – such as NHS buildings or schools;
• this is spread across 13,911 different property holdings;
• almost one fifth of the estate is in London (17.4%);
• 40% of the estate is office space, the estate also includes 40 laboratories and 18 museums; and
• there are 552 vacant property holdings – where possible, these will be marketed and either sub-let or sold, generating income for taxpayers.

To add some more stats it works out at 180 times larger than the O2 Arena, 4.5 times smaller than Loch Lomond and 23 times smaller than the Isle of Wight. So there we are…

The number of rivers in the US, combined with Derek’s brilliant design, make this a really compelling map. Inspired by this work I have quickly (with much less cartographic flair) extracted the major rivers and streams in Great Britain from the Ordnance Survey’s Strategi dataset and coloured them according to whether they are a “river”, “canal” (not sure if this really counts in terms of naming), “water”, “afon” (Welsh for river) and “brook”. You can see that a clear geography exists. I was not surprised by all the “afons” being in Wales but I was surprised to see so many “waters” in Scotland.

On the topic of naming, settlement names also have a clear geography as they, like rivers in the US, reflect the different settlers (or invaders!) of the British Isles over millennia. The map below (taken from my thesis) shows the different naming influences on settlements in Britain. The most striking aspect is the abrupt end to the Viking settlement names along what is called the Danelaw Line. So if you live north of this line you will be using more Viking words on a daily basis than those to the south. There are loads of people studying and recording the different place naming conventions in Britain- I would recommend you check out the “Institute for Name Studies” if you want more information.

The map below uses the increasingly popular cartogram method to show the success of students in each Local Authority (LA) across England. The non cartogram version is also shown alongside.

This is quite a coarse map as England is only split into the 152 LAs and we know there is much greater variation between schools at a local level and even sometimes within individual schools. Moreover, schools on authority borders often serve communities from the areas on either side, limiting the application of LA data to their populations only. Independent (fee-charging) schools are also included in these broad LA results, which is significant when we take into account the predictably higher results of fee-paying pupils and the fact that these schools have not been established with regard for even distribution across the country.  The size of the LA (in school-age population terms) does not seem to have a strong link to the results of its pupils. There must be other factors at play. Concerning known evidence indicates that a pupil’s level of deprivation has a stark impact on his/her attainment. This is supported by the plot for London below that shows the relationship between a borough’s national deprivation rank (known as the index of multiple deprivation or IMD).

Another way to show represent this information is by mapping the 2010 GCSE scores for each of the London Boroughs and resizing the borough so that it represents the levels of child poverty (measured by number of under 16s receiving means-tested benefits).

Again, the map above is not perfect as it is still quite generalised and shows only one of the many measures of child poverty that are used. Both maps also show only one measure of attainment the “GCSE or Equivalent” score. The “or Equivalent” bit is important here as it covers a wide range of more vocational qualifications (called NVQs) that are often perceived as less academically challenging and can be a way for students to get the equivalent of 5 A* to C grades including English and maths (a key educational benchmark) without having to be proficient in these core subjects. This is important as schools in England are often ranked by the proportion of their students achieving this benchmark resulting in a possible bias towards the schools offering more vocational subjects and against those offering more challenging ones such as modern languages. It is interesting to consider whether the nature of equivalent qualifications makes them more likely to be used by certain types of school and to explore this further I have produced the plots below. The codes are as follows: AC= Academy, CTC= City Tech. College, CY= Community School, CYS= Community Special School, FD= Foundation School, FDS= Foundation Special School, IND= Registered Independent School, INDSS= Independent Special School, NMSS=Non-Maintained Special School, VA= Voluntary Aided School, VC= Voluntary Controlled School (if you are as baffled about these as I was see here or here).

The plot shows 9 regions of England. Each point represents a school in that region and is coloured by its type. On the x-axis is the inverse (higher= better) regional ranking of the school based on its GCSE scores only and on the y-axis is the regional ranking if “equivalents” are included. If the inclusion/ exclusion of  equivalents made no difference to the rankings then the points would follow the grey lines perfectly. In reality we get schools falling either side of this line with those under it benefitting if equivalents are counted and those above benefitting if they are excluded. For example, broadly speaking independent schools (light blue) look worse when GCSE equivalents are used in the ranking criteria and therefore would benefit if such qualifications were excluded. This also seems to be the case for the voluntary controlled schools in pink. Academy Schools (orange) however do much better with the inclusion of equivalent qualifications perhaps reflecting a more vocational emphasis to their curriculum. There are also some interesting regional distinctions with independent schools, for example, in the South West and South East appearing to do well whatever the ranking criteria whilst the East/ West Midlands and the North East present a more mixed picture. I think a lot more can be said about these plots so I would welcome comments!

Buried in the London Datastore are the population estimates for each of the London Boroughs between 2001 – 2030. They predict a declining population for most boroughs with the exception of a few to the east. I was surprised by this general decline and also the numbers involved- I expected larger changes from one year to the next. I think this is because my perception of migration is of the volume of people moving rather than the net effects on the baseline population of these movements. I don’t envy the GLA for making predictions so far into the future, but can understand why they have to do it (think how long it took initiate Crossrail!). Last year I produced a simple animation showing past changes in London’s population density (data) and it provides a nice comparison to the above. In total I have squeezed 40 maps on this page!

Technical Stuff

These maps were all produced to demonstrate the mapping capabilities of R. The first uses ggplot2 (plus classInt + RColorBrewer) and is based on some code (see below) written by Mark Bulling. If you follow the code below you will end up with this map, not the one I have produced above. I will stick my code in a formal tutorial soon. The animation uses the standard plot functions (plus spatial packages) in R as per this example.

