Demopolis is an interactive ward-level atlas of London's local elections, bringing political results and 2021 Census demographics together on a single map. It lets researchers, journalists, and citizens explore how each of London's wards voted on 7 May 2026, and how those outcomes line up with the social and economic make-up of each ward. The name — from the Greek dêmos (the people) and polis (the city) — frames the city as something read through its people and their votes.
Demopolis was created by Hiba Sameen, an economist and data scientist based in London, UK. Hiba has a PhD in Economics and her background spans academia, government and think tanks working on economic policy, alongside a strong interest in data science and data engineering. This project grew out of a fascination with how London's electoral geography maps onto its demographic geography — and a frustration with how hard it is to explore ward-level results and census data side by side.
Results colours each ward by its 2026 outcome — winning party, each Big-5 party's vote share, the top-2 margin (safe vs marginal), or turnout.
Bivariate explorer crosses any party's vote share (X axis) with any of 22 curated Census 2021 indicators (Y axis) across seven groups: education, age, ethnicity, national identity / religion, class & occupation, tenure, and mobility & deprivation. Wards are split into tertiles on each axis and shaded with one of nine colours. The stats panel reports the bivariate Pearson r and the standardised OLS partial effect — controlling for 30 other census variables — for the selected pair.
Results and demographics are joined to ONS May 2024 ward boundaries by GSS code. Bivariate classes use within-London tertile breaks on each axis. The OLS β and t-statistic are partial effects from a model controlling for 30 other census variables; p-values are uncorrected for spatial autocorrelation and should be read as ordinal rather than exact.
The 2026 cycle is England-only — there were no Scottish or Welsh local elections. Within London, four boroughs (Newham, Tower Hamlets, Brent, Redbridge) published late and were filled from non-Democracy Club sources. Newham's vote counts are largely placeholder ("winners-only synthetic"): per-candidate votes had not been recorded for most Newham wards when the data was snapshotted, so the winning party for those wards is correct but the vote shares are not. Wards with no declared result appear in dashed grey.
Generated by build_demopolis.py. Re-run after fresh Democracy Club data to refresh.