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I've scoured the internet (including stack exchange) and trialled a few datasets but none have suited my needs. I'm after UK town and city names with long/lat positions and populations (so I can style which towns to label by rules).

I'm aware of the OS Names product but that doesn't have populations and there are hundreds of spreadsheets to amalgamate into a single usable .csv file.

I found this (global dataset): https://www.maxmind.com/en/free-world-cities-database which is ideal. However the file is too big to clip and QGIS's clipping window closes as soon as I run it.

philshem
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James B
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  • I require populations as well – James B Apr 28 '17 at 14:27
  • The GeoNames DB that I referenced here has population data, but the number of records containing actual population data <> 0 is low (maybe 20%) –  Apr 28 '17 at 14:43
  • The maxmind page you link itself says its obsolete, but one option would be to download and clip using a separate standalone program (eg, Perl script) and then import into qgis? –  Apr 28 '17 at 21:42

2 Answers2

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Please see my answer here.

OpenStreetMap has a tag "population" as well. I've checked about half of the cities in the query here and there was always a population tag with some value. However, there is no source:population tag so we don't know the source and the up-to-dateness of this data.

juminet
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I would source the population statistics and the Lat/Lon information separately and just perform a simple join to amalgamate the datasets. Census population info can be downloaded here, with further options on -

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/datasets/2011censuskeystatisticsandquickstatisticsforwardsandoutputareasinenglandandwales

Once the necessary datasets have been sourced a join with a product such as OS Open Names can provide the required output.

albert
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ProudGIS
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