How to Shade Your Maps - Colorbrewer

A short post today about 'Colorbrewer'. What is it? It's a website by Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower and Penn State University (home of many GIS/visualisation boffins) which you can use to help you decide what colours you maps should be. This is not a trivial matter and it is often difficult to develop an appropriate colour scheme that looks good, is colour blind friendly, print friendly and photocopy friendly. Hence the Colorbrewer website.


You can choose from a variety of colour schemes, you can choose the number of colours in you colour scheme, you can export the information in various ways and you can even download a 'colortool' extension for ArcGIS.

There is so much advice on the website - it really is excellent but I just never got round to blogging about it until now. Ultimately you still have to make choices yourself but with Colorbrewer these choices can be much more appropriate. Take a look...

A Vision of Britain Through Time

I've been doing some work recently which involves the analysis of population change in England from 1801 to 2009. The data for this has come from the Census (which goes back to 1801) and mid-year population estimates (for 2009). The data itself has been sourced from a wonderful website called A vision of Britain through time, based at the University of Portsmouth. It's an innovative and pretty comprehensive exercise in historical stats and historical GIS.


As you can see from the screenshot above, you can enter a place name to find a place, you can look at various landcover maps, you can look at historical maps, Census reports and even travel writing by such distinguished contributors as Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe, Celia Fiennes and the wonderfully named Gerald of Wales.

Samuel Johnson's writing is from his 'A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland' and is both shocking and funny seen from today's perspective. He very much disapproves of the 'Highland manners' and he calls Loch Ness 'a very remarkable diffusion of water without islands'.


The maps (as above) are really interesting and you can, for example, take a look at your area in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as look at the present day OpenStreetMap version.

To sum up, lots to look and and worth a look.

Concentrated Poverty

I've been doing some work on the issue of concentrated poverty recently. Whilst doing this I came across an interesting video or two from the Brookings Institution featuring Alan Berube, a Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program. Here's what he had to say:



I also produced a very short animation of patterns of poverty in London between 1999 and 2005, based on the Economic Deprivation Index. As you can see, there is not much change between years and the areas of concentrated poverty (in red) do not change too much. It's a bit 'rough and ready' but does the job...

Local Enterprise Partnerships

In my previous post about Local Enterprise Partnerships I noted that 56 applications had been put forward to BIS/CLG (note here that BIS said they had 62 responses to the invitation to form LEPs but CLG said that 56 proposals were received). There have been some significant developments since then... The publication of the Local Growth White Paper yesterday formally introduced the Regional Growth Fund and states that RDAs are to be shut down by April 2012. This was not really news though. What was new was the announcement of the 24 areas which have been asked to form the first wave of LEPs (see below - click on image to view full size).

You can find more detailed maps of the areas here and on page 39 of the White Paper. I just made the image above because the official maps are a bit muddled/confusing. Some LEPs cover very large areas with many local authorities included (e.g. Kent, Greater Essex and East Sussex), some cover few local authorities but large areas (e.g. Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly) and many others cover local authorities in city region areas (e.g. Liverpool City Region). Some of them will no doubt come up with snappier names than they have at present although 'Coast to Capital' is the early front-runner for best name.

Large parts of England are covered by first wave LEPs (e.g. West Midlands, North West) and the striking thing from the detail of the White Paper is the difference between the Regional Growth Fund and the level of RDA funding previously available. Other sources worth a look are the Analytical paper on sub-national growth (SERC obviously a major influence here), details of the Regional Growth Fund (in a nutshell, £1.4bn over the three years from 2011 to 2014) and the remaining links at the bottom of this page.

There is also a new BIS website on 'Setting out the path to sustainable growth' introduced by the author of the 'one-eyed smile' (see the bottom of this document to understand what I mean).

Sheffield Deprivation

I've been experimenting with deprivation data (again) and google maps (again). This time I've overlaid deprivation data for Sheffield on to google maps. I did this by using a fairly simple technique, which includes making sure the geographic projection is correct. I've described this before too.

You can pan/zoom on the embedded map below, but to see the full thing you'll need to click on 'View Larger Map'. Once you've done that you can see further information on the left hand side. You can turn layers on and off using the little tick boxes on the left and you can query the map by clicking it.

Not much else to say apart from take a look at the map below.


View Larger Map

London Datastore

I've posted stuff before (e.g. economic deprivation, population growth) about London so this post is about data for London which is available via the London Datastore. It is a website run by the Greater London Authority which you can go to if you want data for London (obviously).



What kind of data is available? Well, you could look at the GLA Budget, average house prices, or even data on abandoned vehicles. You could also take a look at the A-Z list and/or search the archive. Hours of fun.

The data are available at various spatial scales, some below Borough level and some not. Finally, here's a map of Cannabis Possession Incidents recorded by the British Transport Police for a two-year period up to July 2010. This just covers incidents on trains, tracks, stations, etc. Click the map to see full size. The highest value is in Westminster.

Travel to Work Areas / Labour Market Areas

I've been doing some work recently which uses travel to work areas rather than local authority boundaries. The analysis is on deprivation in England using the Economic Deprivation Index, so I thought it would make more sense to do the work within the context of more local labour market areas. In England, the best proxy for these is the travel to work area or TTWA.

There are currently 243 of them defined in the UK - and there is a lot more information on this (including the methodology) available here. One part of what I have been doing is to compare the size of TTWAs for different places.

In the maps below you can see the London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester TTWAs displayed at the same geographical scale. The TTWA areas are coloured and the local authority boundaries are overlaid on top of this with black lines. Click on the image below to see it full size in your web browser.

It may be a bit of a surprise to see how big some of the non-London TTWAs are. Clearly, London is the largest and includes the most local authorities but Manchester and Birmingham in particular cover large areas and Liverpool covers a large north to south area.