The 2024 UK General Election Map

2024 is a year of elections. Next Thursday it is the turn of the UK to go to the polls. Which means next Friday Maps Mania will be featuring a number of interactive maps, visualizing the collapse of the governing Conservative Party's vote.

According to the latest opinion polls the Tories could be heading for a loss that might almost rival the collapse of the Canadian Conservative Party in the 1993 federal election. If, as forecast, the UK Labour Party does win a huge majority in this year's General Election then the data visualization editors of the daily newspapers may have a bit of headache in visualizing the scale of the victory. The support for the Conservative Party in rural areas of the UK means that even if they win a few seats the election maps next Friday may still look very blue.

If you are working on visualizing the results of any of this year's major elections then you should be considering how you can prevent larger rural electoral areas from visually overpowering smaller urban constituencies. One way of doing this is by ensuring that there is an equal representation of electoral areas, for example by using a hexmap layer. 

Hexmaps can represent each electoral district or region with the same size hexagon. This ensures that every district is given equal visual weight, regardless of its geographic size. Luckily, thanks to the work of Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae, of Automatic Knowledge Ltd, if you are working on a UK election map you can download a geojson file providing a hexagonal representation of the UK's new parliamentary constituencies. 

Automatic Knowledge's UK Constituency Files contains a number of downloadable election resources, including a hexmap of the 2024 General Election constituencies. You can view an interactive demo of the hexmap on Automatic Knowledge's UK Constituency Hex Map 2023.

I've taken the hexmap data for a spin and created a Torygeddon interactive map. Using Automatic Knowledge's hexagon layer I've created a list and map of all the current Conservative MPs. On election night you can click on the name of each Tory MP as their defeat is announced to wipe them off the electoral map forever. The map really has no useful purpose, beyond providing myself with a neat visual guide to the (hopeful) end of fourteen years of spectacular mismanagement.

Cartographer's Note: My Torygeddon map is using two different data sets. The Automatic Knowledge hexmap shows the new UK electoral constituencies. My list shows all the current Conservative MPs - who won their seats in the previous constituencies. Some current Tory MPs' constituencies may therefore not appear on the map. 

Around 80 Conservative MPs are standing down at this election and are not seeking reelection in 2024. My list shows current Conservative MPs, so in around 80 seats the name shown is not the person seeking election in 2024 but the current retiring Conservative MP.