It's easy to forget quite how big London is. See it on a map of the UK and it's just a small dot in the bottom right hand corner, and the centre feels quite walkable. But Greater London occupies a lot of land, approximately 600 square miles in total, which is equivalent to a 30 mile by 20 mile rectangle. Imagine that footprint shifted elsewhere in the country.
Here's what happens if you shift London to the West Midlands.
I've positioned the centre of Birmingham on top of Charing Cross, the traditional centre of London, then tried to work out where its outlying towns would fall. It's only approximate because this is harder to do than it looks, but these are where the main centres of population end up.
• Wolverhampton would be around Pinner
• Walsall would be around Finchley
• Sutton Coldfield would be around Tottenham
• Dudley would be around Perivale
• West Bromwich would be around Willesden
• Stourbridge would be around Hounslow
• Solihull would be around Catford
• Coventry would be around Bluewater
Coventry is the outlier here, as it is within the West Midlands conurbation, landing just beyond my Greater London boundary. Meanwhile Redditch lands just inside, despite being in Worcestershire.
• Lichfield would be around Cheshunt
• Tamworth would be around Loughton
• Nuneaton would be around Ockendon
• Kidderminster would be around Shepperton
• Redditch would be around Coulsdon
• Royal Leamington Spa would be around Sevenoaks
In fact Greater London is about twice the size of the West Midlands metropolitan area, but it'd be all too easy to assume things were the other way round.
Then there are other towns and cities within the UK which you might think were fairly far apart but turn out not to be on a London scale. For example Liverpool and Manchester are 30 miles apart, and we think of those as very separate, but if you superimposed them onto a map of London they'd be the geographical equivalent of Heathrow and Upminster.
And OK that last Welsh one doesn't quite fit inside Greater London, but it nearly does because our capital city is really quite large. Try picturing some of those combinations in your head and you'll see what I mean.
Remember this the next time someone says London's just a rich little pinprick that doesn't deserve its fair share.
