On the other hand the British have spent nearly 50 years totally
stuffing up their conversion to metric (as an example look at their
Met site it is still in an absurd mixture of imperial and metric).

I worked for the BOM and just when the changeover to metric measurement
occured, when chasing balloons we would
1 enter the range in yards ( on old equipment, newer stuff was metres)
2 work out the wind speed in metres per sec
3 Send out the result in KNOTS

My new block (well in 10 days or so) will be 1164 sm or just over a 1/4 of
an acre.