Which towns and cities do MPs talk about in the Commons, and which do they never mention? A century of Hansard, counted place by place, and every seat since 2005: how often it is named, and by whom.
Every word spoken in the House of Commons is printed in Hansard, and since 1909 it has been printed verbatim. That makes it a record of which places Parliament has had on its mind. I asked the Hansard search service a simple question for 1,661 towns, cities and districts across the UK: in how many Commons contributions does someone say "in Barnsley", "in Bath", "in Belfast", year by year? The answer is 297,134 counted mentions from 1909 to 2025. No speech text was downloaded; only the counts.
Each circle is a place, sized by how often it was mentioned. Switch to For its size to see which places get more attention than their population predicts, to Year by year to play through a century, or to Seats for constituencies since 2005. Tap a circle for its story; search for your town.
Counts of Commons contributions containing the phrase "in" plus the place name (Hansard API, UK Parliament). Hollow grey circles are names that are shared or ambiguous and are left out of the rankings (see section 06). Seats sit at a point for each constituency, not its boundary.
From 2005 to 2025, London was mentioned in 18,243 contributions with "in London", 16.1% of all the town and city mentions counted here. Then come Glasgow (2,975), Birmingham (2,657), Manchester (2,453) and Edinburgh (1,992). Across the whole century from 1909, London's share was 23.8%.
Most mentioned towns and cities in the Commons
Contributions containing "in" plus the name. Switch the period.
Bigger places get mentioned more, but not in proportion. Across the 175 places with at least 50,000 people, mentions grow with population to the power 1.34 (a correlation of 0.75 on log scales): a town ten times bigger gets about 21.8 times the mentions. The places furthest above that line are Kettering (6.47 times what its size predicts), Rotherham (4.14), York (3.78) and Taunton (3.56). Some of the gap is one big year (Rotherham's peak year was 2014, at 9.0 times its usual share), some is steady attention from the town's own member. Where the town and its seat share a name, the seat's own MP spoke 41% of the contributions naming Kettering since 2005, 35% for Harlow and 9% for Rotherham. Per head, the median place with 50,000 people or more was mentioned 232.8 times per 100,000 residents from 2005 to 2025.
Population and Commons mentions, 2005 to 2025
Towns and cities with 50,000 people or more (Census 2021 built-up areas in England and Wales, GeoNames elsewhere). Both axes are logarithmic. The line is the fitted trend; hover or tap a dot.
Most places are mentioned at a low, steady rate for decades, then once in a while a single year lifts them. For each place mentioned at least 150 times since 1909, I found the year in which its share of all town mentions was highest, compared with its usual year. The cards below are the biggest jumps; the titles under each are the debates that came up most often among up to 50 such contributions for that year returned by the Hansard search.
London's grip has loosened and tightened. Its share of town and city mentions was 48.8% in the 1910s, 40.2% in the 1940s, 23.8% in the 1980s and 11.2% in the 2020s.
London's share of town and city mentions, by decade
The nations tell a political story. The chart counts "in England", "in Scotland", "in Wales" and "in Northern Ireland" for every 100 town and city mentions in the same decade. Northern Ireland, created in 1921, was named about 10.1 times per 100 in the 1960s and 44.0 in the 1970s, the first decade of the Troubles. Scotland stayed between 49.0 and 59.0 from the 1910s to the 1970s and fell to 19.7 in the 2000s, the first decade of the Scottish Parliament. Wales rose from 5.1 in the 1920s to 24.7 in the 1970s.
The nations, for every 100 town and city mentions
MPs refer to each other by seat: "the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness". And members name their own seats all the time, to speak for them. Using the Members API I listed every MP who sat from 2005 to October 2026 (1,649 members) and every seat they held (946 seat names). For each seat I counted the contributions that contain its name while it existed, and how many of those came from its own members.
