Drowned and Rising
Raise or drop the sea from the Ice Age to an ice-free world and watch Britain change shape.
I'm Dr Tristan Hotham, an independent researcher. My PhD looked at how British political parties campaign on Facebook, and I still publish on campaigns and platforms across Europe. I also turn the same toolkit, big open datasets, careful counting and a lot of maps, on history, landscape and weather, in Britain and around the world.
Four favourites. Each one is a live, interactive map built from open data: search your town, drag a slider, switch a layer.
Raise or drop the sea from the Ice Age to an ice-free world and watch Britain change shape.
Every council in England and Wales ranked by public rights of way. The South Pennine mill towns win.
Walk north and the water changes its name: brook, beck, burn. The words Britain uses for its landscape, mapped.
How much of each county's A-roads still follow a Roman line, with a lidar layer to check the ground.
More questions about the past, the landscape and the weather. Every study has a map to explore, a write-up and open data. Filter by theme, or let the dice choose.
Every square kilometre of the UK by sunshine and rainfall at once. Since 1961 to 1990 the country has become 5.6% sunnier and 7.2% wetter.
A bathtub model of every sea level from the Ice Age to an ice-free world: Britain becomes an island at −30 m, and at +70 m a third of the UK is under water.
Every path of totality across Britain and Ireland from AD 1000 to 2200, tested for 17,103 places: for most towns the last was in 1715 or 1724.
Walk north and the water changes its name. The words Britain uses for hills, valleys and streams, mapped.
Every named pub in Britain, grouped and mapped: Red Lions, Royal Oaks and the names that give a county away.
20,038 dialect survey answers mapped into Britain's bread roll lines, checked against the high street.
50,822 churches, barrows, stones, hillforts and wells against random points: crowding, not planning, explains the leys.
13,280 megalithic monuments: did the idea of the great stone tomb travel by sea?
Could Britain and Ireland's 4,147 hillforts see each other? A line-of-sight network across two islands.
How much of each county's A-road network still follows a Roman line, with a lidar layer.
King John and Edward I mapped night by night: John moved on 42% of the days we can follow him, Edward on 23%.
The 56 boroughs the 1832 Reform Act abolished, followed to today: 25 are villages, a hamlet or an empty hill.
First World War names on 14,119 community memorials: 18.3 for every 1,000 people living there today, and only 36 small places record no dead.
3,331 stations closed from 1955 to 1975, and 643 towns lost every one. They are a little poorer and more car-bound today, but did not fall off a cliff.
106,550 shipwrecks in Europe's seas, 1744 to 1945, by the flag they sailed under.
All 7,032 quakes in the BGS catalogues: a magnitude 4 about every 3 years, and the busiest modern zones were coalfields.
107 Devil place names in Britain: 31% lie within 1 km of a prehistoric monument, against 19% of comparable places.
Months with afternoon highs of 18 to 27 °C: the average city dweller gets 3.6 a year now and 2.9 by 2041 to 2060. Pick your own band.
My research on parties, leaders and campaigns asks what they actually post, who they reach, and what platforms change. Every paper is open, with a plain-English summary.
The big idea from my PhD: one party shows different faces to different audiences, a traditional face on its own pages and a looser, more partisan one through satellite pages and supporters.
Inside the campaign machine →Open-access preprints, each with a DOI, an abstract page and a plain-English summary.
Four favourites: the thesis, a Facebook paper, a map of Britain’s hill and stream names, and the UK’s sunshine against its rain.

How UK parties campaigned on Facebook from 2010 to 2018, and where the idea of Janus-faced campaigning comes from.

669,760 posts from 17 European countries. Populist parties drew about two and a half times the engagement, mostly because they built bigger audiences.

Brook in the south, beck in the north, burn in the Borders: where Britain’s words for hills, valleys and streams change.

Every square kilometre of the UK by sunshine and rainfall at once. Since 1961 to 1990 the country has become 5.6% sunnier and 7.2% wetter.
My research has been reported in the press and discussed on air, and I have commented on platforms and politics for broadcasters.
Plus broadcast and radio work with BBC World News, BBC World Service, BBC local radio, LBC and Channel 5 News.
Small browser games, from the Second World War and neon tactics to art-gallery chaos. Free to play, no download.
Photography, pictures and music, made for the fun of it, plus every post on the blog.
To get in touch about my research, email me.
Views here are my own.
Short bio: Dr Tristan Hotham is an independent, data-led researcher of politics, the past, platforms and places. PhD, University of Bath. Views are my own.
Cite this site: Hotham, T. (2026). Dr Tristan Hotham: research and data stories. https://tristanhotham.com/