The Double-Dark Winter: A UK Data Study for Digital PR

The Brief (self-initiated):

Build a data-led digital PR story from free public data, then try to break it before an editor can.

The Question: Which UK cities spend the most of this winter commuting in the dark?

What I Did

• Calculated sunrise and sunset for 34 UK cities on every one of the 154 days of winter time (25 Oct 2026 to 27 Mar 2027).
• Defined a “double-dark day” as sunrise after 08:00 and sunset before 17:00, then counted them per city.
• Checked the results against an independent source.
• Tested the obvious headline, “the further north, the darker the evening”. The data contradicted it on 83 of 154 days, so I cut it.

What Survived

• Scotland takes the top five. Inverness has 86 double-dark days; Brighton has 22.
• The east loses its evenings last. Norwich is the last of the 34 cities to see a 5:30pm sunset again (28 Feb), six days after Inverness.
• Norwich’s sun sets earlier than Inverness’s on 83 of the 154 days.

Delivered Ready to Pitch: Headline findings, an interactive chart set, a full 34-city ranking, a downloadable dataset, and an 8-page method note covering sources, limits and pitch angles for national and regional desks.

See the Study: https://www.twine.net/signin · Data (CSV): https://www.twine.net/signin

Method in one line: Every number traces to a source and a calculation an editor can follow, and what the data can’t show is stated, not filled in.