It’s not even the best pub in Charlbury, never mind the whole UK www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2610800...

🎉 It’s happening! Direct Oxford–Bristol trains start on Monday, running every two hours from Monday to Saturday. Weekday Oxford departures are at 0700, 0903, 1103, 1303, 1504, 1904 and 2103: the journey takes ~1hr10.

As everyone is talking about Labour MP Wes Streeting, a reminder he thinks people cycling only need protecting for 2 hours a day (Mon-Fri). With magic bollards. And if you're a weekend visitor to London, none at all. And insurance, obvs. www.taxi-point.co.uk/post/2019/08...

it’s such shibboleth of modern politics to blame politicians for failing town centres when the primary driver is - surely - all of us buying more and more stuff online

And that’s why you’re reversing it, right? …right?

There’s a new Bob Delyn track? And it’s basically a more organic reworking of Ffair y Bala, their finest ever moment? 😍 www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGZT...

this really does make me despair. this is a woman who has just got elected as a Reform councillor. she works for the NHS and wants to know “where the money is going”. it’s going on social care, babe

Genuine excitement. After a bit of a delay the books are finally here. If you pre-ordered a copy it’ll be winging its way to you soon, or maybe right now.

What happened to Goat Maps? It was shaping up to be a really promising outdoor mapping app/site, from the original founders of GaiaGPS. But everything has gone quiet and it's disappeared from the App Store. @goatmaps.bsky.social www.goatmaps.com

Add a few emojis and an “Excited for what comes next” and I could believe ChatGPT had been elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

Playing out on our town website right now

This is lovely: a (fairly bare-bones) OpenStreetMap-based consumer mapping app, with custom cartography in video game styles. mapshifter.com

I did a six-mile school run in the Cotswolds for a couple of years without a 4x4 or, in fact, any type of car at all, but you do you uk.news.yahoo.com/potholes-own...

Xcode predictive autocomplete has decided my test data should be a house in Thamesmead for… reasons?

Sheesh, I really hope New Order don’t turn up for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. It’s the least Factory thing imaginable. Rob Gretton would describe it as “going to Ohio to talk to c***s”. If Peter Hook wants to hawk his tribute act on stage then let him. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

Crazily hard for any of these guys to succeed. But I hope they do. The world needs more small platforms and fewer Metas

Andy Kershaw popped in to chat with me at Waterways World some years ago – he was thinking of buying a narrowboat and wanted some advice. (Plus one of his all-time favourite record shops, Henry's Records, was just up the road.) An absolute delight in person. www.theguardian.com/media/2026/a...

Just waved off Emrhys Barrell, founding editor of Canal Boat magazine, my old boss and someone from whom I learned a lot. (Fittingly, the route from the station to the crematorium was along the Kennet & Avon towpath.) Rest in peace, EGB.

Your regular reminder that if GDS were any use, they would have fixed this rather than futzing around putting everything under one domain, removing hierarchical nav and standardising on Transport typeface while pretending they’re pioneering

I just knew that something good was gonna happen

This is good on Bluesky user growth but really wrong on Bluesky viability. “Bluesky costs a lot of money to run” and “its user base is just too small to monetise” are both mistaken. Bluesky is run for tuppence ha’penny and its userbase is basically your ideal demographic for subscriptions. 🧵

Unprincipled populist nonsense.

what3words is an abomination.

Amazing that Press Gazette keep running headlines like this and they don’t mean Newsquest, Reach or whatever the other one is called this week pressgazette.co.uk/news/the-seo...

This is batshit.

L'application iPhone cycle.travel est désormais disponible en français. (Bientôt disponible sur Android!) apps.apple.com/app/id161963...

🇫🇷 New route guide – Saint-Malo to Nice 🇫🇷 1000 miles/1600 km across France. Stunning gorges, medieval towns, brand new voies vertes, minimal traffic… from Brittany to Provence via the Loire, Lot, Tarn and Ardèche. Full mapping, stage-by-stage guide, GPX and more: cycle.travel/route/saint_...

