Blog

I finally got round to importing schools data for England and Wales. I've not done a lot with it other than list nearby schools for individual postcodes. Let me know how you'd like to visualise or download the data.

One interesting thing I found in the schools data is the inclusion of the UPRN of the school. OK, it's interesting to me, possibly not to many other people. UPRNs uniquely identify addressable properties in Britain but although the data is freely available, it doesn't include the associated addresses. So it's kind of useless. I presume the reason we can't get the addresses is because the Royal Mail and its resellers make money from selling this data as PAF and if we could get a list of UPRNs and their addresses, PAF would be redundant. But this means no-one has much interest in UPRNs, because they don't serve any purpose for humans. 

We could try and build our own open source UPRN/address database, which is sort of happening at OSM. Run the query

node
  [ "ref:GB:uprn"]
  ["addr:street"]
  ({{bbox}});
out;

This currently doesn't return a huge amount of data and populating it is kind of difficult legally. I can find out my UPRN on Find My Address, but can I then use that to help populate OSM? Probably not, since the address data isn't open data. 

The government says we should be using UPRNs

"Systems, services and applications that store or publish data sets containing property and street information must use the UPRN and USRN identifiers."

But if everybody did this, all open property data would only include the UPRN and no address, which would make that data fairly unhelpful for humans. May I make the bold suggestion that it's time to make all this data open?

I've updated the Land Registry data on the website. The annual change is still in positive territory but prices look to be starting to head downwards. Taking into account inflation and wage increases, house prices are falling, but given the increases in mortgage costs, affordability is probably not

Before this summer, climate change had always seemed a rather abstract concept. I knew it was happening and I knew we had to do something about it, but it appeared to be a gradual process that would take decades to play out.

Then large parts of the world started burning. And other places were suffering from catastrophic flooding. As I read about these disasters, the algorithms decided to show me even more related stuff, like the graphs of sea and land temperatures and the climate records being broken on a daily basis and the future started to look increasingly dark.

I went in search of positive climate news and the increasing use of EVs along with the increasing use of renewables to generate electricity gave me some hope for the future. This post gave me the idea of automating the calculation of the equivalent MPG of an EV. I liked this comparison since we are all familiar with the MPG for a fossil fuel car. So here you can calculate the equivalent MPG in terms of emissions and also cost.

Plugging in some numbers for the UK suggested owning an EV is a good thing for the environment and for your pocket. Even for the dirtiest countries (I'm looking at you Poland), running an EV is probably equivalent to running a fossil fuel car and will only get better as we transition to cleaner sources of energy. Of course, not using a car for journeys is an even better option 

Another month goes by and the world may be on fire but house prices keep going up

I've uploaded the latest UK postcode data to the website. Sanity checks suggest everything is OK, but let me know if something looks wrong

You can now sign up to receive email notifications when new blog posts are added here. Just head over to https://www.doogal.co.uk/BlogSignUp  and sign up

Based on some useful feedback some time ago (thanks Denis!), I've added a new feature to the segment explorer to help you grab more KOMs or QOMs. You can now view and filter on the upcoming wind direction for the area you are viewing. I don't really chase KOMs these days (too old and slow) so I can't vouch for its usefulness, but I think it could be quite useful for those that do

I've uploaded the latest Land Registry data for England and Wales to the website. House prices keep going up and seem remarkably resilient given the increase in mortgage costs

I am very slowly working my way through the currently available 2021 Census data and adding it to the site. I've recently added data at the constituency level for England and Wales so I thought I'd take a look at the constituencies with the biggest change in population since the 2011 Census. First, here are the ones with the biggest increases in population

These are all in London and the South East. There have been a lot of flats built in the two London constituencies, which probably explains the increase in population. I'm not familiar with the other areas, although I guess they may be considered as within commuting distance of London, which may explain their appeal

And now the ones with the biggest decreases

These are split between central London and Wales. I guess the London ones are an indication that a lot of people buy properties as an investment and don't actually live there. I'm not convinced that is a healthy thing to be happening to our capital city.

I've uploaded the latest Land Registry data to the site. Rising interest rates still don't seem to be having much of an impact