UNITED KINGDOM · DOCUMENTED PLACES AND CONNECTIONS
Follow Hadrian’s Wall across changing terrain, then explore the United Kingdom through projects about Roman Britain, water, language and travel.
Start with the route and terrain of Hadrian’s Wall, then find projects by place.
ONE WALL, 114.6 KM OF TERRAIN
Move the slider or choose an anchor on the map. The profile shows estimated elevation; the panel names the nearest documented place and states what the evidence says about it.
Estimated elevation at the selected point
Distance follows the modelled line, not the walking trail.
NEAREST NAMED ANCHOR
Anchor at km 40.0; estimated elevation 68 m. Its position is supported by visible remains.
Hadrian's Wall, mile by mile: what survives and where to stop ↗Open the anchor’s sourceElevation uses a smoothed SRTM profile sampled at roughly 200 m. The profile peaks at 322 m; the raw DEM crest reaches 337 m, while the Winshields trig point is 345 m. The profile follows the modelled Segedunum–Bowness route; 114.573 km measured by summing distances between 45 verified anchors. It is about 2.5% shorter than the 117.5 km cited by English Heritage because straight segments cut bends.
Project with a named place
Twelve sourced stops on what Britain and Romania left in each other, from a hoard of nails in Scotland and Dacians on Hadrian’s Wall to jets built in Bucharest; at the end you look up how many Romania-born people live in your area of England or Wales.
FIND A STORY BY PLACE
Choose a region to see projects whose sources name it. These editorial groups are not an exhaustive census of local projects.
Projects centred on London: streets, transport, weather, history and infrastructure.
26 selected projects
Project with a named place
At Heathrow it rains, 1 mm or more, on three days in ten: 109 days a year. Paris, measured at Orly, gets the same; New York gets twice the rain on fewer wet days. Every day from 1 January 1960 to 31 August 2026 is one mark on a wall of days, any date can be followed year by year, and with a year of birth the page counts the birthdays it rained on.
Project with a named place
London’s commonest pub name is The Crown, ahead of the Prince of Wales and the Red Lion: 31 of the 3,155 pubs mapped by OpenStreetMap’s volunteers. Half of the city’s postcodes have a mapped pub within 286 m in a straight line, and the official count of pubs and bars fell from 4,835 in 2001 to 3,525 in 2024, with Hackney the only borough that rose. A map of London drawn only from its pubs, with a result and a picture for each of 217 postcode districts.
Project with a named place
London’s official blue plaque scheme, run today by English Heritage, has 1,035 plaques: 166 are in W1, and 31 of the 120 London postal districts have none. 152 of the 1,010 plaques to a person honour a woman, and the median wait between death and plaque is 49 years. All 3,942 plaques on record, of every kind, on a map drawn from postcodes, with the plaque nearest any postcode and the words on it.
Project with a named place
London's planning rules protect thirteen lines of sight to St Paul's, the Palace of Westminster and the Tower; the longest runs 15.6 km from a gap kept in a hedge in Richmond Park. All thirteen, drawn from the government's 2012 Directions, with the height limit under each, the real ground and roofs from laser survey, and a postcode look-up.
Project with a named place
At 10,528 of Greater London's 177,041 postcodes the ground is lower than an ordinary spring high tide at London Bridge (3.9 m above Ordnance Datum). Any postcode set on a tide staff beside the levels of 1928 and 1953, on the city's laser-surveyed relief, and the Thames Barrier's 221 closures counted winter by winter.
Project with a named place
London's postcode numbers are alphabetical: in March 1917 the Post Office gave 1 to each district's main office and numbered the other delivery offices by name, so Hackney is E8 and SE2 is 15 km from SE1. All 120 districts on a map drawn from 110,673 postcodes, each with its own sentence and picture, and the 5,655 lines of the 1917 street list to search.
Project with a named place
In 1898–9 Charles Booth’s investigators coloured London’s streets in seven colours, from black and blue for the poorest to yellow for the wealthy. Choose a colour to see where it was printed, or look up a street. In English and Romanian.
