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
The Colorado Trail
I am rapt. Tight and warm in my sleeping bag, I stare out at the night sky. It is perfectly clear. My fellow hikers are nearby, and in the distance we …
Letters to America
Custard Woman vs The Dark Lord
If you think America has it bad with a rapist paedophile president hell-bent on fascisting his way out of the international blackmail trap he happily …
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
I thought United started well enough, but in the end the decision to …
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
Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s …
Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you …
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
All in a day's housework
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
Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager. I like some Oasis stuff, the early stuff. I like some …
07
Now
A few changing glimpses from around the site.
Selected writing
Person of Interest 101
The voicemail asked me to call 101 and quote my call reference number. It took three attempts to get through to a human being. I guess they really are all busy dealing with …
Favourite photo See the showcase →
Currently reading
Electric Shock From the Gramophone to the iPhone – 125 Years of Pop Music
Peter Doggett