5 maps that quantify exactly how rammed London is
This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
London–it’s quite busy, isn’t it? But maybe more than you even think.
As of this time last year, 8.6 million people call Greater London their home.
That makes London a LOT bigger than other UK cities. The timeout team fit people from all these city districts into London.
Admittedly, we’re cheating a little, because just as ‘London’ is much bigger than just the central district, so ‘Greater Manchester’ is much bigger than just the middle bit of Manchester.
But even if you take entire metropolitan counties, you can still fit everyone from five of the country’s biggest into Greater London:
See? There’s loads of us. Who else could you fit in London?
Yep, there are more Londoners than Scottish (5.3 million) and Welsh people (3.0 million) put together.
How about some American cities? You could fit the citizens from these all places comfortably inside the Big Smoke:
In fact, we’re even bigger than all these countries combined:
Come to think of it, London is also more populous than Israel, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, New Zealand and Jamaica… to name but a few. (If we became our own country, we’d be the 96th largest – just a few thousand people smaller than Austria.)
If this is all making your blood pressure rise, just be glad you don’t live in Shanghai, which at 24 million people (nearly three times the size of London) is the largest city in the world:
All those people and they all find it impossible to get a civilised drink post 2am
Hahaha love it
And yet, there are empty/derelict/underused buildings throughout the UK.
Given the huge need for physical space that so many people experience, rational urban design would utilise the empty buildings. But there’s so much red tape and NIMBY and power factors that it can’t be done. So people suffer.
It’s quite possible to welcome the refugees and give them a home… but there’s too many powerful people opposed to it. And so, people suffer.
Just want to point out that your graphic showing US cities overlaid on London is a bit misleading. Your London map shows Greater London, whereas Inner London (the central zone) is more comparable to the city metropolitan areas you are plotting. Every city is different, but if you look at population density gradients, you would not make the arbitrary cutoffs on the US cities if you are comparing them to greater London. Better to look at metro areas, conurbations, MSAs, CSAs, etc. SF extends across bay into Oakland, down peninsula to Palo Alto, includes SF airport (as Greater London includes Heathrow and City Airport), etc. So SF population is not 850k but more like 5 million. Likewise for Chicago, Dallas, etc.
lol the ‘even more people’ area of Shanghai is actually just a county of Shanghai with only half a million population.
Haven’t even included Waltham Forest! It’s a pretty built up entire borough of over 300k people and several big towns.