Six things Census 2021 dataset TS012 told me about England and Wales

1) The Welsh in England like to be near Wales

On Census day, 21 March 2021, there were 478,700 Welsh-born people in England, making up 0.8% of the population, with some in every lower-tier local authority area. But the highest proportions were found in the Forest of Dean district of Gloucestershire (6.4%), Shropshire (5.8%), Herefordshire (5.3%) and Cheshire West (4.1%) – which are all also the four lower-tier local authority areas of England that border Wales. The pattern is clear from the map, although this uses upper-tier local authority areas, with 2.8% of the population of Gloucestershire born in Wales.

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Editing what’s on and off the graph

The government’s Halloween press conference was an obvious example to use in my article for Computer Weekly on the good, bad and ugly of data visualisation during the pandemic. Before one slide headed ‘England new SPI-M combined projection bed usage’, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance actually said “this is a complicated slide”. No argument there (see below). Professor Chris Whitty charged through 10 slides in under seven minutes.

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Covid-19 coronavirus in England mapped by cases per million

Good to see that a team including George Bennett at the BBC and Leo Falcomer-Dawson at Bloomberg have set up Covid Live UK, a similar population-adjusted map covering all of the UK rather than just England, updated daily. Nice to note the organisers eventually came to the same conclusion that I did, which is that shades of blue are the way to go.
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Littler Britain: the 14 council areas with falling populations

The Office for National Statistics has just published its annual population estimates for mid-2018. I have updated a map I first produced two years ago, showing how each area’s population has changed between 2008 and 2018. As well as the colour-coding, you can see the percentage change by hovering over an area. The data is derived from sheet MYE5 of this spreadsheet.

There are 14 council areas whose populations have fallen over the decade (shown in blue), while the UK’s population as whole grew by 7.5%. Most of them are rural and coastal areas: in England they include Cumbria, the Isles of Scilly and (an exception to the rural bit) Blackpool; in Wales, Ceredigion, Powys and Blaenau Gwent. In Scotland, seven council areas have fallen in population, mostly on the west coast: Argyll and Bute, Dumfries and Galloway, Na h-Eileanan Siar (the Western Isles), Inverclyde, North Ayrshire, South Ayrshire and West Dunbartonshire.

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Aid organisations dodge cloud for technology that works

There were two reasons I wanted to write about software used by international aid organisations. The first reason was that there were lots of great projects to write about. Where commercial mappers failed, Missing Maps volunteers using OpenStreetMap and aerial images had 23,500 square kilometres of the Democratic Republic of the Congo hit by Ebola mapped in a fortnight, helping Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to tackle the outbreak.

The second reason was that aid organisations need technology that works in all environments. Among other things, this often means avoiding cloud computing. MSF physically flew its new maps to the Congo, first on paper then on a small server, to save bandwidth to its facilities there. Those with staff working mainly in the field, such as Oxfam and World Vision, make sure their software works offline. It demonstrates why cloud is not the answer everywhere, even if mobile coverage in Britain are usually better than in central Africa. Continue reading “Aid organisations dodge cloud for technology that works”