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Open Innovations is winding down and will no longer be commencing new work from May 2026.

Help build a hex map of wards

We need your help. We're trying to build a hex cartogram of 8,396 UK wards (2024). This is a much larger task than when we designed layouts for UK constituencies (twice). Not only are there far more areas to position, but we are even less well placed to know how best to arrange other parts of the country. That's where you come in.

The plan is to create a non-contiguous hex cartogram of UK wards - released under an open licence - that can be re-used (and adapted) by anyone.

This new ward cartogram takes inspiration from the House of Commons Library's MSOA hex cartogram which leaves gaps between groups of hexes. In the case of the MSOA layout, these gaps are between counties. For the ward map we'll be leaving gaps between local authorities. That way, each local authority area will have its own, contiguous, hex layout of wards that could be used for visualising local-level data. But people will also be able to easily extract layouts for groups of local authorities e.g. Greater Manchester.

This project isn't starting entirely from scratch. We've created a rough-and-ready initial draft by placing every ward's hexagon using its geographic centroid. This results in quite a sparse map but at least it gives a starting point.

Breaking it down

Arranging 8,396 wards is a lot. To help split the task into slightly more manageable pieces, we've divided the full layout up into separate files for each of the nations/regions (ITL1 regions). That way different people can start arranging different parts of the country without clashing too much.

We've already made a start on Yorkshire and the Humber. We've reused the layout we'd previously made for Leeds City Council along with the hex layout that Calderdale Council created for Calderdale. We have also grouped the hexes for Bradford, Kirklees, Wakefield and York. Once all the local authorities have been arranged into nice blocks we can look at reducing the space between those groups.

Small, widely-spaced hexagons placed at the centres of wards. The West Yorkshire councils and York council have been arranged in more compact forms.
Making a start on a hex layout for Yorkshire and the Humber. The councils of West Yorkshire and York are already arranged in blocks.
Credit: Stuart Lowe, Open Innovations

If you'd like to help, start editing one of the following nations/regions with our new hex editing tool:

These links all take you to our improved hex editor which lets you zoom in/out, pan, and drag hexagons (or groups of hexagons). It will be easier on a desktop computer but it should be possible to use on a mobile too.

When arranging hexes, it may be useful to keep a copy of the ONS's geographic map of wards somewhere handy to compare against. Arranging hexagons from a geographic layout isn't always easy. Compromises have to be made. It is a bit more or an art than science. Ideally, people from all over the country will be able to design their area and do a much better job than we would.

Once you've arranged the wards of a local authority or two, save the  HexJSON (File > Save HexJSON) and then either update the equivalent file on the Github repo (then create a pull request), or email the updated HexJSON to me.

We will keep a list of local authority progress so that we can see what still needs to be done. If you have any questions about this that aren't answered here, you could always drop me an email.