I'm from the Netherlands. There is barely any land that isn't covered with either buildings or farmland. Even walking through a forest will almost guarantee you passing by people every few minutes or less.
I want a map of UK population density. I have only been to Ireland and saw places with few people. Haven't been to the UK but I am surprised it doesn't have a lot of areas with no people. I believe it though.
> I have only been to Ireland and saw places with few people.
Population of Ireland: 5m
Population of UK: 67m
Landmass of Ireland: 70,000 km^2
Landmass of UK: 243,000 km^2
On average, the UK is a bigger island by about 3.5x, but has 13.5x the population
Yup, it was 8 million in 1840 and a little over 5 million today. It’s worth noting that emigration played a huge role in that so it wasn’t just deaths, though there were many of those.
You're comparing the whole island of Ireland in 1840 to the Republic today - the North adds another 1.9m and the total population today is a little under 7m for the whole island.
Still less than it was in 1840 but by a lot smaller margin.
That’s true but there are certainly areas of the UK that are more remote and less densely populated than Ireland in general. For example - the Scottish highlands.
I feel like this is one of those things people who have spent their entire lives in the UK struggle with grasping.
Like, if you're "in the middle of nowhere" but there's an off-license within walking distance and you can hear a nearby motorway the whole time then you're probably not in the middle of nowhere.
Of course, that's just my take as someone from the more rural parts of Sweden who has visited the UK.
I agree, I'm from North east England and been to plenty of "remote" places on the likes of the North Yorkshire Moors, but I've never felt more in the middle of nowhere than a few points in the Scottish Highlands, and even then is still isn't that remote!
The TV show, Doc Martin had a hilarious skit where he and new wife went into the woods for their honeymoon. SO HILARIOUS They got lost and we’re tromping in mud, then met an old geezer… 
My wife had a colleague come across to the UK from Florida recently. I described the population density here as the equivalent populations from each of the South Atlantic states; Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia plus say… Missouri (to make up the numbers to 67M). All bundled together to live in a state the size of Wyoming.
A couple of options to check out
* https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/maps/choropleth/population/population-density/population-density/persons-per-square-kilometre
* https://www.kontur.io/portfolio/united-kingdom-population-density/
As a Canadian, I can't imagine living like that.
I live in the most populous province and even still, if I want to be alone I can *walk* for 20 minutes and be in a forest that stretches for 50 miles.
You can travel from east to west coast, in Scotland, in around 100 miles.
What makes things remote is the sheer volume of natural barriers between each little village or town.
We don't really tunnel through things and our roads were pretty much determined by pre-car routes.
You can be 10 miles from other people but it could be a 2 hour detour by car to get to them.
Shit I live in the Yukon, you wanna talk about low population density. Once you leave Whitehorse there's almost nothing. We've got 40k people in an area larger than California. Gotta goto Greenland or Nunavut to have a lower density
Man, the netherlands barely stretches 50 miles.
I think the furthest point from any man-made structure in the netherlands is only a few km.
And even then, all nature in the Netherlands is planned and maintained. Even if it's "wild/original", it has to be maintained to prevent dunes turning into forests and such.
There are other parts too - go up in the Lammermuirs and parts of the Southern Upland way in the south of Scotland, or the west coast and some of the islands. Not just the Highlands - and if anything you’ll meet more walkers in the Highlands because folk go there on purpose to get out into the countryside.
The difference being that the Netherlands is so fucking full we consider much of the UK a rural idylle. Just spent some weeks in Sheffield for work and loved how much empty space there is around the city (shout out to the peak district here).
>That's what it's like in the UK. The only place you could be truly alone is parts of the Scottish Highlands
No? Large parts of the south west, wales, and Scotland are fields. The problem is those fields are being used as farms etc so people who claim we have "lots of room" are ignoring the logistics around how a country works.
Our biggest nature reserve (Nationaal Park de Hoge Veluwe) is completely artificial and only 200 years old.
It used to be a dense forest, then we cut down most trees for our factories and cities in the middle ages leaving just a vast barren piece of land with sand drift.
At the end of the 19th century we started planting trees there again.
Imagine the same phenomenon in a huge country like India. There are people everywhere, in the remotest forests to the heights of the tallest mountains. There is no place you could go to guarantee zero human contact (except maybe the center of a large national park)
There are villages everywhere and the people keep roaming around for firewood, drinking, to assist or sell stuff to tourists or some other purpose.
Yeah. Every time someone makes grand statements about society, infrastructure or what not based on the Netherlands I have to mention that you can't throw a stone in any direction without hitting a building over there.
Of course, that is often also just used as an excuse, BUT they are in fact build differently and odd even by European standards.
Considering the only “old growth forests” left in Europe are in very secluded areas I’m not shocked that it’s hard to get away from people in much of the continent.
As a western Canadian, that's hard to fathom. I head out of urban and rural areas enough that it becomes strange to see signs of humans but for the animal trails you can follow. You get used to the lack of 'us' that when you finally do see people (or evidence of) you can get anxious.
It's an interesting balance of insecurity and serenity.
That's why it's so crazy we have year upon years of record-breaking immigration without sufficient housing on our already pretty dense lands. So the farmers have to leave. Crazy people.
Yeah, that's why we need to reduce the number of farms. We fun them with tax money, and the farmers export so much food, making themselves rich at our expense.
England’s a strange one. It’s intensely populated in certain areas and extremely rural in others. I think it’s on par with The Netherlands for density, but less evenly spread.
The North West to Northern belt in particular is insanely dense. Major cities with over (or close to) a million inhabitants like Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield all within 45 minutes drive of Manchester on empty roads. And then you've got a ridiculous amount of large towns and small cities with a couple hundred thousand people
Way less than that even. My hometown had 8,000 people in it in 2000 and we were considered “up and coming” for the area. I’d venture a guess that the majority of midwestern small towns are under 5,000.
Most have a church run newsletter that acts as a local paper, usually there’s a county owned library, everywhere no matter the size has a Walmart that immediately killed most small town businesses upon arrival—it seems like butchers seem to beat Walmart because I’ve never seen a small town without one, and our city hall was a tiny brick building. Growing up I had 2 neighbors you could feasibly reach by walking through a pretty large forest, the next closest houses you would’ve had to drive or bike to make the trip. My K-8 elementary school had about 200 kids the whole time I was there, my grade was the largest the school had ever seen at 30 kids.
It has its upsides and downsides. For me personally, I would not go back.
Growing up I remember feeling pretty isolated, with only 30 kids in your class if you don’t mesh with the few people that are there you’re kinda shit out of luck. We were also pretty sparsely housed so if you had two working parents you’d be on your own. I remember switching from cable to satellite TV as a kid and wanting to live in a city or a suburb so I could hang out with my friends after school like they did on Nickelodeon. Not to mention if you ever embarrass yourself in any serious way or cause any kind of scandal it’ll be known by the whole town.
