Category: Data stories
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Ring the changes: where England’s bells hang
Dove’s Guide lists 7,262 rings of church bells hung for change ringing, 93% of them in England. I mapped them all, and found Victoria’s jubilees, two world wars and seven centuries of bell founding in the dates on the bells.
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How many names on your war memorial?
I counted the First World War names on 14,119 community memorials in the Imperial War Museums register. A typical village memorial carries 18.3 names for every 1,000 people living there today, and only 36 of 6,108 small places record no dead.
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Did the railway invent the seaside?
Britain’s seaside resorts were already growing 1.6% a year before any railway reached them. The line brought a burst in the decade it opened, and did most for resorts that had been slow before.
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Captain Swing: did the riots follow the machines?
In 1830 English farm labourers smashed threshing machines. Using Caprettini and Voth’s open data I mapped 3,117 Swing incidents: parishes with a recorded machine were twice as likely to riot, but 90% of riotous parishes had no machine at all.
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Market towns that failed: what became of the medieval markets of England and Wales?
Medieval kings licensed markets in their thousands, each a bet that a village would become a town. I followed all 2,173 market places in England and Wales to today: 665 are towns, 1,168 are villages, and a few are fields or sea.
