Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS)

Using the GIS to examine the pre-history of the North-South Divide in Britain

The QMW Historical GIS was originally constructed to permit the more systematic examination of data gathered by Humphrey Southall and David Gilbert in a research project concerned with the origins of the depressed areas of Britain. This sequence of maps was originally prepared for our final report to the ESRC on the project which created the Mark I GIS, and demonstrates the variety of data that can be analysed and mapped by the system.

In all cases the attribute data come from the database at QMW while the spatial data (i.e. the base maps) have been extracted from the GIS for a variety of dates and areas. The figures mapped are sometimes simple data manipulations (e.g. the percentage unemployed in map 6 is merely the number of people in the each area unemployed divided by the number of people in the area multiplied by 100). Others, for example map 4 are based on combining a large number of records from a large number of tables. Map 4 used nearly 60,000 reports from union branches. These were aggregated both over time and up to county level and then mapped.