Tag: maps
-
Britain’s last line of defence: the pillboxes and stop lines of 1940
I mapped 14,690 wartime defences recorded by Defence of Britain volunteers. The planned German landing beaches had 2.3 times the average density of defence, and 71% of sites with a known condition were still standing.
-
Did Beeching Kill Your Town?
3,331 railway stations closed in Britain between 1955 and 1975, and 643 towns in England and Wales lost every one. Size for size, they are a little poorer and more car-bound today, but they did not fall off a cliff.
-
From Domesday mills to modern mills
Domesday Book’s entries count 6,172 mills in 1086. Places that had one are 3.9 times as likely to have a mapped watermill within 1 km today, but no likelier to have a windmill, and the textile mills of the Industrial Revolution went somewhere else.
-
Ley lines, tested: are Britain’s ancient sites lined up more than chance allows?
Alfred Watkins saw straight lines of old sites across Herefordshire in 1921. I mapped 50,822 churches, barrows, stones, hillforts and holy wells and compared every alignment with random points: crowding, not planning, explains the leys.
-
Barm, bap, cob or roll? Britain’s bread roll lines
Roll, bun, bap, barm, cob, breadcake, teacake, muffin or batch? I mapped 20,038 answers from two dialect surveys, drew the lines where one word gives way to another, and checked whether the high street agrees.
