To live in Britain is to be a lover of islands – their shape, their size, the daydreams they inspire. The hills with sea views we can imagine roaming, the smooth clifftop sward we can imagine pitching our tent on, the west-facing coves we can imagine contemplating the infinite in. The folk at Ordnance Survey are no less prone to island dreams as you can see from this lovely bit of lunch-break work by their GeoDataViz team, with Alasdair Rae at the University of Sheffield. They found Britain has 82 islands larger than 5km2, and here they are in all their fractal glory, and descending order of size. Someone lives on all but five (Taransay, Scarp, Pabbay, Mingulay and Hirta)...
Download this poster of Britain’s 82 biggest islands
