Tag: open data
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Did the Pits Closing Still Show?
196 deep mines were working in Britain at the start of 1984, and 167 had closed by 1994. Forty years on, the pit towns of England and Wales have 2.0 points more adults long-term sick than similar towns, whenever their pit closed.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