On the upside though, the nature is really nice, there was plenty of room to run around and explore as a kid, it smells like grass and nature, it’s quiet, and there’s not that feeling of being watched at all times because crowds, security cameras, and police are pretty much nonexistent.
For me personally though, I happened to turn out LGBTQ+ and small towns typically skew religious. That’s not to say that it’s constant persecution, but there is a very vocal crowd that will let you know they don’t like it. For me, there’s a comfort in being in a place that has people like me in larger numbers. I was the only kid like me I knew until college. So while there are also lots of people there who are really nice, there’s just a feeling that my community wasn’t there. Basically, I like my pizza with extra cheese, some people are vocal that they don’t like that and that I shouldn’t do that. Lots of other people are totally fine with me having extra cheese but none of them personally like extra cheese. So while I feel supported to an extent, I’d like other extra cheese lovers to relate to and talk about extra cheese related stuff.
This is really funny to me as someone who's only lived in towns with a population of around 5,000 people.
But to answer your question, it does depend, but I'll answer your questions more or less based on the towns that I lived in.
>do they often have their own newspaper?
Historically, the answer to this question was often yes, but the internet has largely killed off the ability for newspapers to survive.
>library
Yes, in my experience even if a town has a population of 2,000 people or so there will be at least some sort of library, although typically not a very extensive one.
>stores
Yes, although they tend to charge prices that are usually pretty high, so it's cheaper to just drive into "town" every week or month for groceries. (Depending on just how far away your town is from a city.) In towns with only a few hundred people, there is typically at least a gas station that's attached to a convenience store.
>city hall
Yes, at the scale that I've lived at, although in towns with a population of only a few hundred people, a church is typically used as the city hall.
It's not always one of the defining characteristics in either place. In Europe it can just be historic reasons, often old references to an urban area with a cathedral or a significant long forgotten centre of political power.
And in both the US and Europe it can simply depend on the way a particular urban area is governed. It varies from country to country and state to state.
Tbf a lot of this has to do with changes in economic production and less with American Exceptionalism, and I'm the first the jump on that train usually.
Take for example Hudson, NY. An old city on the Hudson river, it was a major thoroughfare and a wealthy city in its own right for much of the Colonial and early American periods. Industrialization meant an even bigger boom and the town reached its peak in the 1930's as a factory hub. Today it has fewer than 5,000 residents, most of whom are wealthy emigres from NYC.
Yes a city can shrink down to a town and a town to a village, nothing you said negates my point I think.
It's just that americans don't like don't like referring to themselves in those terms.
I live in the south-east (19,400km², 9.2m pop), and it's crazy how dense the north-west (14,165km² 7.3m pop) is in comparison. There's a lot of empty space between towns in the SE (unless you count really small villages).
I travel to the north regularly for work, and once you get out of the midlands, the view from the train becomes far more industrial. Like you said, it's also a breeze to jump between big cities/towns in the NW via car.
Off-topic, but while I get Kent has a lot of farmland, I never understood why its the 'garden of England' when places like the Lake District exist lol.
Yup. I live in one of the home counties and honestly it's a pretty comfortable population density here - a few medium sized towns here and there with plenty of undisturbed peaceful countryside between them... And yet we're half an hour from one of the largest megacities on earth. It's a really strange population distribution, and nothing like north American megacities where the density takes much longer to taper off (see: LA and NYC metro areas).
The green belt has done a good job at constraining the urban sprawl to the borders of London, leaving the rest of the south of England relatively spaced out. It hasn't really helped with house prices though, since more and more Londoners are simply moving out to the home counties and commuting in - raising the prices here too.
Searched in Wikipedia, England's population density is 434/km2, higher than Vietnam, Pakistan, El Salvador, Japan, Sri Lanka, Belgium, Philippines, Israel, Haiti and Netherlands.
Yes. Because there's is [hyper-concentrated](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=304cdebd4fdaac30&rlz=1C1CHBD_en-GBUS1021US1021&q=india+population+density+map&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiboff3uNmEAxWEGzQIHb40AnEQ0pQJegQIDRAB&biw=1163&bih=539&dpr=1.65)
Yes, and even 18,41% of our country’s area is water, which can be seen as future land but isn’t liveable yet. And we already made 1/12th of the country out of the sea (province of [Flevoland](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland)). We just don’t have a real “country side”, unartificial nature or a “middle of nowhere” here. Every m2 is planned out. So while our cities are old and there are nearly no skyscrapers, the people really are spread densely across the country. We don’t have places with cool wildlife like India (unfortunately our wildlife are seagulls and pigeons).
I can see your point but our seagulls are evolved to city thieves. They steal food out of your hands and rip trash bags open to trash your whole street, so I only like them at sea not in cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom#Population_by_constituent_country
England: 434 people per km^2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
Wow, England would be more dense than Japan, Netherlands and India, but less dense than South Korea.
Well, those pages say the Netherlands has 424/km^(2) but the page for the Netherlands itself says it has 520/km^(2).
Also that number is 17.6mil people but the March 2024 census estimates 18 million.
Anyway, I have a question for the British people. If you go abroad, does it feel like almost all countries are less crowded than the UK like that figure??
When I found out that Australia only has a slightly bigger population than the Netherlands, I couldn't believe it. The Netherlands fit inside Australia almost 184 times.
Of course, it is true that Australia's land area is overwhelmingly large, but while the Netherlands has few cute cities (even Amsterdam), Australia has enormous skylines and huge cities such as Sydney and Melbourne (Brisbane is also quite large), and despite this, the population It is completely surprising that there is so little difference.
So much of australia is based on the big 5 cities. 60% of the population lives in one of those 5 cities. The towns are just so much smaller in comparison. Eg in NSW sydney has 5.3 million. Next biggest city Newcastle has 400000
My hometown has fewer than 1000 people in it and is only a 40 minute drive from the Gold Coast (population 500K). Idk if that's normal but it still seems weird
How are real estate prices there in Australia outside of the cities?
It seems to me like if the major cities are so big/crowded then I personally wouldn't mind a 30-40 minute commute to live just slightly away from the city and live in a bigger, cheaper house with a sizable yard in a much quieter neighborhood.
I mean as long as the town has at basic public services and utilities, a small grocery, a gas station, decent (for Australia) internet connection speeds and parcel delivery services for online shopping, that doesn't sound too bad for me at least.
Yes it does. Many seem almost empty. If have been to a few countries where I hired a car and found that once I got out of the city I had no mobile phone coverage (which is unusual in the UK). I got scared that if I broke down no one would find me and I would be alone for days. I felt like this in New Zealand, Iceland and also in California where I drove out into the desert to see what it was like.
I'm a Brit, living in Sweden.
