I could make a map for you. Of course I have a
fantasy map portfolio which has my fancy art in it that you can check out, but I have a secondary mapping skill set that would adapt to what you want well.
1) I know how to get and work with the actual data for northern UK, so you can have an accurate map of the region based on its current data.
2) I have made modern maps with many, many data points. I'm actually working on one now. I don't tend to drop them into my portfolio because they're not my biggest selling feature but I've made multiple maps that are "a modern location with a high density of points of interest"
This is one I'm working on right now with 43 points of interest that will be noted on it, made with OSM street data, for an upcomining non-fiction book about Windsor Ontario's history.
windsor-text2-sepia.jpg
Could probably come up with something that lies between this "non-fiction" map style I use for non-fiction books for Canadian publishers, and the fancy fantasy art maps.
![Smile](images/cartographer/smilies/smile.gif)
My solution is to do an inset if one area has too high of an amount of legend nodes to be legible, like I did for this map, for a non-fiction book called 100 Miles of Baseball, where there were just too many nodes in the Detroit region requiring an inset to show it properly.
100 miles of baseball map.jpg
Of course these aren't my fanciest maps by a longshot, but they do both manage quite a lot of data on a contemporary street map. We can probably meet in the middle, by adding stylization appropriate to a more fanciful map if that's your desire, instead of modern fonts and simpler designs suitable to academic non-fiction.