Project with a named place
The British pillar box was red in Jersey in 1852, green from 1859 and red again from 1874, London first, and the phone box’s architect wanted it silver. This page follows four London objects, the post box, the phone box, the bus and the Underground logo, year by year from 1852 to 1946 through 18 entries from the record: what the Postal Museum, Historic England and BT Archives say at each change. On the way there is one question: what did Scott write in 1935 about red kiosks in the countryside?
Project with a named place
UK Parliament says one old penny on the Great Clock’s pendulum makes it gain 0.4 seconds a day. Slide the coin along the 4.4-metre rod to see where it speeds the clock, where it does nothing and where it slows it; then let the days run, hear the hour strike in a real recording and make a card of your tray.
Project with a named place
A night map of London's bell towers: pick a night and the towers listing a practice in Dove's Guide light up, tap one to hear its bells, synthesised at the frequencies in the ringers' database, while the order of the ropes changes row by row. Four towers, including St Mary-le-Bow, also have real openly licensed recordings.
Project with a named place
Daily tap counts at 434 London stations, January 2019 to September 2026, wound into rings: one ring per year, one slice per day. Southfields lights up for Wimbledon, Arsenal station follows the fixture list, Ladbroke Grove has no row on Carnival days, and on Christmas Day TfL counts zero Tube journeys. Pick your station and a date of your own.
Project with a named place
Price ten fares across four dated runs — an Exchange run of 1655, a lawyer's shilling of 1662, two admeasured miles of 1715, a GPO circle of 1832 — then judge who the paper meter served, on two dated proof rails.
Project with a named place
In November 1849, a giant waterlily leaf at Chatsworth held an eight-year-old girl. The gardener who weighed it sketched on blotting paper, at Derby, the most extensive building in Europe — and over six million people walked through it. Load the leaf yourself, until it holds Annie. In Romanian and English.
Project with a named place
Tick twelve slips across three coffeehouse tapes — brokers’ talk at Jonathan’s, ship news at Lloyd’s, the auction hammer at Garraway’s — then judge what emptied the houses, on two dated proof rails.
Project with a named place
June 1858: the Thames sinks, the heat bakes the banks, and Parliament's curtains soak in chloride of lime. Stand at Crossness at high water and open the sluice gates: a tide's worth of London sets off downriver on the ebb. In Romanian and English.
Project with a named place
London, 5–9 December 1952: five days of yellow fog in which, at night, you could not see your feet — and three months of dying after the sky cleared. You walk the blind street, lift the lid yourself, and put the influenza alibi to the arithmetic. In Romanian and English.
Project with a named place
The Fleet from Hampstead to the Thames: eight beats of the course, a four-map dated slider (1559–1896), twelve acts of the burial, and ten traces to walk.
Project with a named place
All 272 London Underground stations and the 44 that closed or moved, on a map you can drag from 1863 to today. The ghost stations, the one between Angel and Old Street that now heats homes, and where every name comes from.
Project with a named place
204 London names parsed into stem and ending: a decoder across Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Norman and modern layers, the earliest forms ever written down, and a game of twelve folk traps.
Project with a named place
Bedlem was already a form of Bethlehem when a London priory founded in 1247 started changing what it meant. Ride two tracks — the building crosses London, the word escapes toward chaos — and place seven historical uses on their sense.
Project with a named place
Ride a fictional Tube line through all 32 boroughs and the City: what each name meant in Old English, who built it, and the oddities it keeps — from Croydon's Mayday to Stamford Bridge being in Fulham.
Project with a named place
Streets of booths, printing presses and taverns on the frozen river, from Evelyn's diary and the accounts of 1814. The cold that froze the Thames came back once, in 1963; with the old bridge gone, the river kept flowing.
Project with a named place
The 1666 fire spreads across today's City, day by day, from the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn. The losses were counted carefully; the dead were not.
