UK constituency data hex maps

Around a year ago, with a General Election coming up at some point before the end of January 2025, our founder Paul had the idea for us to build a constituency hex cartogram microsite.

Why hex cartograms?

Hex cartograms are particularly useful for showing constituency-level data. Unlike a geographic map - that typically makes rural constituencies have a bigger contribution to the impression of a visualisation than urban constituencies - each constituency is given the same visual weight. Every constituency is a same size hexagon.

To show data on a cartogram you first need a cartogram. Back in 2017 we created a HexJSON version of a layout of constituencies and made it openly licensed to save others having to repeat the work. Being open, we received improvements from the community in the lead up to the 2019 General Election. I like to think it was the most thoughtful hex layout of UK constituencies. Over the years we've used that layout to show General Election results (for New Statesman), Parliament petitions, Parliament divisions and Who Has A Majority. And organisations such as Flourish have made use of it too.

Going into the next election we knew that we'd also need a new hex layout for the new constituencies so we started building that. As with our previous layout, we encourage improvements to help make the "best" and most re-usable hex cartogram of UK constituencies.

Building a microsite

The first aim of the new microsite was to make it easier for us (Open Innovations) to create more constituency hex cartograms. But we also want to make it easier for people to be able to share links to specific visualisations.

From a technical perspective, we've used our Lume module for visualisations so that all the maps could be built as static web pages and reduce reliance on Javascript. By putting it all in one place, it also means that if we update the new hex layout it will be really easy for us to update all the visualisations we've made.

We have split the microsite up into six themes:

1. Economy e.g. wages and house prices
2. Energy e.g. supply, distribution and use
3. Environment e.g. water and air quality
4. Health e.g. life expectancy
5. Society e.g. electoral data
6. Transport e.g. bikes, buses, cars, trains

Within each theme we have several pages which each show data for a particular topic. For example, within Transport we have a page for Bus Service Changes that shows a dataset that was created by Friends of the Earth and the University of Leeds. Within Society we have a page that shows hex cartograms for every General Election since 2010.

Please have a look around the datasets that we've included so far. If there are interesting constituency-level datasets that you think we are missing, please get in touch to let us know about them.