The latest instalment of our weekly series, in which we use the Centre for Cities’ data tools to crunch some of the numbers on Europe’s cities.
We talk a lot, round here, about which are the largest cities by population. (Nerds gonna nerd.) We talk a fair amount, too, about which have the richest residents.
What we don’t talk about so much is the intersection of those two factors: which cities have the biggest economies? Where are Britain’s powerhouses and engines really located? London, obviously – but beyond that, what does the league table look like?
Let’s fire up the datatron.
The first thing to say is that London is so much bigger than its nearest rivals – so many more people, generating so much more wealth – that it completely knackers the charts. Here’s a scatter graph plotting population (of each city’s primary urban area, explained here) against GVA (gross value added, a measure of economic output).
See if you can somehow pick London out of the crowd:
Let’s take it as read that London is far bigger than the other cities. To make these charts look in any way meaningful we’re going to have to drop the capital.
Here’s a bar chart showing the 20 largest city economies outside London.
GVA in £bn. Image: Centre for Cities.
Unsurprisingly, Manchester and Birmingham are way, way ahead of the pack. What’s perhaps more unexpected is that, at least on this measure, the Manchester economy is slightly bigger. I thought this might be a quirk of the population data – using a definition on which Manchester simply has more people than Birmingham – but surprisingly, no.
That said, there’s not a lot of space between them. They’re of the same order of magnitude, and a long way ahead of the next cities down. Which gets to be second city is an unanswerable question, but nowhere else is really in the running for the title.
There are a few more surprises in the next bit of the chart. That Bristol would have a bigger economy than Leeds, for example: maybe this is me making dodgy assumptions, but Leeds feels like it should be on the next level up from Bristol, not struggling to keep up with it. And yet.
Similarly, it’s striking that Reading’s economy is nearly as big as Nottingham’s, and that Cardiff is out performed by Bournemouth, Milton Keynes and Southampton. As ever, it’s one thing to know there’s a north-south divide in theory. But Reading? On a par with Sheffield?
Part of this is down to size, of course – more people will mean a bigger economy, generally speaking. So here’s that scattergraph again, without London this time. This time it’s interactive, so you can hover over a dot to find out which city it is and get the data.
There’s a clear correlation between the two variables (duh). But it’s not perfect. Dots that are higher than they should be represent cities that are outperforming the average (economies bigger than you’d expect for a given population); dots that are lower than they should be are the opposite.
Reading is on one side of that notional line; Sheffield on the other. You can probably guess which way round.
Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and also has a Facebook page now for some reason.
Want more of this stuff? Follow CityMetric on Twitter or Facebook.
