The center of everything!

Here’s an interesting puzzle. Where is the heart of Greater Manchester?

It turns out it’s a little patch of land just off Blue Moon Street – near Manchester City’s ground. Not one to please the Reds! Or that the heart of Newcastle is 5 Dugdale Road. Well they are if you go off the electoral boundaries.

Of course Wales gets its own map

The centre of the Lake district national park is a lovely, but hard to reach spot near Codale Tarn. That’s in contrast to the Peaks, where the center is a muddy 2 minute walk to a copse just next to the A623

All the centers are based on regions defined by the Government and other sources. They provide shape files , descriptions of the shape or polygons of each area. I used a programme called Qgis, which is designed to handle mapping data and that has a feature that works out the centre of a polygon (called the Centroid). That data is then pretty easy to map. So if you have the polygon, the process is pretty simple.