Coding classes in Hounslow

A hub with public computers is a reasonable fallback on an evening when home is loud. For our lessons a learner needs a laptop or desktop, sound and a steady connection; for the project below, nothing more than Python and a copy of Roy's published figures, which are free to read.

A gap of 1.27 m is larger than every correction in Roy's table except the brass-scale one. That does not show that Roy made a mistake of a metre. The list points mark where each monument is recorded, captured at a map scale of 1:1250, and a monument need not stand exactly over the end of a line measured more than two centuries ago; the foot Roy used was also his own standard, not the modern foot of exactly 0.3048 m. The honest conclusion is that the two agree to within what the modern records can resolve, and that the next correction worth making is to the positions, not to the arithmetic. That is an error budget doing its job.

The straight line between the two monuments runs across Hounslow for 56.6% of its length by our count, through the Hanworth area Roy describes in his paper, while both ends lie just outside the borough. None of the bodies whose data appears here, Hounslow Council, Historic England, the Ordnance Survey, the Royal Society, TfL and the ONS, is linked to Modern Age Coders or endorses this page. The library addresses are the council's; the ranking, the distances and the 56.6% are our own calculations on published data.

Computers will keep getting faster at arithmetic. What stays scarce is the person in the room who can point at one line of a calculation and say that this is where the answer really comes from, and that is a reason for a Hounslow child to learn to code. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.