Centre of Population

[steepholm]

I suspect that this is a well-known and easily accessible piece of information if you know how to ask, but I'm not sure how to frame it in googlable terms.

Imagine that the UK is a plane (geometric not aeronautic) with no thickness and no weight, but infinite strength. Standing on this plane is every person in the UK. Imagine also that they all weigh exactly the same - shall we say 10 Stone?

Now, if you wished to balance the UK on the head of a pin (having first evicted the angels), where geographically should the head of that pin be?

Comments

[cxcvi]

Centre of population gravity?

Good question. My guess would be somewhere near Nottingham.

[steepholm]

Good guess! It's about 30 miles south-south-east, according to this reply over at LiveJournal.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

If it was England alone, Meriden in Warwickshire is reckoned to be the centre of the country, but the whole island I'm not so sure about!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Ah, but is Meriden the centre as weighted for population?

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Meriden is the place that is furthest from the sea in a straight line.

[nwhyte]

Wikipedia says it's Appleby Parva in Leicestershire, as calculated by Leeds University in 2000 based on 1996 figures for the whole of GB (but not NI).

I suspect it would still be somewhere in that area. Population will have grown in London especially, but if you include Northern Ireland that will pull it back the other way.

It's not too difficult to calculate from scratch, actually. You can get breakdowns of the population to whatever level of granularity you want from the officially published census figures, convert lat and long to Cartesian coordinates, multiply it each chunk by the local population and add it all together, divide by the total population, normalise and convert back to lat and long.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thank you, that's what I needed to know!

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Oxford!
Smalltown City of Dreaming Spires for heavy-weighted angels dons fluttering by can only dream of. Those Oscar wanted not to become at any cost and one must say, he managed to avoid them in his own way but still. ...Just flapping around & out to say 'hello' the alien Mollberg Way, you know;)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure we can count angels in our census!