Tag: Georgian
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Great Fires: Did the Towns That Burned Rebuild Bigger?
I read every fire in Wikipedia’s town articles and found 102 great town fires, 63% of them in the 1600s and 1700s. Three centuries on, the towns that burned are neither clearly bigger nor richer.
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Rotten Boroughs: Where Are They Now?
Before 1832 Gatton had 7 voters and two MPs while Manchester had none. I mapped all 56 boroughs the Reform Act abolished: today 25 are villages, a hamlet or an empty hill.
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Canal Mania: Did the Canal Towns Boom, and Do They Still Lead?
England’s canal towns grew about 4.0 times over between 1801 and 1861. But they were rising before the canals came, and today they are bigger, not richer.
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Whose ships sank where?
Two centuries of shipwrecks in Europe’s seas, from Wikipedia’s lists: 106,550 wrecks placed on the map by the flag they sailed under. British ships dominate the record, but the Bay of Biscay, the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the world wars tell other stories.
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Did lighthouses work?
Between 1760 and 1900 the coasts of Britain and Ireland were ringed with new lights. I counted the wrecks recorded at each spot before and after its light was lit. The wrecks came first.
