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For some reason, for population, we always count the Greater London conurbation as just 'London' when we don't do the same for other cities. This creates the pe
by marmarama 4y ago
For some reason, for population, we always count the Greater London conurbation as just 'London' when we don't do the same for other cities. This creates the perception that London is an order of magnitude larger, when in fact it's not.
A more accurate comparison is with the total conurbation size of other cities. For example, Manchester is listed as having a population of about 550000, but the Greater Manchester conurbation (the equivalent of Greater London) has a total population of 2.8 million.
Birmingham is 1.1 million, but the contiguous West Midlands conurbation is about 2.9 million.
The Liverpool to Leeds cross-Pennine urban axis (which is nearly contiguous) has a population of nearly 7 million.
Yes, these are smaller than Greater London, but not by the amount you think.
- smcl 4y agoI think this is what "Northern Powerhouse Rail" was supposed to address, but I don't know if it's going to get as much love as a London project, if it goes ahead at all :( For any non-UK people who aren't familiar, here's here's a simple map showing pop. density to give you a rough idea what we're dealing with: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gridded-UK-population-density-based-on-the-UK-census-at-the-5-km-5-km-grid-spatial_fig2_292189735 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gridded-UK-population-de... You can clearly see the areas in question - London being the big red/purple blob in the far south-east, and the cities/conurbations marmarama described are to the north and north-west of that. They're not individually on the scale of London, but they're substantial population centres that would see real benefits from this kind of public transport infrastructure investment.