David Marsden
Writing, investigating, making (and breaking) things and occasionally creating a ruckus.
I write about local democracy where I live in west London, make odd little web projects, make music and restore my old band Hovercraft's lost tapes, and manage a one hundred-strong community of pretend football managers.
My own little world.
01
Reporting & civic work
Independent reporting from Southall and civic infrastructure for keeping local public memory connected, accessible and held in common.
Independent reporting & investigations
Southall Stories
Local democracy, planning, environment, housing and accountability — including the things people would rather you didn’t notice.
Bringing together independent local reporting, public records, community knowledge and the connections between them — so what happens to a place does not disappear from view.
Live now: Ealing Civic Commons.
02
Personal writing
Notes, observations, photos, family life, politics, technology and whatever else has caught my attention.
The blog
Writing outside the day job
The less easily filed bits of the site: personal essays, old stories, new obsessions and the occasional dispatch from elsewhere.
Letters from America
Multi-Cultural Societies
Mark Twain once informed a preacher visiting Hartford that every word of a sermon the latter had just delivered was in a book at Twain’s home. …
Letters to America
Bye Bye Biden
Some highlights and thoughts from Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden by Branko Marcetic 📚 Against Biden’s best efforts, disaster had been …
03
Football worlds
I’ve been running online multiplayer football-management communities for many years. These are the worlds, archives and tools that have grown out of them.
The original world · since 2015
Top 100
Managers. Stories. A bigger game. One hundred clubs, five divisions, cups, records and more than a decade of community history — now brought together as one connected Top 100 family.
Sister world · gateway
Top 100 Regen
Same DNA. New generation. Launched for Top 100’s tenth anniversary, Regen is the sister game world and gateway into the wider community: 100 clubs, five divisions and its own managers, seasons and rule variations.
In development
The Beautiful Game
A new multiplayer online football-management game.
Data
The Pink Final
The companion club and player database for The Beautiful Game.
From the match reports
Clear and obvious error
From the archive
One Jimmy Carter
My old football blog. Kept online largely because the internet ought to remember things.
04
Music
Solo album · 2026
Eleven originals, covers, rewrites and oddities — songs made, borrowed, bent and broke over the years.
Punk music · 1995 → now
HOVERCRAFT
A retro-space punk rhythm and blues band formed in Grimsby in the mid-1990s, resurrected thirty years later with songs recreated from dusty old cassette tapes, and hazy memories.
Music I Love
Big kid’s current favourite song.
Big kid’s current favourite song.
05
Things I make
Small tools, experiments and occasionally something edible.
Human-first web tools
Helping Hand
A family of small tools for publishing from paper, tablets and local files, dent.hand for the chronological social web, and Drawing Hand for Elijah’s remote drawing challenges.
Open Helping Hand → · Open dent.hand → · Open Drawing Hand →
From the kitchen · Recipes
🥕🌿 Spiced Honey-Carrot & Coriander Soup recipe.
Recipes I’ve cooked, adapted and written down before I forget what went in them.
From the archive · Podcasting
This Is Not A Podcast
For a while I co-hosted and produced a gloriously ramshackle podcast about the social web, technology, football, music and whatever else wandered into the room. Nine episodes, terrible audio in places, and considerably more editing than was sensible.
06
Quotes
Things other people said that seemed worth keeping.
From the commonplace book
At the heart of neoliberalism is the fantasy of escape: escape from taxation and regulation, escape from the European Union and international law, escape from social obligation, escape from democracy. Escape, eventually, to a starlit wonderland beyond …
07
Now
A few changing glimpses from around the site.
Selected writing
Waterboarding on the NHS
Abstract: Gagging for it. Tags: waterboarding, NHS, bronchoscopy, torture, worklessness, Nazi, psychotherapy, banana, splat On Another Planet this week: controversial new …
Favourite photo See the showcase →
