Right after the May 24 bank holiday, temperatures here spiked, going up over 27 degrees, which is unusual for a city as far north as York. This was a bit of an abrupt change because before this I had been wearing my coat to work most days!  Walking through the city it was clear that people were taking advantage of the sun, with tons of people hanging out in the parks or strolling by the river. 

One of my projects at Yorspace is helping update their statistics on the housing crisis in order to show that affordable housing is necessary, but also what kind of housing is most needed and what groups are most affected. I've had a lot of fun going through old Homes England and Office of National Statistics datasets to update their stats -- the Urban Data Analytics course I during the school year really came in clutch! York is an interesting perspective to look at in this context, because it has some unique particulars that change how it experiences the housing crisis. It's a major tourist destination with a ton of demand for temporary accommodation (it receives 1.7 million visitors a year), and it's also a student city with two universities and a student population totalling more than 26,000. These things drive economic growth, but they also put pressure on the housing market, and York's historic status combined with the fact that it lacked planning guidelines for decades can make it difficult to build new housing.

Speaking of historic status, over the weekend my friends and I stumbled across the Eboracum festival, a public history pop-up aiming to show what Roman York would have been like. We got to enjoy artefacts, lectures about how Roman artillery worked (it was surprisingly sophisticated!) and pitched battles between teams of kids dressed up as the Romans and the Celts. Pretty cool!