Measuring the total matter density - stars gas and dark matter - near the Sun is an old problem that dates back to Oort in the 1930's. An accurate measure of the local dark matter component gives us information about the shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo - an important constraint on galaxy formation models. It is also vital input to dark matter direct detection experiments that hope to find evidence for a dark matter particle in the laboratory. In this seminar, we revisit this old problem. By using an N-body model of the Milky Way, we show that standard techniques in the literature would lead us to a biased answer. We then develop a simple technique that is unbiased and show that it recovers the correct answer for the local matter and dark matter densities when applied to our simulation data. We then apply our method to rejuvenated data from the literature to obtain a new estimate of the local dark matter density. We discuss how this compares with previous determinations and what important caveats remain. Finally, we discuss theoretical expectations for the local dark matter density. We argue that our Galaxy ought to have a dark disc that boosts the local value as compared to that extrapolated from the Milky Way's rotation curve. We find tentative evidence to support this scenario.