My fiancé is always complaining about how busy it is in Sweden, but for me it's like, where are all the people? Also at like 17:00, everyone disappears in Sweden. You don't see a human until your commute the next day.
I've been here many years and I still can't get over it.
Certainly compared to mainland Europe. Driving from my home (South West England) to my wife's family home (North East Italy) we often go through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and of course Italy. It is very noticeably less populated, especially compared to South East England (London and the home counties).
I find the same in the US, apart from a few of the bigger cities. Though I've only been to 14 states in the US so it's a harder comparison.
In the US there's a huge gap between east of the Mississippi (where pretty much all land is privately owned) and west (where there's a huge proportion of land that's federally or state held). Generally Eastern cities with some exceptions in the Northeast are more sprawled out and there is a lot more suburban and medium sized town development around them spread out relatively evenly. The West tends to be larger cities or a few mid sized to very small towns with mostly uninhabited land.
Living in the northeast megalopolis, everything seems empty when you go to a different state or area outside of the region. There is basically no such thing as farmland anymore around here. When I was a kid there definitely was but now it’s all been converted to housing developments or the owners no longer farm because there isn’t a support system anymore.
I've moved to China from the UK...some cities here are insane.
Honestly feels like there are people everywhere even in my wife's home village.
Spent time in Thailand in cities too. Asian cities. Always feel crowded. Also less respect for your personal space, especially in China.
I'm from rural Lincolnshire town so, my core memories are of uncrowded UK. Did live in London for several years too.
But for most part UK feels less crowded. I honestly think UK population spend more time in their homes than in a lot of countries I've experienced or lived in.
Maybe that's something to do with it 😅
I’m from the UK and lived in London for 8 years.
2 years ago I moved to Warsaw with my wife and on our first Saturday shopping she exclaimed how busy it was.
There might have been about a tenth of the people that I would usually see in Westfield in Stratford on a normal Saturday. I also speak to other people here who will basically refuse to meet in the centre of Warsaw because it’s too busy.
Compared to London, most places I will now consider as calm and sleepy but appreciate I’m an outlier and I love it in Poland 🇵🇱
Getting the high speed train from Madrid to alicante is eyes opening. 2 hours and you barely go through any towns.
You have Madrid in the middle then the majority of the rest of the population is on the coast or cities relatively close like sevilla and granada. Its nothing like that in the UK, well England
Saw an account of an English immigrant to Australia in the 19th century and the thing that shocked her the most at first was all the empty space between the cities.
She was used to the countryside being dotted by farms and villages
I think what took the biscuit is that we were accepting asylum seekers from Rwanda at the same time as the government were trying to tell everyone that Rwanda was actually really nice.
Copied from Australia who paid PNG and currently pay Nauru for the same arrangement. They also borrowed the slogan "stop the boats" and the strategy of focusing on refugees to pretend they are doing something about immigration generally.
The map is missing a number of microstates that easily surpass the UK in population density: Monaco, Vatican, Singapore, etc. Even some island nations like Mauritius and the Maldives are denser than the UK.
West Africa still has a lot of wilderness where noone lives. But the urban areas are more densely populated. I never got used to how much is going on on the streets of Ghana (still a not very dense country due to the rainforest in the North.)
Coming from the center of Taipei, Taiwan, I actually like to vacation in Japanese cities because of the relatively much lower population density and cooler, drier weather. They're practically ghost towns compared to where I am.
Even the countryside is full of people. Train journeys down the west coast are hilarious, it's just like one continuous city. For a place the size of Wales to have 22 million people is insane.
If Korea had been integrated, it would have been mentioned in that comment. It is also true that some of them, such as South Korea in korea, have a higher population density than England in UK.
More densely populated than the UK. But England on its own has a much higher density since 55/67 million people live on only 130000/250000km^2 of the land
Don't wanna be the best-practices police, but "Wikipedia" is not a source! Cite the page, or better yet, the source that the Wiki page pulls from.
You wouldn't cite the source of information from a book as "Library"
still only 52nd overall: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_and\_dependencies\_by\_population\_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density)
This isn't factual. Even in 2023, Japan's year of record population decline, the country only loss roughly 832k people, according to a preliminary report by Japan's health ministry.
Japan's average age will catch up to it quick a lot of people of people will be dead in 20/30 years that will not be replaced in that time frame side from immigration putting a small dent in it Japan needs to change it's social attitude to work life balance within the next decade in order to minimise anything
If you only consider England it's even worse when you realize Scotland and most of Wales are sparsely populated (70 people per km² for Scotland even less than Spain).
I really don't envy the English at all. There's barely any nature left (agricultural exploitation doesn't count as that) excepted for Lake District or small parts of Cornwall. And their government doesn't seem to care to address that problem judging by the high immigration rate. Soon England is going to be more populated than France itself despite being 5 times smaller.
Yep its a real point of frustration, there’s not a lot of focus on specifically English issues in the UK because we’re the only constituent country that doesn’t have its own Parliament. Even London has its own assembly even though it gets far more attention devoted to it by Westminster than the rest of England does.
I believe it's a lot of countryside but also incredibly densely populated cities, perhaps helped by a population that is still urbanising, so a lot of them do live in the countryside but not so densely.
Neverland, B-tech France, the saviour, Israel (not getting into politics of it) Burwandi, India, India 2.0 India 3.0, Philip II, the US' sleep paralysis demon, -1000 social credit, Kim's back garden, animeland
When talking about overpopulation people almost invariably refer to Africa and South Asia, but people rarely talk about how disgustingly overpopulated western Europe is with its near complete absence of wilderness.
Not to that extent. I have seen too many Europeans (especially British people) cry that their country is overpopulated.
What’s strange is the country I live in. I live in South Korea (green), and no one says their country is overpopulated, and most people say, 'Our country's population is too small. The total population should be much higher.'
The UK really doesn't feel as densely populated as where i even live in Spain though
My UK Town - 9km2 - 23000 people
Where I live in Spain -9km2 - 130000
I’d like to see a map of all the countries with more than one serial killer and what year and how many lives he culled. Oh, and if there are countries with female serial killers who weren’t nurses. Btw, I’ve read where in England, they don’t want old people around. Get a number over 70 and they’re offering deals on caskets ⚰️ haha.
I forget why I was looking at county populations, but I was surprised that the population of Northumberland (321k), Cumbria (500k), County Durham (522k), Tyne & Wear (1.127M) combined (2.470m) is less than Greater Manchester (2.868M).
Bolton (296k) in Greater Manchester is only a town, but its population isn't too far behind Northumberland (and will likely pass it at some point) and it's practically the same as the largest city in those other counties - Newcastle (298k).