Project with a named place
There are eels in London's rivers, and every one of them hatched in the Atlantic, thousands of kilometres away, where nobody has ever seen an eel spawn. This page follows one such life, step by step: the transparent leaf adrift, the climb up the tidal Thames, the years in a London river, the body's change and the leaving. At Molesey Weir in 2025, the volunteers' traps caught, on average, one young eel for every four and a half days of trapping.
Project with a named place
The diary of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, the Persian envoy who conquered — and sharply judged — London in 1810.
Project with a named place
Sunset, sunrise and twilight times for London through 2026–27, the clocks going back on 25 October, and how many of your weekday journeys home start after sunset.
“Great Britain” and “United Kingdom” are not synonyms. Choose a definition to see what it contains, then a region to open place-linked projects.
Project with a named place
Twelve sourced stops on what Britain and Romania left in each other, from a hoard of nails in Scotland and Dacians on Hadrian’s Wall to jets built in Bucharest; at the end you look up how many Romania-born people live in your area of England or Wales.
Project with a named place
How Proto-Germanic *walhaz* became the name of the Welsh, the Vlachs, Wallonia and Wallachia — with a map, sources and the limits of certainty.
Project with a named place
Doggerland joined Britain to Denmark and the Netherlands until the sea drowned it. A relief map of today’s sea floor, with 1,873 river channels, lakes and other features mapped beneath it, and the computed shore of any moment since 16,000 years ago. For each North Sea town, it shows how far away the shore was 10,500 years ago.
This is where most projects cluster: streets, Tube, bells, plaques, water, fire and weather. Filter London to find them together.
Project with a named place
At Heathrow it rains, 1 mm or more, on three days in ten: 109 days a year. Paris, measured at Orly, gets the same; New York gets twice the rain on fewer wet days. Every day from 1 January 1960 to 31 August 2026 is one mark on a wall of days, any date can be followed year by year, and with a year of birth the page counts the birthdays it rained on.
Project with a named place
London’s commonest pub name is The Crown, ahead of the Prince of Wales and the Red Lion: 31 of the 3,155 pubs mapped by OpenStreetMap’s volunteers. Half of the city’s postcodes have a mapped pub within 286 m in a straight line, and the official count of pubs and bars fell from 4,835 in 2001 to 3,525 in 2024, with Hackney the only borough that rose. A map of London drawn only from its pubs, with a result and a picture for each of 217 postcode districts.
Project with a named place
London’s official blue plaque scheme, run today by English Heritage, has 1,035 plaques: 166 are in W1, and 31 of the 120 London postal districts have none. 152 of the 1,010 plaques to a person honour a woman, and the median wait between death and plaque is 49 years. All 3,942 plaques on record, of every kind, on a map drawn from postcodes, with the plaque nearest any postcode and the words on it.
Project with a named place
London's planning rules protect thirteen lines of sight to St Paul's, the Palace of Westminster and the Tower; the longest runs 15.6 km from a gap kept in a hedge in Richmond Park. All thirteen, drawn from the government's 2012 Directions, with the height limit under each, the real ground and roofs from laser survey, and a postcode look-up.
Project with a named place
At 10,528 of Greater London's 177,041 postcodes the ground is lower than an ordinary spring high tide at London Bridge (3.9 m above Ordnance Datum). Any postcode set on a tide staff beside the levels of 1928 and 1953, on the city's laser-surveyed relief, and the Thames Barrier's 221 closures counted winter by winter.
Project with a named place
London's postcode numbers are alphabetical: in March 1917 the Post Office gave 1 to each district's main office and numbered the other delivery offices by name, so Hackney is E8 and SE2 is 15 km from SE1. All 120 districts on a map drawn from 110,673 postcodes, each with its own sentence and picture, and the 5,655 lines of the 1917 street list to search.
Wales has few dedicated projects; Scotland and Northern Ireland do not yet have a selected local page. UK-wide projects have a broader scope and are not substitutes for a country-by-country map.
