It turns out this is excellent clickbait because when people see the question they want to know the answer. It didn't matter that I'd provided a really bad answer, they clicked through anyway.
Two online portals proved highly amenable to sending visitors my way. One was Reddit, the social news aggregation community, and the other was Hacker News which has a more technology/software-based focus. In each case a blogreader submitted my article to the portal and in each case a swoosh of upvotes fired it up the main list. It didn't remain high on the list for long, these things always fall back, but a few hours of prominence meant a substantial audience came to read what I'd written. In Reddit's case it was members of the r/London community, generally local, but with Hacker News the pile-on was substantially more global. Hence the fifteen thousand visitors.
My thanks to the readers who submitted the links in the first place because these don't always take off. For example "Diamond Geezer: Griping at length about TfL's handling of the 347 withdrawal" got only 275 views and no comments, whereas "Where is London's most central sheep?" hit the jackpot. It's also worth saying that the link was to my original incorrect post, not to my subsequent apology, so thousands of people now have an entirely incorrect understanding of London's most central sheep. In this case it's not an important distinction, but this is how disinformation spreads.
On Reddit most of the subsequent conversation was about where London's most central sheep might be. People suggested "Mudchute farm?", "Vauxhall farm?", "Hackney farm?" proving they hadn't read what I'd written, only responded to the title. Others responded with non-living sheep, for example "Lamb and Flag, Covent Garden", "Shepherd and Sheep Statue in Paternoster Square" or "probably a Kofta in a restaurant" because they weren't playing by my rules because they hadn't read them. This is the way with so much online discourse, a fervent debate about a headline rather than a nuanced discussion based on the actuality of the situation.
The discussion on Hacker News was longer and a lot more varied, spiralling off on all kinds of tangents. One of these, obviously, was where exactly the centre of London is, especially from people who didn't realise there's a long-standing location. Another was where the most central rabbit/cat/bear might be, not just sheep, not just in London. But the most interesting tangent regarded the significance of how far you have to travel from a city centre to find yourself in the country.
"When my wife and I lived in Bristol we developed a metric designed to measure how enjoyable a city was to live in that we called "time to sheep". Basically it's a measure of how long you have to travel from the center of the city before you're in the English countryside surrounded by sheep and the best cities have a low (but not too low) "time to sheep" metric. It helped explain one of the reasons we loved living in Bristol so much when we had such a hard time living in London."
This attracted responses from around the world...
» If we instead consider "time to cows" then Cambridge does quite well
» In Canada we call it "time to moose"!
» In Africa I suppose we have time to lion...
» My metric for when you've left the city is "have I passed a field of potatoes"
» There needs to be a counterbalancing variable, though; presumably you want to live in a city, otherwise you'd just live in the countryside somewhere with a TTS of zero :) Maybe the other factor is "time for pizza to arrive at door"?
London's quite good for being able to reach the countryside easily, as opposed to just a park or city farm. Technically the most central finger of Green Belt creeps down the Lea Valley to end at Tottenham Hale, although if you want proper unbroken fields and woodland you have to go a bit further. Step out of stations in Stanmore, Cockfosters, Chingford, Bexley or Coulsdon and the onward countryside never stops, although I think the most central/rural interface is in Mill Hill, eight miles out. It's mostly horses round there though, not sheep.
Sometimes the strangest questions turn out to have the most interesting answers. But I doubt most of the 15,000 souls who landed here for the first time yesterday will ever come back.
