British cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 7 learning regions, matching the rounds on the United Kingdom guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 18 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

London

Founded as Londinium around AD 47 and the largest city in the world from about 1825 until the 1920s. Around 8.9 million people live inside the Greater London boundary and about 14 million in the built-up area around it. The City of London at its center is a separate square mile with its own police force and its own lord mayor.

Edinburgh

The capital since the fifteenth century, and the seat of a parliament that sat until 1707 and then not again until 1999. The castle stands on the plug of an extinct volcano and the Old and New Towns together are a World Heritage Site. Its festival, started in 1947, is the largest arts festival in the world.

Cardiff

Only named capital of Wales in 1955, which makes it one of the youngest capitals in Europe. It grew on coal from the valleys behind it: in 1913 Cardiff shipped more coal than any port in the world, about 10.7 million tonnes, and the docks that did it are now the bay the Senedd sits on.

Belfast

Linen first and then ships: Harland and Wolff was the largest shipyard in the world in the early twentieth century and built the Titanic, launched here in 1911. The city was the center of thirty years of conflict from the late 1960s, and the agreement that ended it was signed here in 1998.

Birmingham

About 1.15 million people, which makes its council the largest local authority in Europe. It made things nobody else did — buttons, guns, jewellery, steam engines — and in the 1760s the Lunar Society met here to argue about all of it: Boulton, Watt, Priestley and Darwin’s grandfather in one room once a month.

Manchester

The first industrial city in the world, built on cotton to the point that it was called Cottonopolis. Rutherford split the atom at its university in 1917, and in 1948 the Manchester Baby became the first machine anywhere to run a program stored in its own memory.

Liverpool

The first enclosed wet dock in the world opened here in 1715, and at the city’s height something like 40% of world trade passed through the port — including, for a century, a large share of the transatlantic slave trade, which the museum on the waterfront now documents. Nine million emigrants left for America through it.

Glasgow

Larger than Edinburgh, with about 635,000 people to the capital’s 530,000. It built ships: at its peak a fifth of all the ships in the world were launched on the Clyde, and "Clyde-built" was a guarantee anywhere they sailed. Charles Rennie Mackintosh gave it the architecture it is now best known for.

Newcastle upon Tyne

Coal was shipped from here from the thirteenth century, which is where "carrying coals to Newcastle" comes from. Hadrian’s Wall ended a few kilometers downriver at the place still called Wallsend. The seven bridges across the Tyne in the middle of the city are the thing everybody photographs.

Bristol

For centuries the second port in England after London, and heavily involved in the slave trade — a statue of one of the merchants who ran it was pulled down and thrown in the harbour in 2020. Brunel left it two things: the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the SS Great Britain, the first iron-hulled screw-driven ocean liner.

Oxford

There has been teaching here since at least 1096, which makes it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest anywhere still running. The Bodleian is one of six legal deposit libraries entitled to a copy of everything published in the country, and holds about 13 million items.

Cambridge

Founded in 1209 by scholars who walked out of Oxford after a quarrel with the town. The Cavendish Laboratory here found the electron in 1897, split the nucleus in 1932, and worked out the structure of DNA in 1953; the university has more Nobel laureates attached to it than any other.

York

Roman Eboracum, then Anglian Eoforwic, then the Viking capital Jorvik, and the layers are still stacked under the streets. Its walls run about 3.4 kilometers, the longest in England, and the Minster above them has the largest expanse of medieval stained glass in the country in one window.

Bath

The only hot springs in Britain rise here at about 46°C, and the Romans built a temple and a bath house over them and called the place Aquae Sulis. It was rebuilt almost entirely in honey-coloured Georgian terraces in the eighteenth century, and it is one of very few places inscribed twice on the World Heritage list.

Aberdeen

Built out of the granite quarried beside it, which is why it is grey and glitters in the rain. It was a fishing and university town until oil was found in the North Sea in the late 1960s, and it has been the center of that industry — and increasingly of the offshore wind that is replacing it — ever since.

Inverness

The capital of the Highlands and the smallest city in Scotland, with about 47,000 people. The valley behind it is the Great Glen, a fault line running southwest to the Atlantic with a chain of lochs in it. Culloden, where the last pitched battle on British soil was fought in 1746, is eight kilometers east of the town.

Lerwick

The capital of Shetland, which is about a hundred islands 170km north of the Scottish mainland and closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh. The islands were Norse until 1469, when they were pledged to Scotland against a Danish princess’s dowry and never redeemed; the dialect still carries the Norn words for wind and weather.

Penzance

The furthest west of any town in England, a few kilometers from Land’s End, and the port the boat leaves from for the Isles of Scilly. The Atlantic keeps it warmer than anywhere else in Britain in winter: palms grow outdoors here, and frost is rare enough to be news.

How this one works

The other maps of the United Kingdom

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the United Kingdom atlas page, the country itself on the United Kingdom guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.