Project with a named place
A wooded hill in Powys hides an Iron Age hillfort. Slide from the tree tops to the laser-measured ground: the rampart, ditch, gateway and hollows found in two surveys.
Project with a named place
Twelve names from Romania’s top-20 lists appear in no baby-name table for England and Wales from 1996 to 2003. In 2020 they were given to 611 babies. What the official tables can and cannot count, tested on Polish names.
Project with a named place
A UK postcode sits in a council, a health board, a network region and a flood map that do not share a border. Type yours and see which recent policies reach that street.
The tool’s points are ONS-published geographic centroids, not project coordinates. Regions group pages by the places and scope named in their own sources; this is not an exhaustive inventory of every country.
Project with a named place
Ride a fictional Tube line through all 32 boroughs and the City: what each name meant in Old English, who built it, and the oddities it keeps — from Croydon's Mayday to Stamford Bridge being in Fulham.
Project with a named place
Police in England and Wales recorded 119,365 vehicle thefts in the year to March 2026, one every 4 minutes 24 seconds. How keyless relay attacks work, why car theft is rising again, and what stops it.
Project with a named place
190 years of English rainfall: winter 2025–26 among the wettest, summer 2026 among the driest.
United Kingdom · 45 projects
Search titles, descriptions and topic terms, or choose a theme.
45 projects
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England
Police in England and Wales recorded 119,365 vehicle thefts in the year to March 2026, one every 4 minutes 24 seconds. How keyless relay attacks work, why car theft is rising again, and what stops it.
North Sea
Doggerland joined Britain to Denmark and the Netherlands until the sea drowned it. A relief map of today’s sea floor, with 1,873 river channels, lakes and other features mapped beneath it, and the computed shore of any moment since 16,000 years ago. For each North Sea town, it shows how far away the shore was 10,500 years ago.
London
At Heathrow it rains, 1 mm or more, on three days in ten: 109 days a year. Paris, measured at Orly, gets the same; New York gets twice the rain on fewer wet days. Every day from 1 January 1960 to 31 August 2026 is one mark on a wall of days, any date can be followed year by year, and with a year of birth the page counts the birthdays it rained on.
London
London’s commonest pub name is The Crown, ahead of the Prince of Wales and the Red Lion: 31 of the 3,155 pubs mapped by OpenStreetMap’s volunteers. Half of the city’s postcodes have a mapped pub within 286 m in a straight line, and the official count of pubs and bars fell from 4,835 in 2001 to 3,525 in 2024, with Hackney the only borough that rose. A map of London drawn only from its pubs, with a result and a picture for each of 217 postcode districts.
London
London’s official blue plaque scheme, run today by English Heritage, has 1,035 plaques: 166 are in W1, and 31 of the 120 London postal districts have none. 152 of the 1,010 plaques to a person honour a woman, and the median wait between death and plaque is 49 years. All 3,942 plaques on record, of every kind, on a map drawn from postcodes, with the plaque nearest any postcode and the words on it.
London
London's planning rules protect thirteen lines of sight to St Paul's, the Palace of Westminster and the Tower; the longest runs 15.6 km from a gap kept in a hedge in Richmond Park. All thirteen, drawn from the government's 2012 Directions, with the height limit under each, the real ground and roofs from laser survey, and a postcode look-up.
London
At 10,528 of Greater London's 177,041 postcodes the ground is lower than an ordinary spring high tide at London Bridge (3.9 m above Ordnance Datum). Any postcode set on a tide staff beside the levels of 1928 and 1953, on the city's laser-surveyed relief, and the Thames Barrier's 221 closures counted winter by winter.
London
London's postcode numbers are alphabetical: in March 1917 the Post Office gave 1 to each district's main office and numbered the other delivery offices by name, so Hackney is E8 and SE2 is 15 km from SE1. All 120 districts on a map drawn from 110,673 postcodes, each with its own sentence and picture, and the 5,655 lines of the 1917 street list to search.