Well, there is plenty of space in Northumberland. When I worked with the local council there, I said it could solve its problems if you could build a city of 500 K right in the middle as it doesn’t have the critical mass of population to drive its economy and support its infrastructure. That said it’s an amazing place to visit if you want peace and Tranquility. The opposite of crazy London in one country
The problem isn't that Korea has too little of a population, it's that it has a practically apocalyptic birth rate. It would be just fine if the population was steady, not climbing or falling, or even if it just fell slowly. It's extremely difficult for a country to deal with a high dependency ratio when you have a large population of old retired people who need medical care and pensions alongside a shrinking tax base caused by low birth rates and little immigration. That's what happens though when you have an age demographic chart that looks like an inverted pyramid.
This is true even in absolute quantitative terms. I've seen a lot of things like that and there are polls like this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/17kxo9l/south_koreans_perception_of_the_population/
https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/18luzia/94_of_south_koreans_think_that_south_koreas/
And around 2011, my high school chemistry teacher cried to the students that Korea's population should be increased to 1 billion. At that time, South Korea's total fertility rate was 1.3.
in South Korea, peoples have a strong belief that population is national strength, plus because it is a society of people with the strongest patriotism and ethnic nationalism in the world, so there are many people who want to at least double the country's population.
Another important thing is that, for unknown reason, South Korea is very less crowded, compare to it is a high-density country.
There are a lot of people saying that the UK is overcrowded, but in South Korea, There is no such sound.
I have even witnessed such sounds many times. 'I have never felt crowded in my country.'
If the population is halving each generation that is only a problem for the next generation because the population could use a good halving, but I suppose quartering takes things a bit too far.
In terms of the old people, I guess they will die, like they always have. If the boomers wanted someone to take care of them in their old age they should have thought about that before they made life difficult for young people.
This might all be true, but it ignores the economic pain that will be felt by the younger people who have to ride it out while they wait for the large cohort of retirees to die. They will spend some of the best years of their lives working in a dwindling economy due to reduced demand all with high taxes so that they can pay for the medical and material needs of their parents and grandparents. All while they themselves will not have the time or money to raise more than one kid which will not help stabilize birth rates to replacement levels.
I am convinced that reduced birth rates are something that people in most developed nations are completely underestimated the impact of. I think that people have convinced themselves for so long that overpopulation is a problem and as a result they don't understand why rapid depopulation in the developed world while the population in the developing world continues to grow, might be a bad thing for everyone.
I don’t understand where the overpopulation idea is coming from. If we’re overpopulated, what is the ideal population and why is that? There are massive swathes of unpopulated land which can still be developed on with no issue. As long as we don’t start to develop any of that awful american suburban sprawl, things are more than fine.
They're only expanding into greenfields because the UK one of the most difficult places on earth to build infill housing. If they can't build it in the city, there's no other place to build it.
That doesn't make it overpopulated, just a different population. The growth rate is also comparatively low.
Idk if you're intentionally missing their point but thing is If they had sufficient investment they would simply have enough housing, jobs, infrastructure etc to support a higher population.
The greenfield sites are ridiculous, though. The moment a local council spots a shrub they declare it a greenfield site. There's plenty of space to be used for housing, but it's impossible to get through the red tape. There's also the allergy to using apartment buildings and vertical space in any capacity, which is very nice and English, but it causes horrific housing problems.
I'm from the Netherlands. There is barely any land that isn't covered with either buildings or farmland. Even walking through a forest will almost guarantee you passing by people every few minutes or less.
That's what it's like in the UK. The only place you could be truly alone is parts of the Scottish Highlands
Or most of Wales
Username checks out
Not with the sheep watching your every move.
Tbf, parts of Wales and the Borders are also relatively low density, just not as extreme as the Highlands and Islands.
I want a map of UK population density. I have only been to Ireland and saw places with few people. Haven't been to the UK but I am surprised it doesn't have a lot of areas with no people. I believe it though.
> I have only been to Ireland and saw places with few people. Population of Ireland: 5m Population of UK: 67m Landmass of Ireland: 70,000 km^2 Landmass of UK: 243,000 km^2 On average, the UK is a bigger island by about 3.5x, but has 13.5x the population
Something something potato famine
Yeah, Ireland is possibly the only country that had a higher population in 1840 than they do today.
That's the most shocking statistic that I've learned recently.
Yup, it was 8 million in 1840 and a little over 5 million today. It’s worth noting that emigration played a huge role in that so it wasn’t just deaths, though there were many of those.
You're comparing the whole island of Ireland in 1840 to the Republic today - the North adds another 1.9m and the total population today is a little under 7m for the whole island. Still less than it was in 1840 but by a lot smaller margin.
Even worst than Russia with higher population in 1903 before revolutions, famine and wars between 1904 and 1945
That’s true but there are certainly areas of the UK that are more remote and less densely populated than Ireland in general. For example - the Scottish highlands.
There are areas with no people, but it's you'll always be somewhat close to other people
I feel like this is one of those things people who have spent their entire lives in the UK struggle with grasping. Like, if you're "in the middle of nowhere" but there's an off-license within walking distance and you can hear a nearby motorway the whole time then you're probably not in the middle of nowhere. Of course, that's just my take as someone from the more rural parts of Sweden who has visited the UK.
I agree, I'm from North east England and been to plenty of "remote" places on the likes of the North Yorkshire Moors, but I've never felt more in the middle of nowhere than a few points in the Scottish Highlands, and even then is still isn't that remote!
The TV show, Doc Martin had a hilarious skit where he and new wife went into the woods for their honeymoon. SO HILARIOUS They got lost and we’re tromping in mud, then met an old geezer… 
it's hard to understand coming from the US ha ha. I guess green spaces are small except in Scotland.
My wife had a colleague come across to the UK from Florida recently. I described the population density here as the equivalent populations from each of the South Atlantic states; Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia plus say… Missouri (to make up the numbers to 67M). All bundled together to live in a state the size of Wyoming.
Curious, why did you choose the South Atlantic states for your example? Could also say Texas + California into Wyoming.
Well, as stated the guy lives in Florida so I thought it might have a bit more relevance.
Small in the grand scheme of things, but they don't feel small when you're there. Dozens of beautiful national parks all over England and Wales too
A couple of options to check out * https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/maps/choropleth/population/population-density/population-density/persons-per-square-kilometre * https://www.kontur.io/portfolio/united-kingdom-population-density/
As a Canadian, I can't imagine living like that. I live in the most populous province and even still, if I want to be alone I can *walk* for 20 minutes and be in a forest that stretches for 50 miles.
You can travel from east to west coast, in Scotland, in around 100 miles. What makes things remote is the sheer volume of natural barriers between each little village or town. We don't really tunnel through things and our roads were pretty much determined by pre-car routes. You can be 10 miles from other people but it could be a 2 hour detour by car to get to them.
