Inspired by the great work done by Paul Butler to visualise Facebook friendship connections across the globe, London-based web developer Jim Holden has produced some great mapping visuals of the UK using postcode, bus stop and road network data.
Click on the images below for larger more detailed image versions, which do the visualisations more justice:
The road network map can be viewed here.
All three pieces do a great job of portraying the population patterns around the country. The postcode map, in particular, which is based on more than two million data points, reveals the dominance of London, the Northern clustering of the Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester, the somewhat isolated world of Newcastle and the dominating Scottish corridor of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Jim points out that Scotland is difficult to map given the lack of postcodes and bus routes in the upper north west side of the country.
As with the Facebook map, the data ‘silences’ are just as fascinating, with large gaps depicting the sparsely populated regions of the national parks of Dartmoor, Exmoor in the South West, the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia in Wales, and the Peak District, Yorkshire Dales, North York moors and Lake District in the English North.
The maps were produced using detailed locations from publicly open Ordnance Survey data, available from the data.gov.uk website. For the bus stop map, data was acquired from the governments open release of NaPTAN. Jim describes the technical process:
I wrote a PHP script to read in the data sets, con and cycle through each point and translate that to an image width/height of my choice. If you want to maintain the correct aspect ratio of the UK then you can use the maximum GB grid points of the UK to determine a horizontal/vertical ratio. Once the plotting (+2 million postcodes) is processed you can use some functions within PHP to filter and slightly blur the resulting graphics such that it brings out the “heat map” style. I didn’t use any other products or GIS software.
Next up, Jim is planning to produce a similar piece based on the train network data, also provided by NaPTAN, as well as one compiled from data on the UK’s mobile infrastructure.