United Kingdom
From 1803 to today Romania's name appears 24,591 times in the debates of the British Parliament, in 9,209 debates and questions. Measured against everything said, the peak is the Crimean War; by sitting days, 1939; by mentions, 1990. Ceaușescu's state visit of 1978 brought no debate. In Romanian and English.
London
In 1898–9 Charles Booth’s investigators coloured London’s streets in seven colours, from black and blue for the poorest to yellow for the wealthy. Choose a colour to see where it was printed, or look up a street. In English and Romanian.
London
The British pillar box was red in Jersey in 1852, green from 1859 and red again from 1874, London first, and the phone box’s architect wanted it silver. This page follows four London objects, the post box, the phone box, the bus and the Underground logo, year by year from 1852 to 1946 through 18 entries from the record: what the Postal Museum, Historic England and BT Archives say at each change. On the way there is one question: what did Scott write in 1935 about red kiosks in the countryside?
United Kingdom
Twelve sourced stops on what Britain and Romania left in each other, from a hoard of nails in Scotland and Dacians on Hadrian’s Wall to jets built in Bucharest; at the end you look up how many Romania-born people live in your area of England or Wales.
London
There are eels in London's rivers, and every one of them hatched in the Atlantic, thousands of kilometres away, where nobody has ever seen an eel spawn. This page follows one such life, step by step: the transparent leaf adrift, the climb up the tidal Thames, the years in a London river, the body's change and the leaving. At Molesey Weir in 2025, the volunteers' traps caught, on average, one young eel for every four and a half days of trapping.
London
UK Parliament says one old penny on the Great Clock’s pendulum makes it gain 0.4 seconds a day. Slide the coin along the 4.4-metre rod to see where it speeds the clock, where it does nothing and where it slows it; then let the days run, hear the hour strike in a real recording and make a card of your tray.
London
A night map of London's bell towers: pick a night and the towers listing a practice in Dove's Guide light up, tap one to hear its bells, synthesised at the frequencies in the ringers' database, while the order of the ropes changes row by row. Four towers, including St Mary-le-Bow, also have real openly licensed recordings.
London
Daily tap counts at 434 London stations, January 2019 to September 2026, wound into rings: one ring per year, one slice per day. Southfields lights up for Wimbledon, Arsenal station follows the fixture list, Ladbroke Grove has no row on Carnival days, and on Christmas Day TfL counts zero Tube journeys. Pick your station and a date of your own.
London
Price ten fares across four dated runs — an Exchange run of 1655, a lawyer's shilling of 1662, two admeasured miles of 1715, a GPO circle of 1832 — then judge who the paper meter served, on two dated proof rails.
England
A wooded hill in Powys hides an Iron Age hillfort. Slide from the tree tops to the laser-measured ground: the rampart, ditch, gateway and hollows found in two surveys.
London
In November 1849, a giant waterlily leaf at Chatsworth held an eight-year-old girl. The gardener who weighed it sketched on blotting paper, at Derby, the most extensive building in Europe — and over six million people walked through it. Load the leaf yourself, until it holds Annie. In Romanian and English.
London
Tick twelve slips across three coffeehouse tapes — brokers’ talk at Jonathan’s, ship news at Lloyd’s, the auction hammer at Garraway’s — then judge what emptied the houses, on two dated proof rails.
London
June 1858: the Thames sinks, the heat bakes the banks, and Parliament's curtains soak in chloride of lime. Stand at Crossness at high water and open the sluice gates: a tide's worth of London sets off downriver on the ebb. In Romanian and English.
London
London, 5–9 December 1952: five days of yellow fog in which, at night, you could not see your feet — and three months of dying after the sky cleared. You walk the blind street, lift the lid yourself, and put the influenza alibi to the arithmetic. In Romanian and English.
London
The Fleet from Hampstead to the Thames: eight beats of the course, a four-map dated slider (1559–1896), twelve acts of the burial, and ten traces to walk.
