The population of the United Kingdom in 2024 was estimated to be approximately 69.3 million, with over 9.6 million people living in South East England. London had the next highest population, at almost 9.1 million people, followed by the North West England at 7.7 million. With the UK's population generally concentrated in England, most English regions have larger populations than the constituent countries of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, which had populations of 5.5 million, 3.2 million, and 1.9 million respectively. English counties and cities The United Kingdom is a patchwork of various regional units, within England the largest of these are the regions shown here, which show how London, along with the rest of South East England had around 18 million people living there in this year. The next significant regional units in England are the 47 metropolitan and ceremonial counties. After London, the metropolitan counties of the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, and West Yorkshire were the biggest of these counties, due to covering the large urban areas of Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds respectively. Regional divisions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland The smaller countries that comprise the United Kingdom each have different local subdivisions. Within Scotland these are called council areas, whereas in Wales the main regional units are called unitary authorities. Scotland's largest Council Area by population is that of Glasgow City at over 650,000, while in Wales, it was the Cardiff Unitary Authority at around 384,000. Northern Ireland, on the other hand, has eleven local government districts, the largest of which is Belfast with a population of approxiamtely 352,000.

Historical dataset of population level and growth rate for the South Hampshire, UK metro area from 1950 to 2025.

According to the 2021 Census, London was the most ethnically diverse region in England and Wales – 63.2% of residents identified with an ethnic minority group.

The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a class problem of computer science that seeks to find the shortest route between a group of cities. It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, important in theoretical computer science and operations research.

https://data.heatonresearch.com/images/wustl/kaggle/tsp/world-tsp.png" alt="World Map">

In this Kaggle competition, your goal is not to find the shortest route among cities. Rather, you must attempt to determine the route labeled on a map.

Calculating Line Distances

The data for this competition is not made up of real-world maps, but rather randomly generated maps of varying attributes of size, city count, and optimality of the routes. The following image demonstrates a relatively small map, with few cities, and an optimal route.

https://data.heatonresearch.com/images/wustl/kaggle/tsp/1.jpg" alt="Small Map">

Not all maps are this small, or contain this optimal a route. Consider the following map, which is much larger.

https://data.heatonresearch.com/images/wustl/kaggle/tsp/6.jpg" alt="Larger Map">

The following attributes were randomly selected to generate each image.

• Height
• Width
• City count
• Cycles of Simulated Annealing optimization of initial random path

The path distance is based on the sum of the Euclidean distance of all segments in the path. The distance units are in pixels.

Dataset Challenges

This is a regression problem, you are to estimate the total path length. Several challenges to consider.

• If you indiscriminately scale the maps, you will lose size information.
• Paths might overlap, causing the ration of total pixels to total length to become misleading.
• As paths overlap bot other path segments and cities, the resulting color becomes brighter.

The following picture shows a section from one map zoomed to the pixel-level:

https://data.heatonresearch.com/images/wustl/kaggle/tsp/tsp_zoom.jpg" alt="TSP Zoom">

CSV Files

The following CSV files are provided, in addition to the images.

• train.csv - Training data, with distance labels.
• test.csv - Test data without distance labels.
• tsp-all.csv - Training and test data combined with complete labels and additional information about each generated map.

CSV File Format

The tsp-all.csv file contains the following data.

id,filename,distance,key
0,0.jpg,83110,503x673-270-83110.jpg
1,1.jpg,1035,906x222-10-1035.jpg
2,2.jpg,20756,810x999-299-20756.jpg
3,3.jpg,13286,781x717-272-13286.jpg
4,4.jpg,13924,609x884-312-13924.jpg

The columns:

• id - A unique ID that allows linking across all three CSV files.
• filename - The name of each map's image file.
• distance - The total distance through the cities, this is the y/label.
• key - The generator filename, provides the dimensions, city count, & distance.

In 2024, the population of the United Kingdom reached 69.3 million, compared with 68.5 million in 2023. The UK population has more than doubled since 1871 when just under 31.5 million lived in the UK and has grown by around 10.4 million since the start of the twenty-first century. For most of the twentieth century, the UK population steadily increased, with two noticeable drops in population occurring during World War One (1914-1918) and in World War Two (1939-1945). Demographic trends in postwar Britain After World War Two, Britain and many other countries in the Western world experienced a 'baby boom,' with a postwar peak of 1.02 million live births in 1947. Although the number of births fell between 1948 and 1955, they increased again between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, with more than one million people born in 1964. Since 1964, however, the UK birth rate has fallen from 18.8 births per 1,000 people to a low of just 10.2 in 2020. As a result, the UK population has gotten significantly older, with the country's median age increasing from 37.9 years in 2001 to 40.7 years in 2022. What are the most populated areas of the UK? The vast majority of people in the UK live in England, which had a population of 58.6 million people in 2024. By comparison, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland had populations of 5.5 million, 3.2 million, and 1.9 million, respectively. Within England, South East England had the largest population, at over 9.6 million, followed by the UK's vast capital city of London, at almost 9.1 million. London is far larger than any other UK city in terms of urban agglomeration, with just four other cities; Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Glasgow, boasting populations that exceed one million people.

