Questions About Other Countries' Politics that You Were Too Afraid To Ask

[YL]

What's the deal with the Peak District? Why is it so undeveloped despite being next to a bunch of big cities--is it just downstream effects of topography?

Various reasons:

It is a National Park, and even in the relatively weak British sense of that designation that means it is protected from a lot of development, and has been since the middle of the 20th century.  There is a bit of upmarket suburban-style development dating from before then, especially close to some of the railway stations, but it didn't get that far.  (E.g. this, near Bamford station.  I suspect that without planning restrictions there'd be more of this.)

Much of the really empty land is remote from roads and is high, cold and windy and I'm not aware of its landowners ever being interested in attempting to develop it rather than use it for shooting a few grouse every August.  Further, it is used as a source of water (there are several big reservoirs) and that actually led to people being moved out in some areas, so some of those valleys are emptier of people now than they were 150 years ago.

[YL]

What's the deal with the Peak District? Why is it so undeveloped despite being next to a bunch of big cities--is it just downstream effects of topography?

Well yes, its mostly fairly large hills with relatively little land that can be easily built on.

(similarly, the *actual* Chilterns and Cotswolds don't have that many houses on them either)

Alasdair Rae produced this chart of the population of Great Britain (approximately) by altitude:


Note how thin it starts getting above about 200m. Most of the really empty bits of the Peak District are well above that, and the general area must contribute quite a bit to the upper parts of that chart, including Flash in the Staffordshire bit of the Peak, which is the UK's highest village.  As Al says the Valleys in South Wales will contribute a lot.

(Source for plot: http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2022/12/population-by-altitude-in-great-britain.html)

[YL]

7. But perhaps this is not a coincidence: an outsider may well be preferred to a more locally-rooted candidate from one of the other towns.

I've seen something similar as a possible explanation for the curious fact that none of the last three Orkney & Shetland MPs have been from either Orkney or Shetland.

[YL]

1. Bilston and Wednesfield for those who find such things interesting. Bilston is as core a part of the Black Country as Tipton or Darlaston, while Wednesfield is further out and has a lot of postwar housing, so has less of the... feel.

Bilston and Wednesfield were only annexed by Wolverhampton in the same 1960s round of local government changes in the area which massively expanded West Bromwich CB and turned Smethwick CB into Warley CB annexing Oldbury and Rowley Regis. Not being from the area, I'm not sure to what extent they regard themselves as part of Wolverhampton today.

Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland, here is an adminstrative map of Staffordshire from just before those changes, showing the various Black Country boroughs and districts as they existed at the time.

[YL]

I guess I'll provide the obvious follow-up to the Black Country Question: Is it really still the case?

Yes, there are plenty of examples worldwide of adjacent economic cores developing differently, maintaining differences, and ending up in different places with different cultures. And those cultures like to persist even when the resident populations shift and times change. There's no denying that.

However, in the modern age where everyone wants to be in or near a city, cause that's where the good paying jobs are, areas that might have once been distinct end up in an unholy mess of urbanization. The most obvious example that springs to my mind is San Francisco and Oakland, but there are many, many more worldwide.

It's not that hard to get past census data to examine this. As a percentage of the resident working age population, you still see larger shares commuters coming in the from the areas to the north, east, and south of Birmingham - the Black County does provide for some of her own. But in terms of raw people, Sandwell, Walsall, and Dudley are numbers 2 through 4 in terms of thousands of commuters to Birmingham. Sandwell is only surpassed slightly by Solihull. Conversely, as a sign of the urban integration, people from Birmingham go in the other direction for work. Solihull has the number one spot by far for Birmingham -> somewhere else, but Sandwell and Walsall are 2 and 3.

If you look at the official Travel to Work Areas you will note that there is a Birmingham TTWA which extends from the city north to Tamworth and south to Redditch and Bromsgrove and also includes urban Solihull (Solihull proper plus Chelmsley Wood and Castle Bromwich). None of this is very surprising.

There is also a Dudley TTWA which includes pretty much all of that borough together with a few adjoining areas in Staffordshire and Worcestershire together with most of Sandwell: Oldbury, West Brom, Tipton and Wednesbury. Then there is a rather extensive Wolverhampton & Walsall TTWA which includes pretty much all of the former and most of the latter, but also extends all the way to Lichfield and Cannock as well as west towards Telford (but not getting that far).

There are however bits of the "Black Country boroughs" which are in the Birmingham TTWA. Some of these are I think really spillover of genuine Birmingham suburbia and not really part of the Black Country in spite of the administrative boundary: Pheasey, Streetly, Great Barr. Then there's Smethwick, which I think is usually regarded as Black Country but more associated with Birmingham than the rest of it, and then some of the Warley area to the south of it which was also part of the old Smethwick borough.

However that link does also show you some "alternative TTWAs" using some subsets of occupations, and it does in fact turn out that for some of the higher status ones (e.g. the high qualifications one) the Birmingham, Dudley and Wolverhampton/Walsall TTWAs do all merge into one (but Coventry stays separate). And some weird things happen for some of the others too.