And here’s Manchester’s finest with Everything’s Gone Green. www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_gg...

From Penzance to Thurso (and Marazion to Hoy)… it’s finished. After 25 years, I’m delighted to report that the New Adlestrop Railway Atlas now covers the whole of England, Scotland and Wales in one big PDF. Every* passenger line and station. Download it here: www.systemed.net/atlas/

And anyway, this is why cycle.travel doesn’t unthinkingly route over highway=track www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The Green Party candidate has the right answer here (although ‘Columbia’ would have been acceptable as Oasis’s one surviving baggy song before they embarked on the Beatles>dadrock trajectory)

News! streetmap.co.uk is back up, blaming Storm Goretti for a month-long outage, and is plastered with “Donate here” ads. They have launched a crowdfunder for £16,000 annual running costs. I am not entirely convinced this is a sustainable model. www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/streetmapc...

Jim Ratcliffe, owner of Ineos: “The UK has been colonised by immigrants” Number of British riders in Team Sky, 2018, before it was bought by Ratcliffe and rebranded: 10 Number of British riders in Ineos Grenadiers, 2026: 6

what’s the point of that

Labour: we're banning asylum seekers from using taxis to get to medical appointments. Also Labour: Greens should stand aside in Gorton and Denton by-election to prevent the horrible racist party getting in.

This is the correct way of dividing Oxfordshire up into three councils and I shall not be taking questions

With the future of the A379 / Slapton Line near Torcross in Devon uncertain following recent storm damage, here's a few other disappearing roads you may want to ride before its too late...

This week in “maybe we should have supported proportional representation after all” news

And I still have my Multimap mug! (with typo on the bottom)

streetmap.co.uk appears to have finally keeled over and died. In the early 00s it was one of the two big online map sites in the UK, but whereas Multimap smartly sold out to Microsoft, Streetmap ploughed on with its frankly antiquated tech, at one point suing Google for market abuse (and losing).

Keir Starmer’s chief secretary made a blame-the-civil-servants speech, praising “doers not talkers” and calling for “complete digital transformation”, at what3words HQ today. what3words has lost £150m in ten years and is showing no signs of ever making a profit. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

180 pupils, 5 schools, 1 awesome concert! A little drizzle didn't dampen our thrill at hosting the Primary Schools Choir Concert in Christ Church Cathedral. Thank you to everyone who sang, listened, performed and directed - what a joyous way to spend a Monday afternoon! 🎶💙 #CCCSOxford #MusicMatters

* “average resurfacing cycle for all types of roads in England is every 103 years” factoid actualy just statistical error. average resurfacing cycle is every 12 years. Stonesfield megalosaurus pothole, which was caused by a 700kg dinosaur 166mn yrs ago, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

This is very neat: 3D city models made from OpenStreetMap data (inter alia) www.lichtbild-manufaktur.shop

For clarity, this government has so far: - cancelled HS2 north of Birmingham (previous government hadn't actually done that formally) - cancelled electrification of the Midland Main Line - cancelled West Yorkshire mass transit - cancelled the trans-Pennine high speed line

The Telegraph (usual fare: “The Car of the Year is the Mercedes CLA – here is why you should want one”) has an article on “Britain’s 20 prettiest streets”. _15_ of them are car-free (and 4 of the others are very quiet). Restricting cars makes for better towns. www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/desti...

Clarion news: We’re leaving Twitter (’X’). We can’t condone the objectionable content it now promotes, which goes against everything we believe and the Clarion tradition. Our live posting is now here on Bluesky, with all this plus much more in our email newsletter twice a week.

This keyboard actually _is_ an entire computer because, unlike the Spectrum, it has a mass storage device included

15ish years ago, when all the roads to Charlbury were snowed up, the one thing getting in and out was the train. But I guess the HSTs were made of sterner stuff than the current trains.