Election 97
This top-rating 1997 election site - at the time it was www.election.co.uk - has since disappeared, but we cannot let it go unsung and unmourned (it was a mighty resource).
Election 1997 was provided by a consortium of companies, including Business Geographics, October Design and ourselves. One of its great strengths was its powerful geographical database of UK constituencies, which sadly is no longer available. Although we helped with the database functionality, we have no intellectual property rights to the data, so we cannot reproduce it (note 1). But here are a few contributions to which we do hold copyright:
New Dimensions
The star turn was this regional rendering of the British political scene in three dimensions using VRML. Instead of a flat map showing the party allegiances, a third dimension was added to show the electoral density of the area. The result is that the volume of each constituency represents the electorate. We have so far only converted one of these maps (for north-west England) from the original code - VRML has moved on since then.
If you see nothing when you click on the link, it is because you do not have a VRML viewer installed. We will be running up a page on VRML shortly, which will tell you how to view VRML files and more...
Postwar Blues
James Meagan's excellent summary of the postwar British electoral scene. We may even prevail on him to bring it up-to-date.
Animal Crackers
Our very popular Commons speech contest - you are asked to identify (usually) the politician. Each speech snippet contains a zoological reference. (Naturally the contest is now inactive, but you can still play the .wav files and see if you have the right answers).
Future Histories
This was a matrix of UK maps we generated using C/C++ after the election to show how the country would look in the next election given a range of swings. Interesting to compare it with the reality of that poll.
Terms of Office
Philip Johnston's A-Z of British politics. Frequently tongue-in-cheek.
Extreme Measures
A very simple page - it shows the highs and lows for UK constituencies (lowest and highest turnout, swing, electorate etc)
NOTE 1: We do have permission to connect constituency references to the database on the Daily Telegraph-sponsored Election 2001 site (upon which we also worked) and we may well do this later.
