b north south

This map shows places with names beginning "North" and "South".

The diagram below shows the differences between the eastings and between the northings for places with

names beginning "North" and beginning "South". Ideally, if two places are separated by a greater North-South

distance than their East-West distance, they would be called "North ----" and "South ----" rather than

"East ----" and "West ----". These places would lie above the two sloping red lines.

The histogram at the right hand side shows the differences between the N-S and E-W coordinates for pairs

of places. They should always be positive. Given that the OS Open Data are given as the centres of the

containing 1 km squares rather than as exact values, the data are mainly compatilble with this idea.

There is little evidence of an East-West bias. The mean separation of pairs of places is about 1.72 km, with

an rms deviation of about 1.02 km. The circles in the diagram have had a random amount with a range of

+- 0.5 km added to their X and Y coordinates to break the degeneracy.