Some time ago, I started wondering why you seem to get clusters of villages starting with the same letter. Was it confirmation bias? Was it my imagination? Was I really sad enough to think about once I was sober again?

We all know the answer to this…

I found a list of 39,000 towns and villages in the UK, together with their Long/Lat…

A quick bit of PHP, mysql and GD magic later, I had a script that took the positions in the database and plotted them out on a thousand pixel square gif. The answer very quickly became a very clear and loud “what the hell were you thinking?” So we’ll forget that I ever had that idea…

But what about all the towns and villages of the alphabet plotted on the same 1000² grid? Well, that would be the picture to the right…