NomansiteNews / 12 September 2026
The register learns cities
Nobody looks for a directory of studios. People look for a studio in a city — so the register now answers by city, tells you which cities are nearest to you, and ranks the ten strongest studios in each.
A register is only useful at the size of the question people actually ask. Ours was answering "all the studios in the United Kingdom" — 5 573 of them, which is a number, not an answer. The question people ask is smaller and sharper: a studio in London, in Toronto, in Ahmedabad. So the register now answers at that size.
What makes a city page
Three studios with an address we have read. Not an address anybody typed into a form for us — there is no form. The address is either what our crawler found printed on the studio's own site, or what OpenStreetMap holds for its office. Below three, a name is more likely to be a mistake in parsing than a city, and a city with two studios does not deserve a page anyway.
That threshold is also why your city may be missing today and present next week: the register keeps reading, and a city appears the moment the third address turns up.
A district belongs to its city
A studio in Shoreditch is a London studio, and a client looking for London expects to find it. So places that sit inside a city — within eight kilometres of it and twenty times smaller — are shown as part of it: Covent Garden and Holborn under London, Surry Hills and Pyrmont under Sydney, North York under Toronto. Boroughs that people search for in their own right, Brooklyn and Manhattan among them, stay where they are.
One city, one name
Studios print their address in their own language, so the same city arrived under several names: Warszawa and Warsaw, Praha and Prague, Київ and Kyiv. They are now one page under the name the world uses, and the old spellings redirect rather than disappear. Cities are placed on the map with GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).
Near you, without telling us where you are
The nearest cities page asks your browser where you are and sorts the register's cities by distance — and the arithmetic happens inside your browser. The coordinates never reach our server: the page is carrying every city's position already, so there is nothing to send.
Each city also has its own monthly ranking now — the ten studios with the highest reach there, kept month by month, so next month the movement can be seen. Start from all cities, or from a country.