A team of researchers at UCL recently surveyed 2,500 households across the UK to see how the design of their homes and neighborhoods has impacted their experience during lockdown (May to June 2020).

Perhaps most notably, the report, called Home Comforts, found that people living in housing built in the last 10 years were more likely to feel uncomfortable during lockdown (1 in 5), compared to those living in homes built before 1919 (1 in 7).

On top of this, people living in Victorian era housing were more likely to say that their neighborhoods were meeting their everyday needs, which seems to translate into convenient access to basic amenities (5 to 10 minute walk).

So what does this tell us?

That people want more ornament and clearly defined Zoom-friendly rooms? That the Victorians were better at city and community building? Or maybe that Londoners living in low-rise pre-1919 housing are generally well-established and have the ability to afford more conveniences? It's likely a bunch of different things.

There's no denying that the way we build our homes and our neighborhoods has, for better or for worse, changed over the last 100 years. But let's not forget that it's easy to romanticize the past and the things we used to do. I'm sure it wasn't puppy dogs and ice cream for all of the Victorians.

The United States and the United Kingdom recently published some official statistics on the impacts that this pandemic has had on ecommerce. The above chart is from Benedict Evans and he has some more over here. It's worth a click through. What is clear is that lockdown forced a whole bunch of adoption and accelerated trends that were already underway. More people turned to shopping online. The UK went from 20% ecommerce penetration to over 30%. And the US went from 17% to about 22%. What is also clear is that grocery has demonstrated to be exceptionally resilient. Most physical retailers saw a decline in sales during lockdown. Grocery proved to be a notable exception. But what is unclear is how much of this adoption will actually stick. The UK is reporting monthly (as opposed to quarterly for the US) and already you can see signs of a possible reversion. My guess is that -- provided we don't see another major lockdown -- there will be a meaningful reversion before the trend line resumes its march.

Alasdair Rae is back with another set of interesting maps. This time he maps out precipitation levels across the United Kingdom and the United States using cool 3D extruded mappings. He calls them rain shadow maps. Above is showing the average annual precipitation in the contiguous US from 1981 to 2010. The higher the peaks the higher the precipitation. Not surprisingly, the highest values are in the Pacific Northwest with over 4,064 mm (160 inches) of precipitation per annum. Some of the patterns here are also really interesting. Note California's Central Valley.