• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Cartographicum Thandeum

I'm debating whether it's worth adapting the old Boothroyd base map for the new UK parliamentary boundaries or not. On the one hand there are much better base maps now, but I do like the idea of perpetuating comparable election maps.
 
A random ASB idea I had, which seems obvious now but I don't recall being done before - Pournelle's CoDominion but in the classical era:

SPQRES2.png

Someone with better graphics skills than me can probably do something with an eagle and dragon (or some more specifically Han symbol).
 
It's been FOURTEEN YEARS since we got some new national constituency boundaries in the UK (longer if you're Scottish) and the last time things changed, I was still using basemaps other people had made. This time, I've decided to make my own - albeit it is derived from the one on Wiki, but the one on Wiki is also WRONG and I've had to make numerous painstaking corrections. This has been an exercise in frustration as there are multiple versions of the boundaries floating around (including different versions from the Boundary Commission, not always making it clear what are final and what are original boundaries) and I eventually resorted to treating the Guardian's interactive map as the gospel truth, seeing as it's the most recently updated. Incidentally, it's a very good map, it's almost as good as the one the BBC website used in Flash for the 2005 general election, against which literally every subsequent BBC attempt is objectively laughably inferior.

In addition to fixing the actual factual errors, my version improves on the Wiki one by using a philosophy of easy recolouring - single-pixel boundaries (which also look more aesthetically pleasing), simplified coastline and the elimination of all but the largest islands. Although I definitely racheted my threshold up and down inconsistently as I made my way around the coast. I also got rid of the more egregious city insets, many of which didn't even magnify the area in question significantly. I was going to cull even more of them (some are obviously necessary like London) but I reluctantly decided I might as well keep the rest. That Channel Coast one (which had a much stupider name in the original) is probably borderline unneeded, as is Derby & Nottingham, but sod it, that one can stay as it has Erewash as the centre and all psephological maps need to highlight @Alex Richards' contributions in some way. And I'm not risking offending anyone in Belfast.

Yes I've just reassigned the UKIP colour to Reform UK even though they don't use that, shut up, I am not trying to manage with two slightly different blue scales, I am not letting this turn into our version Japan's infinite shades of green. It's not as if they'll win any seats anyway.

So anyway, here it is, the final* blank map until I find an error. I intend to populate this with the notional results shortly.

2024 UK election blank FINAL-FINAL.png
 
Great work. And the original one is an .svg which means the detatched areas are probably all single shapefiles for easy colouring. Not that that helps anyone using a raster program rather than a vector one.

EDIT: Though thinking about it, does it fit if you swap the locations of Belfast and the Notts-Derby insets on that map, because there's just someting bugging me about how Belfast is sitting off the east coast of the country rather than being near Norn.
 
Great work. And the original one is an .svg which means the detatched areas are probably all single shapefiles for easy colouring. Not that that helps anyone using a raster program rather than a vector one.

EDIT: Though thinking about it, does it fit if you swap the locations of Belfast and the Notts-Derby insets on that map, because there's just someting bugging me about how Belfast is sitting off the east coast of the country rather than being near Norn.
Yeah, nothing will ever convince me to use vectors - that goes back to my days in the mid-90s trying to find editable map gifs that weren't so low resolution they didn't show Newfoundland as an island.

That makes sense about swapping those insets, I did find that an odd choice.
 
Back
Top