Across all seats, 10.9% of mentions of a seat's name came from its own MP; for the median seat it is 8.5% (half of all seats lie between 3.5% and 16.8%). The rest come from other members, very often in the "Member for" form: 423,109 of the 625,965 mentions contain "Member for" and the seat name. Members seldom say their own seat's full name; they are more likely to say "my constituency". The seat named most often in the "Member for" form is Strangford, about 246 times a year; the median seat about 29 times. Seats held by Sinn Féin members, who do not take their seats, have no mentions from their own member.
Share of each seat's mentions that come from its own MP
Seats mentioned at least 20 times, 2005 to 2026, whose names are not also an ambiguous place name.
This is a count of words, not a judgement of anyone's work. A seat named often by its own member may have a member who speaks a lot, or one who names the seat in every question; a seat named rarely may have a member who is a minister, a whip or the Speaker, who by convention speak less for their constituencies. Seats whose names are ordinary place names also pick up mentions of the town.
Counting words is easy; knowing which Reading is meant is not. I handled ambiguous names in four ways, and every one is listed in the data.
Ordinary words. "In reading the Bill", "in sale", "a deal": for 59 names that are also everyday words or names, I sampled up to 40 contributions containing "in" plus the name from 2005 to 2025 and checked whether the name had a capital letter. That gives a precision, and the counts are scaled by it: Bath keeps 88% of its count, Wells 81%, Deal 90% and Reading 60%. Names below 60%, or that the check cannot handle, are left out of the rankings (9 names: Sale at 59% of 17, Stone, Battle and Eye; March, which is nearly always the month; Street, too common to check; and a few more). Sale, the town in Greater Manchester, is real enough, but "in sale" turns up too often in other senses.
Namesakes. 29 names are better known as somewhere or something else: Washington, Perth, Boston, Salisbury (also the old name of Harare), the Duchy of Lancaster, the Windsor Framework, County Durham. They are shown hollow and left out. Shared names. 26 names belong to more than one UK place in my list (Newport, Bangor, Richmond and others) and cannot be split, so they are left out of the rankings too. Other meanings. For the any-mention count, names that are also members' surnames or whose "in" share is far below the norm are marked.
Counts, not text. The UK Parliament Hansard API has a timeline service that returns, for any search, the number of matching contributions in each year. I ran 7,279 searches in the House of Commons, contribution type "Spoken" (speeches, questions and answers, interventions), each for a quoted phrase, and kept only the counts. A contribution counts once however many times it uses the phrase.
Two measures. The headline measure is the phrase "in" plus the place name (for example "in Barnsley"). It is a consistent sample of how places come up when members talk about them as places, and it is not inflated by the "hon. Member for" formula, by surnames, or by division lists. The second measure counts any mention of the name, but only from 2005: before then the Hansard API files the lists of members voting in each division, with seats in brackets, as spoken contributions (the phrase “Tellers for the Ayes” is found in 355 spoken contributions in 2000 and 184 in 2004, but in at most one a year from 2005), which swamps the count for any seat name.
Places. The list is every UK place in GeoNames with 15,000 people or more and every town and city in OS Open Names, merged by name, plus a few short forms used in speech (Southend, Stockton, Leamington, Newark, Berwick, Merthyr, Hull, Stoke, Londonderry with Derry), the four nations and some London boroughs. A search for "in Southend" also finds "in Southend-on-Sea". Populations are Census 2021 built-up areas (ONS) for towns in England and Wales and GeoNames figures elsewhere; per-head figures use only real towns and cities of 50,000 people or more, and are a guide, not a measure. The list is today's UK, so Irish towns before 1922 are not counted, which raises London's share in the 1910s. Where one name begins another, the longer name's "in" count is taken off the shorter one ("in Bury" also finds "in Bury St Edmunds"; 35 such pairs).
Seats. Members and seats come from the UK Parliament Members API. A member's own mentions are those they spoke while holding the seat. Seats are placed at points from the sister project Who Won Here?; 939 of 946 seat names have a point.
Limits. Search counts depend on Parliament's search index and on how the record was digitised; older volumes were scanned and may miss words. The number of contributions per year changes over time (longer sittings, more questions), so the long view uses shares of all counted mentions, not raw counts. Hansard text is the record of what was said, edited for clarity. The Lords, written questions and committees are not counted.