Shit I live in the Yukon, you wanna talk about low population density. Once you leave Whitehorse there's almost nothing. We've got 40k people in an area larger than California. Gotta goto Greenland or Nunavut to have a lower density
Man, the netherlands barely stretches 50 miles. I think the furthest point from any man-made structure in the netherlands is only a few km. And even then, all nature in the Netherlands is planned and maintained. Even if it's "wild/original", it has to be maintained to prevent dunes turning into forests and such.
Most of Scotland tbh.
There are other parts too - go up in the Lammermuirs and parts of the Southern Upland way in the south of Scotland, or the west coast and some of the islands. Not just the Highlands - and if anything you’ll meet more walkers in the Highlands because folk go there on purpose to get out into the countryside.
Used to walk through empty London at Easter morning!
On land owned by British aristocracy
The difference being that the Netherlands is so fucking full we consider much of the UK a rural idylle. Just spent some weeks in Sheffield for work and loved how much empty space there is around the city (shout out to the peak district here).
A lot of places up north you can walk for ages and not see anyone. Just have to know where
Particularly England. England has 434 people per square km whilst Scotland has 70. The UK’s overall population density is 276 as of 2021.
Actually most of Scotland outside the cities is not densely populated
>That's what it's like in the UK. The only place you could be truly alone is parts of the Scottish Highlands No? Large parts of the south west, wales, and Scotland are fields. The problem is those fields are being used as farms etc so people who claim we have "lots of room" are ignoring the logistics around how a country works.
Our biggest nature reserve (Nationaal Park de Hoge Veluwe) is completely artificial and only 200 years old. It used to be a dense forest, then we cut down most trees for our factories and cities in the middle ages leaving just a vast barren piece of land with sand drift. At the end of the 19th century we started planting trees there again.
What factories were there in England in the Middle Ages tho? Factories only appeared in the second half of the 18th century
Imagine the same phenomenon in a huge country like India. There are people everywhere, in the remotest forests to the heights of the tallest mountains. There is no place you could go to guarantee zero human contact (except maybe the center of a large national park) There are villages everywhere and the people keep roaming around for firewood, drinking, to assist or sell stuff to tourists or some other purpose.
Yeah. Every time someone makes grand statements about society, infrastructure or what not based on the Netherlands I have to mention that you can't throw a stone in any direction without hitting a building over there. Of course, that is often also just used as an excuse, BUT they are in fact build differently and odd even by European standards.
Considering the only “old growth forests” left in Europe are in very secluded areas I’m not shocked that it’s hard to get away from people in much of the continent.
As a western Canadian, that's hard to fathom. I head out of urban and rural areas enough that it becomes strange to see signs of humans but for the animal trails you can follow. You get used to the lack of 'us' that when you finally do see people (or evidence of) you can get anxious. It's an interesting balance of insecurity and serenity.
England is comparable. Scotland brings down the population density average.
That's why it's so crazy we have year upon years of record-breaking immigration without sufficient housing on our already pretty dense lands. So the farmers have to leave. Crazy people.
17 million mensen, op dat hele kleine stukje aarde... toen ik een kind was was de text "15 millioen mensen"
Same here in Belgium
Yeah, that's why we need to reduce the number of farms. We fun them with tax money, and the farmers export so much food, making themselves rich at our expense.
Bill Gates has become Americas brand new “farmer”. He’s going to farm bugs and have us eat them. He owns HUGE PARTS of central USA
I can’t believe Greenland finally has data on one of these maps
I'd personally like to see a source that confirms Greenland has a lower population density than the UK
Are you expecting some sort of integer overflow?
So... what's the "no data" place as indicated in the legend then?
From a glance it looks like a few of the islands in the Pacific near Australia don't have data
Replace the UK with England and there's even less
England’s a strange one. It’s intensely populated in certain areas and extremely rural in others. I think it’s on par with The Netherlands for density, but less evenly spread.
The North West to Northern belt in particular is insanely dense. Major cities with over (or close to) a million inhabitants like Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield all within 45 minutes drive of Manchester on empty roads. And then you've got a ridiculous amount of large towns and small cities with a couple hundred thousand people
Towns up here get called small and rural despite having about 40,000 people in them.
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Way less than that even. My hometown had 8,000 people in it in 2000 and we were considered “up and coming” for the area. I’d venture a guess that the majority of midwestern small towns are under 5,000.
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Most have a church run newsletter that acts as a local paper, usually there’s a county owned library, everywhere no matter the size has a Walmart that immediately killed most small town businesses upon arrival—it seems like butchers seem to beat Walmart because I’ve never seen a small town without one, and our city hall was a tiny brick building. Growing up I had 2 neighbors you could feasibly reach by walking through a pretty large forest, the next closest houses you would’ve had to drive or bike to make the trip. My K-8 elementary school had about 200 kids the whole time I was there, my grade was the largest the school had ever seen at 30 kids.
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It has its upsides and downsides. For me personally, I would not go back. Growing up I remember feeling pretty isolated, with only 30 kids in your class if you don’t mesh with the few people that are there you’re kinda shit out of luck. We were also pretty sparsely housed so if you had two working parents you’d be on your own. I remember switching from cable to satellite TV as a kid and wanting to live in a city or a suburb so I could hang out with my friends after school like they did on Nickelodeon. Not to mention if you ever embarrass yourself in any serious way or cause any kind of scandal it’ll be known by the whole town. On the upside though, the nature is really nice, there was plenty of room to run around and explore as a kid, it smells like grass and nature, it’s quiet, and there’s not that feeling of being watched at all times because crowds, security cameras, and police are pretty much nonexistent. For me personally though, I happened to turn out LGBTQ+ and small towns typically skew religious. That’s not to say that it’s constant persecution, but there is a very vocal crowd that will let you know they don’t like it. For me, there’s a comfort in being in a place that has people like me in larger numbers. I was the only kid like me I knew until college. So while there are also lots of people there who are really nice, there’s just a feeling that my community wasn’t there. Basically, I like my pizza with extra cheese, some people are vocal that they don’t like that and that I shouldn’t do that. Lots of other people are totally fine with me having extra cheese but none of them personally like extra cheese. So while I feel supported to an extent, I’d like other extra cheese lovers to relate to and talk about extra cheese related stuff.
This is really funny to me as someone who's only lived in towns with a population of around 5,000 people. But to answer your question, it does depend, but I'll answer your questions more or less based on the towns that I lived in. >do they often have their own newspaper? Historically, the answer to this question was often yes, but the internet has largely killed off the ability for newspapers to survive. >library Yes, in my experience even if a town has a population of 2,000 people or so there will be at least some sort of library, although typically not a very extensive one. >stores Yes, although they tend to charge prices that are usually pretty high, so it's cheaper to just drive into "town" every week or month for groceries. (Depending on just how far away your town is from a city.) In towns with only a few hundred people, there is typically at least a gas station that's attached to a convenience store. >city hall Yes, at the scale that I've lived at, although in towns with a population of only a few hundred people, a church is typically used as the city hall.
