Born Here: Notable Births, Fame and Population in UK Towns and Cities, from Wikidata

Which towns produce more famous people than their size would suggest, and who is the most famous person born in each? I take every person in Wikidata whose recorded place of birth is in the United Kingdom (200,835 people) and match 166,586 of them, by the coordinates of their birthplace item, to 3,869 of 4,979 towns and cities with official populations: ONS built-up areas with Census 2021 counts for England and Wales, NRS localities for Scotland and NISRA settlements for Northern Ireland. Fame is measured by the number of Wikimedia sitelinks, checked against English Wikipedia page views. Notable births grow faster than population: across towns of 10,000 or more, the log-log slope is 1.30. London holds 14% of the residents of these towns but 26% of the matched births. Per head of today's population Scotland leads (43.6 per 10,000) and England trails (24.9). The ranking of towns depends strongly on era: for towns of 10,000 to 50,000, the rank correlation between births per head before 1900 and since 1950 is 0.59, and the post-1950 leaders are mostly towns with large hospitals, led by Bellshill. Births outside any counted town fall from 9.0% of placed births in the 1800s to 1.2% since 1980. Women are 18% of the notable people overall and 28% of those born since 2000. The note sets out the place-matching method and its failure modes, and argues that "born in" is a weak proxy for "from" in the hospital era. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/famous-births/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/famous-births. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/29/famous-births/.