*Information*

These data were created by Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae, of Automatic Knowledge Ltd.

The GIS files shared here are a hexagonal representation of the UK's new parliamentary constituencies, published in summer 2023 and used in general elections thereafter.

You will see a version number and a date in the file names.

We give permission for anyone to use these files so long as you remember to credit us, using one of the following citations:

"Automatic Knowledge Ltd"

"Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae, Automatic Knowledge Ltd"

"Philip Brown and Alasdair Rae"

If you don't cite us then we're not going to sue you, but we might be mildly miffed. We are making this file available under the CC BY 4.0 licence and you can read about that here:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/


The overall shape of this hex configuration is based on the hex map created by Ben Flanagan of Esri UK, but we rebuilt the entire file from scratch using pieces of paper, donuts, coffee and WhatsApp. We also changed the layout in a few places.

Ben's original shapefile can be found here: https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=15baaa6fecd54aa4b7250780b6534682 and is available for use under a CC BY licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

We are publishing the file in different formats so there should be one that best suits your software. The file also contains the official GSS area codes for each constituency, as well as the electorate at the time the constituencies were created. The population data, as well as the constituency type information in the file, was compiled by mySociety and you can find it here: https://pages.mysociety.org/2025-constituencies/datasets/parliament_con_2025/latest

What the columns in our file mean

fid - just a number from 1 to 650
CTR_REG - an indication of which English region or UK country a constituency is in (e.g. East of England, Wales)
CRCODE - a two letter code relating to CTR_REG above (e.g. SE = South East)
3CODE - we created a unique 3 letter code for each constituency, the idea being that these could be used as labels in the middle of each hex so that people can figure out what's what - useful given the geographic distortion in hex maps
BCName - the name given to the constituency in the Boundary Commission files we used to create the data
AltName - sometimes (e.g. in Wales) constituencies have another name so that's why we added this column (e.g. Dwyrain Casnewydd for Newport East)
Country - this tells us which UK country a constituency is in
GSScode - the official Government Statistical Service (GSS) code for each constituency
Type - an indicator telling us if a constituency is a 'borough' or 'county' kind of constituency
Electorate - the electorate in each constituency at the time they were created, from mySociety data linked to above

Alasdair Rae and Philip Brown
Sheffield
November 2023