Tag: Persistence test

• 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.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories

  Britain, cities, England, industry, Lost places, medieval, Persistence test, Plague, population, Present day, Towns and cities, Wales

• 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.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories

  Census, cities, history, industry, Persistence test, population, Poverty and wealth, Present day, railways, Transport, Twentieth century, UK

• 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.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories

  Britain, Domesday, Domesday Book, England, history, industry, medieval, OpenStreetMap, Persistence test, Present day, Rivers, Wikidata

• 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.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories

  Census, cities, Early modern, England, Georgian, history, industry, Natural hazards, Persistence test, population, Towns and cities, Wikipedia

• 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.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories

  Britain, Census, Cornwall, elections, England, Georgian, history, Lost places, Parliament, Persistence test, population, Present day, Towns and cities