All articles by jonn elledge
jonn elledge
Greater Manchester has some lovely place names, so here are 17 of them
Something I realised pottering round Manchester yesterday: it’s an absolutely brilliant city for place names. And nobody outside knows this.…
Does this map actually show every European town with over 1,000 residents?
Sometimes in my travels around the backwoods of the internet I spot a map so pleasing, one that does such…
Sadiq Khan just put out a smug press release about delivering four days’ worth of housing
London’s mayor Sadiq Khan is very pleased with himself today about the fact he’s just given the go ahead for…
No, the solution to Britain’s cycling problems isn’t glowing tubes in the sky
Of all the things that annoy me about the modern media industry – and goodness me there’s a lot to…
Podcast: Limps, marriages and deaths
I don’t want to lie to you, this is one of our sillier episodes. Things we discuss, in no particular…
These charts show how wage growth has been terrible in most British cities for years now
The latest instalment of our weekly series, in which we use the Centre for Cities’ data tools to crunch some of…
We’re not building skyscrapers in Stratford to protect the views from Richmond Park
You’re familiar, I assume, with the acronym NIMBY. Literally “Not in my back yard”, it refers to any group of people who don’t want things built near them because, well, they prefer fields and trees and chemically contaminated flood plains and so on.
Podcast: Parallel histories
“Is there a podcast this week?” Someone tweeted me yesterday. “Is it about trains? I’d like it to be about…
Why do so many of England's cities straddle traditional county boundaries?
Last week I wrote a frankly rather over-lengthy screed explaining the origins of the name of every county in England.…
Who will be the first mayor of the West Midlands?
The first thing to say about the West Midlands: don’t call it Greater Birmingham. It’s perhaps best, indeed, that we…