London
All 272 London Underground stations and the 44 that closed or moved, on a map you can drag from 1863 to today. The ghost stations, the one between Angel and Old Street that now heats homes, and where every name comes from.
London
204 London names parsed into stem and ending: a decoder across Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Norman and modern layers, the earliest forms ever written down, and a game of twelve folk traps.
London
Bedlem was already a form of Bethlehem when a London priory founded in 1247 started changing what it meant. Ride two tracks — the building crosses London, the word escapes toward chaos — and place seven historical uses on their sense.
London
Ride a fictional Tube line through all 32 boroughs and the City: what each name meant in Old English, who built it, and the oddities it keeps — from Croydon's Mayday to Stamford Bridge being in Fulham.
London
Streets of booths, printing presses and taverns on the frozen river, from Evelyn's diary and the accounts of 1814. The cold that froze the Thames came back once, in 1963; with the old bridge gone, the river kept flowing.
London
The 1666 fire spreads across today's City, day by day, from the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn. The losses were counted carefully; the dead were not.
Wales
How Proto-Germanic *walhaz* became the name of the Welsh, the Vlachs, Wallonia and Wallachia — with a map, sources and the limits of certainty.
United Kingdom
21 speakers across Britain read the same paragraph: pick a town and watch six words change shape in phonetic transcription.
England
Pytheas's book on Britain and Thule was lost more than 2,000 years ago. What survives of it comes only from the quotations of the people who argued with him.
England
Bergen, London's Steelyard, King's Lynn and Boston: four stops of a 14th-century Hanseatic trade through England. The real cargo, stop by stop, isn't what you'd guess.
England
John Leland spent a decade travelling England and Wales on a royal commission and a thousand questions. He filled 11 notebook Parts. His mind was failing by 1547, and the promised book was never written.
England
Celia Fiennes travelled for her health, by coach at first and later on her own horses. Her own journal puts her in 39 of England's 40 historic counties, all but Monmouthshire.
London
The diary of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, the Persian envoy who conquered — and sharply judged — London in 1810.
United Kingdom
Heathrow lets a 2-litre container through security. Stansted still stops an ordinary liquid over 100 ml.
United Kingdom
Cheese from France: no. Chicken from Romania: yes. What you can actually bring home in your luggage.
England
In 1900, the Tube was 14°C. After 125 years of braking, 500 GWh of annual heat have saturated the clay mantle, turning the earth into a 30°C radiator.
England
An end-to-end guide to Hadrian's Wall with its measured elevation profile, forts, milecastles, turrets and car-free connections, together with the limits of the available data.
United Kingdom
Ten harvests, two free ports and the 9-foot Sulina bar: how Brăila and Galați came to send hundreds of thousands of quarters of wheat to 1840s London.
United Kingdom
A UK postcode sits in a council, a health board, a network region and a flood map that do not share a border. Type yours and see which recent policies reach that street.
England
190 years of English rainfall: winter 2025–26 among the wettest, summer 2026 among the driest.
London
Sunset, sunrise and twilight times for London through 2026–27, the clocks going back on 25 October, and how many of your weekday journeys home start after sunset.
Wales
Twelve names from Romania’s top-20 lists appear in no baby-name table for England and Wales from 1996 to 2003. In 2020 they were given to 611 babies. What the official tables can and cannot count, tested on Polish names.
This collection brings together relevant projects from the site’s library. Each entry has a title, a description and a link to its available edition. The complete projects carry their sources and evidence limits.
Reviewed · Collection as text
Official centroids for the four countries; the dataset clips coastlines to the official December 2025 administrative boundary. The diagram uses the centres as anchors and does not draw borders.
Definitions used here distinguish Great Britain, the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, Crown dependencies and overseas territories.
The administrative composition of the United Kingdom.
External reference for the route-length comparison. The profile and modelled line use data from the local Hadrian’s Wall project, with its limits explained there.
