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
Why complain?
Two years into Gaza’s destruction, you can trace the evolution of genocide denial in real time: Phase 1: “It’s not happening” - Israel is only …
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
The World Cup on drugs: pure-grade heroin cut with shavings of Clive Tyldesley
From the archive
One Jimmy Carter
My old football blog. Kept online largely because the internet ought to remember things.
04
Music
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
Jon Batiste's Tiny Desk concert
Songs I Made
A very rare Marsden “original”
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 — plus dent.hand, a chronological social-web client — with as little machinery in the way as possible.
From the kitchen · Recipes
Sarnie. White rye bread with caraway seeds, salt beef, celeriac …
Recipes I’ve cooked, adapted and written down before I forget what went in them.
06
Quotes
Things other people said that seemed worth keeping.
From the commonplace book
“Mum, passing me a small parcel wrapped in Xmas paper: ‘I didn’t get you anything for Xmas.’ Me: ‘What’s this then?’ Mum: ‘Oh, just socks.’”
07
Now
A few changing glimpses from around the site.
Selected writing
Live at the Counter Eurovision '79
“without the knowledge of your history you cannot determine your destiny” Forty-seven years ago, Misty In Roots played at the Counter Eurovision rock festival in Brussels, in …