Where do 'Page 3 Girls' come from?

I know you've been dying to know that answer to that question. Zoe Kleinman from the BBC got me thinking about Page 3 Girls with a tweet. A quick web search shows that there's a special Page 3 web site (watch out: click that link and you may see topless young women).

So I wrote some code using BeautifulSoup to extract the location of each maiden.

import urllib
import re
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

def get_maidens(a):
    f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.page3.com/includes/girls/%d.html" % a)
    s = BeautifulSoup(f)
    return s.findAll('a', href=re.compile("^/girl/"), onmouseout="hideddrivetip()")

def get_location(m):
    f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.page3.com%s" % m)
    s = BeautifulSoup(f)
    return s.find('span', id="girlLocation")

l = []

for a in range(1,5):
    ms = get_maidens(a)
    for m in ms:
        l.append(m['href'])

for m in l:
    lo = get_location(m)
    try:
        print lo.string
    except:
        print "No location"

And with the help of BatchGeo here's a map of the 165 women featured on the Page 3 web site:

View Page 3 in a full screen map

So it's pretty clear that Page 3 is a mostly southern phenomenon. Go into Wales or the north of Blackpool and you won't find many women represented. Would be good to map this against population density. Zoom a bit and, yes, Essex has been quite a supplier of Page 3 girls.

PS I had also grabbed the full text of their biographies and done some word analysis to see if there was anything interesting. And, well, let's just say that the list of common words was indicative of the reading age of Sun readers.

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