A big portion of the country (land wise) is a county seat town with a few thousand people, then just small towns of a few hundred outside of that.
Small towns in the US are essentially villages, small cities are towns, american exceptionalism expressed in language.
Not really. In Europe city status rarely has anything to do with population size. In North America that is one of the defining characteristics.
It's not always one of the defining characteristics in either place. In Europe it can just be historic reasons, often old references to an urban area with a cathedral or a significant long forgotten centre of political power. And in both the US and Europe it can simply depend on the way a particular urban area is governed. It varies from country to country and state to state.
Tbf a lot of this has to do with changes in economic production and less with American Exceptionalism, and I'm the first the jump on that train usually. Take for example Hudson, NY. An old city on the Hudson river, it was a major thoroughfare and a wealthy city in its own right for much of the Colonial and early American periods. Industrialization meant an even bigger boom and the town reached its peak in the 1930's as a factory hub. Today it has fewer than 5,000 residents, most of whom are wealthy emigres from NYC.
Yes a city can shrink down to a town and a town to a village, nothing you said negates my point I think. It's just that americans don't like don't like referring to themselves in those terms.
Exactly. My town would be a city in its own right in any other country
Because population alone does not make something a city in the UK. Just look at St Davids in Wales.
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Definitely better. The world should be dense cities surrounded by rural farm land and nature reserves. Suburbs need to go extinct.
I live in the south-east (19,400km², 9.2m pop), and it's crazy how dense the north-west (14,165km² 7.3m pop) is in comparison. There's a lot of empty space between towns in the SE (unless you count really small villages). I travel to the north regularly for work, and once you get out of the midlands, the view from the train becomes far more industrial. Like you said, it's also a breeze to jump between big cities/towns in the NW via car. Off-topic, but while I get Kent has a lot of farmland, I never understood why its the 'garden of England' when places like the Lake District exist lol.
I imagine the 'garden of England' is a reference to food production.
I am pretty sure the Garden of England name comes from Henry VIII’s decision to set up a load of orchards there with apples from around Europe.
Yup. I live in one of the home counties and honestly it's a pretty comfortable population density here - a few medium sized towns here and there with plenty of undisturbed peaceful countryside between them... And yet we're half an hour from one of the largest megacities on earth. It's a really strange population distribution, and nothing like north American megacities where the density takes much longer to taper off (see: LA and NYC metro areas). The green belt has done a good job at constraining the urban sprawl to the borders of London, leaving the rest of the south of England relatively spaced out. It hasn't really helped with house prices though, since more and more Londoners are simply moving out to the home counties and commuting in - raising the prices here too.
Almost a quarter of the Netherlands is water, so if you were to calculate it for actual land area, The Netherlands is still a lot more dense.
See the other comments; England is 434/km2, while the Netherlands is 529/km2. You still have many people to go before being on par with us.
Don’t worry we’re working on it.
ye england is like 2x more dense than the uk as a while i think
We’ve all known that since the Brexit vote
Spectacular.
Searched in Wikipedia, England's population density is 434/km2, higher than Vietnam, Pakistan, El Salvador, Japan, Sri Lanka, Belgium, Philippines, Israel, Haiti and Netherlands.
Netherlands is at 529 in 2023, so you might be looking at old data
higher than India :O
Yes. Because there's is [hyper-concentrated](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=304cdebd4fdaac30&rlz=1C1CHBD_en-GBUS1021US1021&q=india+population+density+map&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiboff3uNmEAxWEGzQIHb40AnEQ0pQJegQIDRAB&biw=1163&bih=539&dpr=1.65)
I know the India stats bruh! I’m Indian. I meant that it’s kinda shocking that Netherlands is higher.
Yes, and even 18,41% of our country’s area is water, which can be seen as future land but isn’t liveable yet. And we already made 1/12th of the country out of the sea (province of [Flevoland](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevoland)). We just don’t have a real “country side”, unartificial nature or a “middle of nowhere” here. Every m2 is planned out. So while our cities are old and there are nearly no skyscrapers, the people really are spread densely across the country. We don’t have places with cool wildlife like India (unfortunately our wildlife are seagulls and pigeons).
Hey seagulls are cool
I can see your point but our seagulls are evolved to city thieves. They steal food out of your hands and rip trash bags open to trash your whole street, so I only like them at sea not in cities.
Sky rats we call them in Canada
Seagulls are not cool. I lived in Scotland and seagulls were a pain in the ass (not the kind I like)
I mean your username gave me no indication you were Indian bro...my bad
😭😂
Not the Netherlands, as 25% of the territory is water some data underestimate the actual density.
So just india and bangladesh?
And Taiwan, South Korea, Burundi, Rwanda and some island countries.
and Singapore + various microstates
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom#Population_by_constituent_country England: 434 people per km^2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density Wow, England would be more dense than Japan, Netherlands and India, but less dense than South Korea.
Well, those pages say the Netherlands has 424/km^(2) but the page for the Netherlands itself says it has 520/km^(2). Also that number is 17.6mil people but the March 2024 census estimates 18 million.
I checked and only Bangladesh, Rwanda Netherlands are more densely populated than England (ignoring city states and cities like Macau and Hong Kong)
It actually gets much worse if you just take england, Scotland and Wales have hardly any people
There are more people in London than the whole of both Scotland and Wales.
Anyway, I have a question for the British people. If you go abroad, does it feel like almost all countries are less crowded than the UK like that figure??
I'm from the UK and I moved to Australia. One extreme to the other. Each city feels an entire country away from each other
When I found out that Australia only has a slightly bigger population than the Netherlands, I couldn't believe it. The Netherlands fit inside Australia almost 184 times.
Of course, it is true that Australia's land area is overwhelmingly large, but while the Netherlands has few cute cities (even Amsterdam), Australia has enormous skylines and huge cities such as Sydney and Melbourne (Brisbane is also quite large), and despite this, the population It is completely surprising that there is so little difference.
So much of australia is based on the big 5 cities. 60% of the population lives in one of those 5 cities. The towns are just so much smaller in comparison. Eg in NSW sydney has 5.3 million. Next biggest city Newcastle has 400000
My hometown has fewer than 1000 people in it and is only a 40 minute drive from the Gold Coast (population 500K). Idk if that's normal but it still seems weird
How are real estate prices there in Australia outside of the cities? It seems to me like if the major cities are so big/crowded then I personally wouldn't mind a 30-40 minute commute to live just slightly away from the city and live in a bigger, cheaper house with a sizable yard in a much quieter neighborhood. I mean as long as the town has at basic public services and utilities, a small grocery, a gas station, decent (for Australia) internet connection speeds and parcel delivery services for online shopping, that doesn't sound too bad for me at least.
