Dear Mark
Mark Longair, who I was lucky enough to count as a friend for more than 20 years and work with for two, died last Saturday, 10 January 2026, aged 49. After Mark published his blog post the previous Sunday, I…
Mapping £2.6 billion of farm payments
Farmers in England are paid via the Environmental Stewardship Scheme to keep their land in good agricultural and environmental condition. This scheme is smaller than the better-known CAP payments, but still accounts for around £3 billion of public funding over…
My year-and-a-bit working on tech-for-good projects
In the past year or so I did a lot of work on public-interest tech and data projects. I was so busy writing code, designing systems and hiring people that I failed to write anything at all about why these…
How to use Land Registry data to explore land ownership near you
Land ownership in Britain is secretive, and always has been. About 18% of land in England and Wales is unregistered, and not even the government knows who owns it. Even information about registered land is not freely available – you have…
Using statistics to find the nicest (and nastiest) food at Waitrose
Using the Wilson score interval to identify the most delicious, and disgusting, foods at Britain’s best online supermarket. Jump to the results. The hardest bit of cooking, for me, has always been choosing what to cook. Sure, it’s fine if…
Sienna, Rihanna, Cameron and Usama: Baby names in England and Wales
If you are a parent, or soon to be a parent, you may already have discovered the US’s Baby Name Voyager. It’s a data-visualization classic, a wonderful way to bring 100 years of American baby names to life. And like…
Introducing… What Size Am I
For many women, there are few things more frustrating than trying on clothes. To put it in terms that my (mostly male) coder friends will understand: debugging CSS doesn’t come close to the blood-boiling irritation of trying to work out…
Forget 5.9% – some train fares rise today by four times inflation
Today, rail fares go up by an inflation-busting average of 5.9%, to howls of outrage from commuters and groups like Passenger Focus. But what many people don’t realise is that 5.9% is just an average. And while Passenger Focus came…
Train times v. house prices: the commuter belt, on a graph
We’re house-hunting. And for me, like most coders, house-hunting involves lots and lots and lots of screen-scraping. As well as crawling Rightmove listings, I’ve been looking at transport and house-price data. Specifically, I’ve scraped travel times to London by train…