Tag: Present day
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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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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.
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Who gets a blue plaque?
I read all 1,037 English Heritage plaques listed in London and mapped 6,476 plaques across the UK. Only 16% of the people on London’s plaques are women, but 54% of those honoured since 2020.
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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.
