David Marsden
Writing, investigating, building things and occasionally making a racket.
I write about local democracy and place, build online communities and odd little web projects, make music with Hovercraft, and have spent an unreasonable number of years running multiplayer football worlds.
This is the front door to all of it.
01
Writing & local democracy
Investigative citizen journalism
Southall Stories
Local democracy, planning, environment, housing, accountability and the things people would rather you didn’t notice — from Southall and across Ealing.
Civic infrastructure
Ealing Civic Commons
An open civic information project for gathering, organising and sharing what is happening to Ealing.
Incubated by Southall Stories.
Personal writing
Blog
Notes, observations, photos, family life, music, politics, technology and whatever else has caught my attention.
02
Football worlds
I’ve been running online multiplayer football-management communities for more than thirty years. These are the worlds, archives and tools that have grown out of them.
Community
SM Top 100
The original multiplayer Soccer Manager community: five divisions, promotion, relegation, cups, rivalries, statistics and an alarming amount of history.
Community
Top 100 Regen
A second-generation multiplayer football world and community.
In development
The Beautiful Game
A new multiplayer online football-management application.
Data
The Pink Final
The companion club and player database for The Beautiful Game.
From the archive
One Jimmy Carter
My old football blog. Kept online largely because the internet ought to remember things.
03
Music
Punk music · 1995 → now
HOVERCRAFT
A punk band formed in Grimsby in the mid-1990s, resurrected thirty years later with unfinished songs, old recordings, new technology and unfinished business.
04
Things I build
Experiment / open-source tool
Handwritten Publish
From paper to web at the push of a pen.
A handwriting-to-web publishing tool inspired by my reMarkable workflow: write by hand, send it, publish it.
In development.
05
About
I’m based in Southall, west London. I’m an investigative journalist, community researcher, web tinkerer, former-and-apparently-current-again punk musician, and administrator of online football worlds that should probably have died decades ago but stubbornly refuse to.
Much of my current writing concerns local government, development, environment and community power in Southall and Ealing.
By day I work in charity administration and project development at King’s Centre Southall.
This is my personal website. The views, writing and projects here are my own unless explicitly stated otherwise.