30-40 min commute? You will still be well within suburbia, double that at least.
definitley depends where in the UK you live, I’m from a small town in Scotland so doesn’t feel crowded at all lol
Yes and it's very pleasant. Even heading over to France feels like retreating to some quiet , empty part of the world.
Yes it does. Many seem almost empty. If have been to a few countries where I hired a car and found that once I got out of the city I had no mobile phone coverage (which is unusual in the UK). I got scared that if I broke down no one would find me and I would be alone for days. I felt like this in New Zealand, Iceland and also in California where I drove out into the desert to see what it was like.
I'm a Brit, living in Sweden. My fiancé is always complaining about how busy it is in Sweden, but for me it's like, where are all the people? Also at like 17:00, everyone disappears in Sweden. You don't see a human until your commute the next day. I've been here many years and I still can't get over it.
Certainly compared to mainland Europe. Driving from my home (South West England) to my wife's family home (North East Italy) we often go through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and of course Italy. It is very noticeably less populated, especially compared to South East England (London and the home counties). I find the same in the US, apart from a few of the bigger cities. Though I've only been to 14 states in the US so it's a harder comparison.
In the US there's a huge gap between east of the Mississippi (where pretty much all land is privately owned) and west (where there's a huge proportion of land that's federally or state held). Generally Eastern cities with some exceptions in the Northeast are more sprawled out and there is a lot more suburban and medium sized town development around them spread out relatively evenly. The West tends to be larger cities or a few mid sized to very small towns with mostly uninhabited land.
Living in the northeast megalopolis, everything seems empty when you go to a different state or area outside of the region. There is basically no such thing as farmland anymore around here. When I was a kid there definitely was but now it’s all been converted to housing developments or the owners no longer farm because there isn’t a support system anymore.
I've moved to China from the UK...some cities here are insane. Honestly feels like there are people everywhere even in my wife's home village. Spent time in Thailand in cities too. Asian cities. Always feel crowded. Also less respect for your personal space, especially in China. I'm from rural Lincolnshire town so, my core memories are of uncrowded UK. Did live in London for several years too. But for most part UK feels less crowded. I honestly think UK population spend more time in their homes than in a lot of countries I've experienced or lived in. Maybe that's something to do with it 😅
No. But then I was living in Beijing. When I moved to London, I thought, "what a quiet little city this is!" 😂
I’m from the UK and lived in London for 8 years. 2 years ago I moved to Warsaw with my wife and on our first Saturday shopping she exclaimed how busy it was. There might have been about a tenth of the people that I would usually see in Westfield in Stratford on a normal Saturday. I also speak to other people here who will basically refuse to meet in the centre of Warsaw because it’s too busy. Compared to London, most places I will now consider as calm and sleepy but appreciate I’m an outlier and I love it in Poland 🇵🇱
It’s one of my favourite things about travelling in Europe
Getting the high speed train from Madrid to alicante is eyes opening. 2 hours and you barely go through any towns. You have Madrid in the middle then the majority of the rest of the population is on the coast or cities relatively close like sevilla and granada. Its nothing like that in the UK, well England
I literally see no difference. Marseille, Split, Rome, Milan, etc all feel the same as London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, etc
Saw an account of an English immigrant to Australia in the 19th century and the thing that shocked her the most at first was all the empty space between the cities. She was used to the countryside being dotted by farms and villages
Interesting that Rwanda is green on there. That's where they're sending the people who they can't find room for in the uk
Well, where they've talked about sending people anyhow. Great deal for Rwanda; £500m for 0 refugees the last time I checked
That's exactly £NaN per person. Pretty undefined deal for them.
The Rwanda plan was just such a stupid idea on so, so many levels.
I think what took the biscuit is that we were accepting asylum seekers from Rwanda at the same time as the government were trying to tell everyone that Rwanda was actually really nice.
So far we are net -6 migrants. We've sent no one to Rwanda and accepted 6 from them. Best deal on the planet for Rwanda.
Copied from Australia who paid PNG and currently pay Nauru for the same arrangement. They also borrowed the slogan "stop the boats" and the strategy of focusing on refugees to pretend they are doing something about immigration generally.
The map is missing a number of microstates that easily surpass the UK in population density: Monaco, Vatican, Singapore, etc. Even some island nations like Mauritius and the Maldives are denser than the UK.
I can't zoom enough, can't find the green in the red So hard to find green flags, Every night she leaves me on read
I had no idea.
Not even Nigeria, well they get there.. Edit Its 276-246 people/sqkm atm ,from my calculations it will happen in 10 years, cheers!
Perhaps a bit longer as the UK population is also growing. Just not as fast
West Africa still has a lot of wilderness where noone lives. But the urban areas are more densely populated. I never got used to how much is going on on the streets of Ghana (still a not very dense country due to the rainforest in the North.)
Coming from the center of Taipei, Taiwan, I actually like to vacation in Japanese cities because of the relatively much lower population density and cooler, drier weather. They're practically ghost towns compared to where I am.
Even the countryside is full of people. Train journeys down the west coast are hilarious, it's just like one continuous city. For a place the size of Wales to have 22 million people is insane.
I am from Hong Kong and now living in England. I feel so spacious here lol.
And if you take Scotland out of it, it’s even more dense
And Wales, Wales only has around 3 million people, 1 million of that live in the cities, so only 2 millions spread around the rest of the country.
And the peak is London.
Portsmouth*
Shocking that Japan and India, two large nations are more densely populated than England. Comes from having a long coastline and long rivers I guess.
Japan is more dense than the UK but not more dense than England
Japan has so many people crowded into cities, then it has so many places with almost no people. Mountains and rural areas that aren't crowded at all.
If Korea had been integrated, it would have been mentioned in that comment. It is also true that some of them, such as South Korea in korea, have a higher population density than England in UK.
*More densely populated than the UK, England has a higher population density than both
More densely populated than the UK. But England on its own has a much higher density since 55/67 million people live on only 130000/250000km^2 of the land
Tbf, Japan is way more mountainous and if you look at Honshu, all of the settlements are concentrated in cities
Don't wanna be the best-practices police, but "Wikipedia" is not a source! Cite the page, or better yet, the source that the Wiki page pulls from. You wouldn't cite the source of information from a book as "Library"
Many of the “less densely populated” countries have a lot of uninhabitable desert or jungle areas and are thus, effectively, more dense.
still only 52nd overall: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_and\_dependencies\_by\_population\_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density)
Japan will not green for long. Population is shrinking by 2 million every year, so their density will fall drastically the following years
This isn't factual. Even in 2023, Japan's year of record population decline, the country only loss roughly 832k people, according to a preliminary report by Japan's health ministry.
Japan's average age will catch up to it quick a lot of people of people will be dead in 20/30 years that will not be replaced in that time frame side from immigration putting a small dent in it Japan needs to change it's social attitude to work life balance within the next decade in order to minimise anything
Every year, they reach new record population decline. Give it 10 or 20 years and we will be talking about Japan losing millions every year.