These data are the urban woodland habitat networks of eleven different cities: Nottingham, Plymouth, Stoke-on-Trent, Milton Keynes, Coventry, Wolverhampton, Northampton, Birkenhead, Derby, Luton and Kingston-Upon-Hull.Three types of data are used to create the shape files:The OS MasterMap Topography (EDINA Digimap Ordnance Survey Service, 2024) ‘Natural Environment’ layer.This was overlain upon the latest version of the LandCover Map (EDINA Environment Digimap Service, 2022) for each urban area using QGIS (https://qgis.org/). Urban area boundaries were determined and clipped using the experimental urban extent polygons for the UK (ONS, 2019).ReferencesEDINA Digimap Ordnance Survey Service (2024) OS MasterMap® Topography Layer [GeoPackage geospatial data], Scale 1:1250, Tiles: GB, Updated: 1 February 2024, Ordnance Survey (GB). Available at: https://digimap.edina.ac.uk (Accessed: 10 July 2024).EDINA Environment Digimap Service (2022) Land Cover Map 2021 [FileGeoDatabase geospatial data], Scale 1:250000, Tiles: GB, Updated: 10 August 2022, CEH. Available at: https://digimap.edina.ac.uk (Accessed: 10 July 2024).ONS (2019) Experimental urban extent for UK - Office for National Statistics. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/experimentalurbanextentforuk (Accessed: 26 August 2024).

In 2023, London had a gross domestic product of over 569 billion British pounds, by far the most of any region of the United Kingdom. The region of South East England which surrounds London had the second-highest GDP in this year, at over 360 billion pounds. North West England, which includes the major cities of Manchester and Liverpool, had the third-largest GDP among UK regions, at almost 250 billion pounds. Levelling Up the UK London’s economic dominance of the UK can clearly be seen when compared to the other regions of the country. In terms of GDP per capita, the gap between London and the rest of the country is striking, standing at over 63,600 pounds per person in the UK capital, compared with just over 37,100 pounds in the rest of the country. To address the economic imbalance, successive UK governments have tried to implement "levelling-up policies", which aim to boost investment and productivity in neglected areas of the country. The success of these programs going forward may depend on their scale, as it will likely take high levels of investment to reverse economic neglect regions have faced in the recent past. Overall UK GDP The gross domestic product for the whole of the United Kingdom amounted to 2.56 trillion British pounds in 2024. During this year, GDP grew by 0.9 percent, following a growth rate of 0.4 percent in 2023. Due to the overall population of the UK growing faster than the economy, however, GDP per capita in the UK fell in both 2023 and 2024. Nevertheless, the UK remains one of the world’s biggest economies, with just five countries (the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and India) having larger economies. It is it likely that several other countries will overtake the UK economy in the coming years, with Indonesia, Brazil, Russia, and Mexico all expected to have larger economies than Britain by 2050.

The Elland ward dataset includes the ward map; demographic profile; Public Health England local health report; Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) factsheet; Public health data; elections data and maps; anti-poverty data; and other ward data. Elland ward is in south-east Calderdale, and includes Elland town and smaller settlements such as Blackley, Upper Edge and Lower Edge. The topography slopes steeply from the southern boundary to the River Calder, then rises to Elland Park Wood. Elland has direct access to the M62 motorway, and the main road between Halifax and Huddersfield (A629 Calderdale Way). Lowfields business park is north-east of Elland, close to the A629. For schools data at ward level, see Schools data by ward.

