The Urban Fabric of English Cities

[now updated, thanks to @udlondon - scroll to bottom of page]
Inspired by some mapping in the US by Seth Kadish, the availability of new GIS open data, and the fact that I love looking at patterns of urban form, structure and density, I have created a comparative graphic showing the building footprints of nine English cities, with London at the centre (just because it's biggest). I have done this in a very simple way, with all cities mapped at a scale of 1:125,000 in the full size versions (which are massive), plus one small scale bar and a little explanatory text. Here's what it looks like:

The urban fabric of English cities (black/red, medium res)

This graphic does a good job - in my view - of demonstrating the compactness or otherwise of the cities in question. It also illustrates how tightly-bounded some places are and how under-bounded others are. For example, Liverpool is very dense and compact in contrast to Leeds but this really is a boundary effect because the size of the local authorities differs so much. The urban area of 'Liverpool' extends far beyond the boundaries of the local authority area, which is what I show above. I wanted to compare the local authority areas rather than the wider city-region because I wanted to highlight this boundedness issue and compare like with like in terms of formal administrative areas. London is obviously a bit different so I've shown the 33 constituent parts of Greater London.

Take a closer look at the graphic by clicking on the two larger images below - one in white and one in black. They are both just a bit bigger than A0 paper size in their full size versions in the zipped folder below so if you want to take a really close look, download them. I've also uploaded smaller-sized versions in the same folder. I deliberately didn't include more information on the graphic itself, but at the bottom of the post you'll see the population of each city in 2011 (which relates to the individual city images), plus its urban area and metropolitan area population. The population of Greater London in 2011 was 8.2 million (compared to 4.4 million for the other cities shown). The cities I selected are the English members of the Core Cities group, which now also includes Glasgow and Cardiff.

Click here for a full screen white version

Click here for a full screen black version

Download a zipped folder with black and white versions in different sizes.

Update: the @udlondon people got in touch via twitter to show their attempt at fitting the core cities inside the London boundary - as below - so this inspired me to try the same with the original data. The first image below is the original @udlondon artwork and the next one is my attempt using GIS. Finally, as a reminder that nothing is ever really new, I have added a similar map which we found as part of the JR James urban image archive which we launched last year. This version has 13 different cities.

A manual approach to GIS!

My attempt at the same thing, using QGIS - full size

Some of the boundaries were a bit different in those days

City	Population	Urban area	Metropolitan area
Birmingham	1,085,400	2,440,986	3,683,000
Bristol	428,200	587,400	1,041,000
Leeds	751,500	1,499,465	2,302,000
Liverpool	466,400	816,216	2,241,000
Manchester	503,100	2,240,230	2,556,000
Newcastle	280,200	879,996	1,599,000
Nottingham	305,700	666,358	1,543,000
Sheffield	552,700	640,720	1,569,000

Totals: the population of the 8 city local authority areas is 4.4 million, for their urban areas it is 9.8 million and for their metropolitan areas it is 16.5 million. I may compare metropolitan areas next time, but mapping this is a little more time consuming.