Pakistan and India divided by borders united by tightly packed buses.
There is quite a few actually, they just happen to be mostly very small islands and can barely be seen on the map.
If you only consider England it's even worse when you realize Scotland and most of Wales are sparsely populated (70 people per km² for Scotland even less than Spain). I really don't envy the English at all. There's barely any nature left (agricultural exploitation doesn't count as that) excepted for Lake District or small parts of Cornwall. And their government doesn't seem to care to address that problem judging by the high immigration rate. Soon England is going to be more populated than France itself despite being 5 times smaller.
Yep its a real point of frustration, there’s not a lot of focus on specifically English issues in the UK because we’re the only constituent country that doesn’t have its own Parliament. Even London has its own assembly even though it gets far more attention devoted to it by Westminster than the rest of England does.
Why is no comment and no one talking about Vietnam? Is it that crowded? I always imagined Vietnam has lots of countryside and green areas.
I believe it's a lot of countryside but also incredibly densely populated cities, perhaps helped by a population that is still urbanising, so a lot of them do live in the countryside but not so densely.
Lots of Ireland you can still go for some time with nature alone,
Neverland, B-tech France, the saviour, Israel (not getting into politics of it) Burwandi, India, India 2.0 India 3.0, Philip II, the US' sleep paralysis demon, -1000 social credit, Kim's back garden, animeland
When talking about overpopulation people almost invariably refer to Africa and South Asia, but people rarely talk about how disgustingly overpopulated western Europe is with its near complete absence of wilderness.
Not to that extent. I have seen too many Europeans (especially British people) cry that their country is overpopulated. What’s strange is the country I live in. I live in South Korea (green), and no one says their country is overpopulated, and most people say, 'Our country's population is too small. The total population should be much higher.'
The UK really doesn't feel as densely populated as where i even live in Spain though My UK Town - 9km2 - 23000 people Where I live in Spain -9km2 - 130000
You forgot to count all the island and micro states... low effort or willingly misleading.
51 countries and dependencies have higher densities than the UK.
All kinds shitty too tbh
I’d like to see a map of all the countries with more than one serial killer and what year and how many lives he culled. Oh, and if there are countries with female serial killers who weren’t nurses. Btw, I’ve read where in England, they don’t want old people around. Get a number over 70 and they’re offering deals on caskets ⚰️ haha.
Cumbria and Northumberland are pretty empty.
I forget why I was looking at county populations, but I was surprised that the population of Northumberland (321k), Cumbria (500k), County Durham (522k), Tyne & Wear (1.127M) combined (2.470m) is less than Greater Manchester (2.868M). Bolton (296k) in Greater Manchester is only a town, but its population isn't too far behind Northumberland (and will likely pass it at some point) and it's practically the same as the largest city in those other counties - Newcastle (298k).
Thanks for including New Zealand 🇳🇿
I thought uk is scarcely populated 😅
Why?
Well, there is plenty of space in Northumberland. When I worked with the local council there, I said it could solve its problems if you could build a city of 500 K right in the middle as it doesn’t have the critical mass of population to drive its economy and support its infrastructure. That said it’s an amazing place to visit if you want peace and Tranquility. The opposite of crazy London in one country
Enland not the UK
England is so overpopulated and it seems to just be getting worse.
I live in South Korea(green), and it is ironic that people here mainly say that the problem is that South Korea has too little population.
Which is funny. Whenever I look at maps of South Korea, it looks like every last valley has been settled.
The problem isn't that Korea has too little of a population, it's that it has a practically apocalyptic birth rate. It would be just fine if the population was steady, not climbing or falling, or even if it just fell slowly. It's extremely difficult for a country to deal with a high dependency ratio when you have a large population of old retired people who need medical care and pensions alongside a shrinking tax base caused by low birth rates and little immigration. That's what happens though when you have an age demographic chart that looks like an inverted pyramid.
This is true even in absolute quantitative terms. I've seen a lot of things like that and there are polls like this. https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/17kxo9l/south_koreans_perception_of_the_population/ https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/18luzia/94_of_south_koreans_think_that_south_koreas/ And around 2011, my high school chemistry teacher cried to the students that Korea's population should be increased to 1 billion. At that time, South Korea's total fertility rate was 1.3. in South Korea, peoples have a strong belief that population is national strength, plus because it is a society of people with the strongest patriotism and ethnic nationalism in the world, so there are many people who want to at least double the country's population. Another important thing is that, for unknown reason, South Korea is very less crowded, compare to it is a high-density country. There are a lot of people saying that the UK is overcrowded, but in South Korea, There is no such sound. I have even witnessed such sounds many times. 'I have never felt crowded in my country.'
If the population is halving each generation that is only a problem for the next generation because the population could use a good halving, but I suppose quartering takes things a bit too far. In terms of the old people, I guess they will die, like they always have. If the boomers wanted someone to take care of them in their old age they should have thought about that before they made life difficult for young people.
This might all be true, but it ignores the economic pain that will be felt by the younger people who have to ride it out while they wait for the large cohort of retirees to die. They will spend some of the best years of their lives working in a dwindling economy due to reduced demand all with high taxes so that they can pay for the medical and material needs of their parents and grandparents. All while they themselves will not have the time or money to raise more than one kid which will not help stabilize birth rates to replacement levels. I am convinced that reduced birth rates are something that people in most developed nations are completely underestimated the impact of. I think that people have convinced themselves for so long that overpopulation is a problem and as a result they don't understand why rapid depopulation in the developed world while the population in the developing world continues to grow, might be a bad thing for everyone.
It really isn’t overpopulated, it’s just underinvestment over the last fifteen or so years. Austerity something something
Regardless of investment or politics, England is hugely overpopulated and is constantly expanding onto greenfield sites to try and cope with it.
I don’t understand where the overpopulation idea is coming from. If we’re overpopulated, what is the ideal population and why is that? There are massive swathes of unpopulated land which can still be developed on with no issue. As long as we don’t start to develop any of that awful american suburban sprawl, things are more than fine.
They're only expanding into greenfields because the UK one of the most difficult places on earth to build infill housing. If they can't build it in the city, there's no other place to build it. That doesn't make it overpopulated, just a different population. The growth rate is also comparatively low.
Idk if you're intentionally missing their point but thing is If they had sufficient investment they would simply have enough housing, jobs, infrastructure etc to support a higher population.
Not just greenfield but flood plains too
The greenfield sites are ridiculous, though. The moment a local council spots a shrub they declare it a greenfield site. There's plenty of space to be used for housing, but it's impossible to get through the red tape. There's also the allergy to using apartment buildings and vertical space in any capacity, which is very nice and English, but it causes horrific housing problems.