To have something published in the National Geographic is a great honour. The map of US Surnames has proved hugely popular and was a great project to work on. A real high point in my PhD research so far.

The popularity of a London version of the US Surname Map outstripped all expectations with 10s of thousands of visitors. Cartographically less impressive than the US map but much more detailed, I think the main thing people are most surprised (and perhaps disappointed about) is just how many “Smiths” there are!

I’ve not quite worked out if this map shows anything surprising but I really like the cartography so “Profane Mountains, Polite Plains” gets a shout out here. It shows the frequency of swearwords in people’s Tweets across the US.

This map of scientific collaborations (detailed here) demonstrates nicely the strong academic ties between some countries over others. I think its a great map which I hope (although I can’t seem to confirm) was created with R. The map was actually created using MySQL, Java and Photoshop (thanks @beyondmaps).

Inspired by the What’s in a Surname? map we helped make with the National Geographic, I have created 15 interactive typographic maps to show the most popular surnames across London. What they lack in cartographic brilliance, I hope they make up for in detail. There are 983 geographic units (Middle Super Output Areas) in each map and across all 15 there are 2379 individual surnames (15,000 surname labels in total). The font size for each surname label has been scaled to give an idea of the number of people who have that surname in each place. The surname frequencies come from the 2001 Electoral Roll and won’t contain everyone living in London but it is one of the best datasets available.

London is renowned for being a diverse city but this is barely reflected in the most prevalent surnames- only a few name origins can be discerned from the map. You have to look a little further down the surname rankings for this diversity to become apparent. The surnames shown on all 15 maps can be traced back to one of 38 origins; I have selected unique colours for 10 of the most popular. Surname origins were established using the Onomap classification tool. We are mapping the origins of the surnames, which are not necessarily the same as the origins of the people possessing them. Many people in London have adopted Anglicised surnames.

It is also clear from the maps that the same sorts of surnames tend to cluster together. This is because they often closely reflect the naming preferences of particular groups of people within an area. As you transition through to the less popular surnames things become a little more jumbled and the distinct patterns present in the first map become less distinct.

The final thing that stands out is how surname popularity decreases between the first and second most popular names and every subsequent change after that. You can see this by how quickly the text size reduces until almost all names are written in the smallest font sizes.

The more you study these maps the more interesting, and perhaps complex, they become.  My final thoughts therefore appear a little contradictory. The first is that a surprising number of Londoners share the same name (especially with their immediate neighbours). The second is that despite the dominance of relatively few surnames at the top of the rankings, the further down the rankings you get the more you see of London’s population diversity. We are of course only mapping the top 15 surnames in each area of London- there are many thousands more. If you can’t find your surname on these maps, you can see where it is around the world here.

The maps were created as part of my ongoing PhD research using the Worldnames Database compiled by University College London’s Department of Geography. Thanks to Oliver O’Brien from CASA for putting the maps online. A high resolution print version of the map (previewed below) is available on request.

January

The coldest spell of winter weather for 3 decades. The UK was gripped by Arctic winds and covered in snow. This stunning MODIS image conceals the chaos below.

OpenStreetMap Haiti earthquake response. The efforts of the OpenStreetMap community placed the project in many of the national newspapers and served as a fantastic demonstration of the skills and goodwill of the mapping community.

OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

February

2010 Winter Olympics. Vancouver was short on snow and Team GB brings home its first individual gold medal for over 30 years. This New York Times cartogram of Winter Olympic Medals shows just how far the Winter Olympics movement has to go before it deserves its global claims.  March

Any ideas?

April

Eyjafjallajökull (aka the Icelandic Volcano). Air traffic mayhem as the ash cloud spreads over northern Europe. The map below shows some predicted extents of the ash cloud (from the UK Met Office). The video is an Ito World visualization showing the effect it had on air traffic.

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

May

The UK General Election resulted in a hung parliament leading to a Conservative/ Liberal Democrat coalition government. This is the map I produced showing the mixture of votes in each constituency. More here.

June

BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. For a neat interactive map see here.

July

Raoul Moat manhunt and mass shootings in Northumbria.

August

The London Elephant Parade. 260 hand painted elephants were placed around London to raise awareness about the decline of the Asian Elephant. This event really captured the imaginations of Londoners and added more colour to the city over the summer. The locations of the elephants changed, but people could request a free map to see if they could catch them all.

September

Another London map. This time of its cycle hire scheme. The Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme, or “Boris Bikes”, was launched at the end of July. Within a couple of months it was becoming clear that Londoners were making full use of the scheme to commute or relax. I have included an early animation of Oliver O’Brien’s excellent bike hire map.

24 hours of the London Cycle Hire Scheme from James Cheshire on Vimeo.

UK Chancellor George Osbourne outlined the Comprehensive Spending Review. This laid the foundations for the many cuts to public spending that have been announced in the last few weeks. The BBC produced an interactive map to show those areas most or least likely to be affected.

November

Wikileaks has had a massive impact on the news this year. November saw the release of US Embassy Cables. I have produced my own map with some of these data. I have included one from the Guardian below.

December

Some of the most violent riots in recent times occurred last week in London. Students (and anarchists) clashed with police over the proposed (now implemented) rise in tuition fees for English Universities. The students just across the UCL Quad from me occupying part of the university put together a “live protest map” using nothing but the default tools provided by Google. Protesters frequently updated this map with the locations of police etc.