With approximately 122.1 crimes per 1,000 population, Cleveland, in North East England, had the highest crime rate of all the police force areas in England and Wales in 2024/25. High crime rates are evident in other areas of northern England, such as West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester at 114.5 and 108.2, respectively. In the UK capital, London, the crime rate was 105.5 per 1,000 people. The lowest crime rate in England was in the relatively rural areas of Wiltshire in South West England, as well as North Yorkshire. Overall crime in England and Wales The number of crimes in England and Wales reached approximately 6.74 million in 2022/23, falling slightly to 6.66 million in 2023/24, and 6.59 million in 2024/25. Overall crime has been rising steadily across England and Wales for almost a decade, even when adjusted for population rises. In 2022/23, for example, the crime rate in England and Wales was 93.6, the highest since 2006/07. When compared with the rest of the United Kingdom, England and Wales is something of an outlier, as crime rates for Scotland and Northern Ireland have not followed the same trajectory of rising crime. Additionally, there has been a sharp increase in violent crimes and sexual offences since the mid-2010s in England and Wales. While theft offences have generally been falling, the number of shoplifting offences reached a peak of 530,640 in 2024/25. Troubled justice system under pressure Alongside rising crime figures, many indicators also signal that the justice system is getting pushed to breaking point. The percentage of crimes that are solved in England and Wales was just 5.7 percent in 2023, with sexual offences having a clearance rate of just 3.6 percent. Crimes are also taking far longer than usual to pass through the justice system. In 2022, it took an average of 407 days for a crown court case to reach a conclusion from the time of the offence, compared with 233 days in 2018. This is most likely related to the large backlog of cases in crown courts, which reached over 67,750 in 2023. Furthermore, prisons in England and Wales are dangerously overcrowded, with the government even releasing some prisoners early to address the issue.

In the past four centuries, the population of the Thirteen Colonies and United States of America has grown from a recorded 350 people around the Jamestown colony in Virginia in 1610, to an estimated 346 million in 2025. While the fertility rate has now dropped well below replacement level, and the population is on track to go into a natural decline in the 2040s, projected high net immigration rates mean the population will continue growing well into the next century, crossing the 400 million mark in the 2070s. Indigenous population Early population figures for the Thirteen Colonies and United States come with certain caveats. Official records excluded the indigenous population, and they generally remained excluded until the late 1800s. In 1500, in the first decade of European colonization of the Americas, the native population living within the modern U.S. borders was believed to be around 1.9 million people. The spread of Old World diseases, such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, to biologically defenseless populations in the New World then wreaked havoc across the continent, often wiping out large portions of the population in areas that had not yet made contact with Europeans. By the time of Jamestown's founding in 1607, it is believed the native population within current U.S. borders had dropped by almost 60 percent. As the U.S. expanded, indigenous populations were largely still excluded from population figures as they were driven westward, however taxpaying Natives were included in the census from 1870 to 1890, before all were included thereafter. It should be noted that estimates for indigenous populations in the Americas vary significantly by source and time period. Migration and expansion fuels population growth The arrival of European settlers and African slaves was the key driver of population growth in North America in the 17th century. Settlers from Britain were the dominant group in the Thirteen Colonies, before settlers from elsewhere in Europe, particularly Germany and Ireland, made a large impact in the mid-19th century. By the end of the 19th century, improvements in transport technology and increasing economic opportunities saw migration to the United States increase further, particularly from southern and Eastern Europe, and in the first decade of the 1900s the number of migrants to the U.S. exceeded one million people in some years. It is also estimated that almost 400,000 African slaves were transported directly across the Atlantic to mainland North America between 1500 and 1866 (although the importation of slaves was abolished in 1808). Blacks made up a much larger share of the population before slavery's abolition. Twentieth and twenty-first century The U.S. population has grown steadily since 1900, reaching one hundred million in the 1910s, two hundred million in the 1960s, and three hundred million in 2007. Since WWII, the U.S. has established itself as the world's foremost superpower, with the world's largest economy, and most powerful military. This growth in prosperity has been accompanied by increases in living standards, particularly through medical advances, infrastructure improvements, clean water accessibility. These have all contributed to higher infant and child survival rates, as well as an increase in life expectancy (doubling from roughly 40 to 80 years in the past 150 years), which have also played a large part in population growth. As fertility rates decline and increases in life expectancy slows, migration remains the largest factor in population growth. Since the 1960s, Latin America has now become the most common origin for migrants in the U.S., while immigration rates from Asia have also increased significantly. It remains to be seen how immigration restrictions of the current administration affect long-term population projections for the United States.

The lowest average daily sun hours in the United Kingdom typically occur in January and December. The highest daily sun hours recorded since 2015 was in May 2020, at an average of 9.7 hours per day. In comparison, May 2024 saw 5.6 hours of daily sunshine. High levels of monthly sunlight in 2018 Since 2014, the pattern of total monthly hours of sunlight remained relatively similar up until 2018. That year there was a noticeable increase in sunlight hours in May, June and July – with May recording 241 hours of sunlight. The following year the pattern returned to normal, but a significant increase was again recorded in 2020. Annual sun hours The average annual number of daily sun hours in the UK has remained above four hours per day since 2001, but has not increased above five. Daily sun hours were highest in 2003 at 4.9 hours per day. The following years saw sun hours remain at a similar level, until figures increased again to 4.9 hours in 2022.