Where are you located on Earth?
I live in the small town of Lancaster, in the north of England (this is important later). Historically built on the textile industry as an important west coast port city with links to the lands across the Atlantic and hence the evils of slavery. The town still has a few large mill buildings, one of which is now accommodation for one of the two universities that have campuses here. Education has become perhaps the town’s primary function, alongside tourism and as a gateway to the Lake District National Park.
What do you do?
I work at one of the universities – Lancaster University, founded in 1964. I’m a Research Fellow in the Medical School, but I won’t be the one standing up when the flight attendants ask if there’s a doctor on board. I teach R and Python to Masters’ students and get pulled into interesting data analysis and statistics projects with a geographical aspect. My latest project involved looking at factors influencing medical students’ journeys from home to medical school to training. Prior to that we did a lot of work during the COVID epidemic, and I did a lot of tropical medicine data analysis as well.
I’m only doing this until your Geohipster Calendars flip over to April, since I’m leaving the University. Higher education is having a financial crisis in the UK, and many of us are moving on or calling time on our careers a bit early. My last day at work here will also be my 60th birthday. If anyone needs my services, get on the Bazphone!
How did you get into making maps/Geospatial Field?
I first came to Lancaster in 1987 to do a PhD in particle physics, working on data from the previous accelerator in the tunnel that now houses the LHC at CERN. After three years it was clear the work wasn’t going very well. Then in the summer of 1990 I heard of a job opportunity going in what I think is the most English way possible – a chance conversation with someone in the Geography Department during a Physics-Geography cricket match. Seeing my PhD funding running out I did some research on this “GIS” thing (it helped that Geography was in the same building as Physics) and got the job based on my Fortran programming skills. The 3-year project was to get more spatial statistics into GIS, which meant I went from one day looking at b-quark annihilation events 100 metres underground in a tunnel halfway across a continent, to the next day looking at locations of cancer cases in the county. I’ve been doing geospatial health data analysis for 35 years.
What inspired your map?
The KLF, also known as the Justified Ancients of MuMu, also known as the JAMS were putting out these amazingly strange but brilliant records back in the 90s. This particular track, “Its Grim Up North” resonated with me since I was a southerner (born and living in London for 21 years) and now here I was in the midst of all these place names. I must have heard it early in 2025 with my geospatial hat on and wondered whether the ordering made sense. So I located all the places and no, it was a mess, jumping around all over the country. But I liked the idea of mapping them in a UK-roadmap style and including a shortest-path SatNav view.
What tools and data did you use to make the map?
The map is a single print layout in QGIS with two maps. A lot of the decoration such as the title, credits, and some of the decoration round the SatNav are SVGs created in Inkscape, although the main structure of the SatNav is made from QGIS shapes. The data is all OpenStreetMap for the background and the glowing roads, and I used OSRM through an R package to do the routing. Its all open source tools of course – I’ve been involved with OSGeo for many years now
Anything you’d like to tell the readers of Geohipster?
Here’s a well-kept secret: its not actually grim up north! Come visit Lancaster, I’ll buy you a single-origin locally-roasted artisan syphon-brew in one of our expensive hipster coffee shops!