How would the UK look if you were to only keep the land areas that voted leave or remain respectively?

Our Brexit Isles maps are inspired by the cartographic map of ‘Two Americas’ made by Tim Wallace in 2016. This blog will follow the steps used to create the maps and some of the cartographic choices made by the Media Maps team.

The approach

To begin with, a basemap must be chosen that is suitable for showing land areas without losing the details of geographic features (mountains, rivers, lakes and coastlines). For this project the World Oceans basemap, included with ArcGIS Pro, was used. I chose to keep the Transparency at 0% but turn the place labels (the reference layer) off, to avoid cluttering the map whilst I was editing away.

I brought in a CSV file containing the remain or leave attributes for each local authority area, which was obtained from the Electoral Commission for England, Wales and Scotland and the Electoral Office of Northern Ireland.

After importing the data, a join was used on a Local Authority Area shapefile from the Ordnance Survey that would be used to visualize the data. I chose to join the data by the GeoCode attribute as this was more accurate than the slight differences in area/region names between the two files.