In the Rivers of London series, it sometimes seems our main characters can't throw a stick without hitting a Genius Loci, talking fox or group of rogue American practitioners. How large and internationally widespread is the magical community in the series?
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Do you want a Word-of-God quote from Ben Abramovich or speculation based on the books so far? As there's no geographical, spiritual or mana-based magic involved, magic is literally everywhere and anyone can pick it up (Mr. Nolfi learned it on spec from his mother, the Jazz Vampires were accidentally and unknowingly taught it by their music mistress, the merchant bankers unwittingly tapped into it in their ceremonies, the high fey can walk between "dimensions", the quiet people are inherently magical, other nations have their own "traditions" and so on) the list is potentially endless.– SprattyCommented Jul 6, 2021 at 9:12
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@Spratty I'll take either. The huge variety you've listed is one of the key reasons for the difficulties everyone seems to be having with their peaceful stick throwing.– JontiaCommented Jul 6, 2021 at 9:40
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1In that case I wish you the very best of British luck :-) I'm not aware of any W-o-G from Abramovich (but I'm not obsessive about checking everything he says, either [I'll put my hands up to being moderately obsessive about the books, and I still haven't stopped opening my hand and saying "lux", just in case]), and I would truly love to see an exhaustive list of practitioners/affected persons/gods/fey/traditions/influences/ghosts/foxes and so on - although I suspect a list so dense would undergo gravitational collapse and become a black hole for my reading time.– SprattyCommented Jul 6, 2021 at 9:45
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1 Answer
As far as I can tell there isn't a definitive answer in the stories as yet. Even what detail there is contains hedging from the character supplying the answer. But it looks like it is possible that around 0.5% of the population is special in some way.
"How many special people. In the whole country?"
"Thousands" I said. "Hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as a million"
The October Man - Chapter 9, High Places
The October Man being set in Germany, the population is around 83 million.
This would mean around 45,000 special people living in London.
With specific references to wizards the best figures come from Moon Over Soho, and are pulled out on Follypedia.
Operation Spatchcock directly resulted in the deaths of at least 2396 Ambrose House alumni, along with an unspecified number of British and other Allied wizards. Nightingale estimated that 3 out of 5 of every British wizard of military age (60%) died during the raid.
The UK population being around 50million at this time, a wizarding population via Ambrose house of 4,000 or even doubling that for "unlicensed practitioners" would represent a tiny fraction of the special population, potentially 1/4 of a million people, let alone that of the country as a whole. To put that into scale in 2018 there were 8,000 Forestry workers in the UK according to ONS.