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Posts tagged ‘Maps’

A compendium of Liverpool history compendia

In this post I’ve collected together a few articles and pages which delve a little deeper into aspects of Liverpool history. They’re either longer, detailed articles about one topic, or they bring together a whole range of sources.

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Whatever the Risks, it’s people that keep history alive

This week we get an updated list of the heritage at risk on Merseyside, see a unique perspective on how Liverpool has changed over the last few decades, plus some personal points of view on Liverpool and its past.

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Cornucopia of historical treasures: maps, talks, Ged Fagan and Peter Ellis

Happy New Year!

Well, by the time you read this we’ll be well into 2015, but it seems the right thing to say, as I’m planning to reinvigorate Liverpool Landscapes, which has gone a bit quiet over the last couple of years. My excuse is that I’ve become self-employed, and only just getting to grips with managing my time! Read more

Liverpool from above and around

This week (fortnight?) I’m looking at the historic city of Liverpool from above, and from raised perspectives both literal and metaphorical. Read more

Interactive Historic Maps of Liverpool

Historic Liverpool has always been primarily about the old maps. Well, now I’m starting to put interactive versions of the ones I own on the site for you to explore.

There are five maps on the Old Maps of Liverpool page now, but I’m hoping to add more as I get them scanned in (which isn’t the cheapest thing ever). Watch this space! Read more

Liverpool History News Roundup

Screenshot of The National Archives' Domesday on a Map tool

The National Archives' Domesday on a Map tool

Having written about the bigger themes this week, I’ve had to skip past a few other interesting links related to the history of Liverpool. So here they are, just for you:

Firstly, as an excitable mapping/interactive/web geek, I was interested in the new Domesday on a Map tool from The National Archives.

This, as the name might suggest, is a map showing all the places mentioned in the Domesday Book.  You have to zoom in to see any detail, but once there you get markers indicate the places named in Domesday, with an outline of the rough extent of the manor.

Click on the markers to see the historic name of the place (in 1086) and the page of the Book on which its described.

Director of Technology and Chief Information Officer David Thomas tells us why the map was produced in his blog post on the topic.

Domesday Book predated Liverpool by about 200 years, but a couple of places in the area were very important at the time, and get an entry: West Derby, Woolton, Toxteth and Childwall amongst others.

Whether or not your local history research is in Liverpool, Domesday on a Map is definitely must-see.

Planning permission was submitted to Liverpool City Council last Monday, 4th October, for Liverpool Waters, a plan to develop 150 acres of Merseyside docklands.

The scheme will include the tallest building outside London (possibly to be dubbed the “Shanghai Tower“), and for better or worse will transform Liverpool’s skyline.

Permission has already been granted for Wirral Waters, a similar scheme for the waterfront on the south side of the Mersey.

Planning permission documents have also been submitted for a stretch of Edge Lane including the retail parks and industrial areas.

The scheme will cost £200m and include a new park in addition to ‘leisure and retail units’ (“shops” to you and me).

The Merseyside Civic Society have awarded 8 different projects in four different categories at its relaunched awards scheme.

The categories are best New Build, Green Space, Open Space and Refurbishment. Read the full article on the MCS Awards website.

As two of my regular reads collide, SevenStreets has an article on Colin Wilkinson’s Streets of Liverpool, a site of interest to anyone reading this post I should think.

As well as discussion of how the site started, Colin describes how he came to where he is now, via the Open Eye gallery on the corner of Whitechapel to the Bluecoat Press which he has run since 1992. There are also a couple of classic photos from Colin’s archives.

Well, that’s it for now. Hopefully I’ll have some more Historic Liverpool news sooner or later, as I’m trying to find time for more additions to that site.

National Archives UK Photo Finder

Photo card showing the Cunard Building and the Liver Building, from The National Archives

Cunard and Liverpool Buildings, Liverpool, Lancs., from UK Photo Finder

The National Archives have produced UK Photo Finder, a map-based tool for finding historic photos in your area.

The free tool is one of their ‘Lab’ projects, and so is open for comments and queries, though you may find a few bugs here and there (one user found it doesn’t work on Firefox for the Mac, and I’ve found it can occasionally refresh at annoying moments). Nip on to the site and have a play around.

There are 31 photos of Liverpool City Centre (although there’s a sneaky one of the Sefton Park Peter Pan statue in there); 5 attached to Huyton; and 18 on the Wirral.

The images are also shown attached to their record cards, keeping the photos ‘in context’ as archives, not just as photographs.

The photos at the moment are exclusively from the important Dixon-Scott collection, although I suspect that if this pilot is successful, they will extend it to other collections. I hope they do, as this is a really great site. Dixon-Scott is of great interest to readers of this blog, as he saw and recorded the changing landscape of Britain with the expressed aim of preserving what he saw as the disappearing landscape.

It’s also quiet similar to the independently produced (and ‘crowd-sourced’) Historypin project, which I also recommend you have a look at (and which also has a few bugs to iron out).

Web Sites for Local History

Queen Avenue, off Castle Street, by M D Greaney

Queen Avenue, off Castle Street, by M D Greaney

Over the past few weeks I’ve come across a handful of very interesting looking sites for those of you with a local history interest. The best thing about them is that they’re after your input, so pop along and see what you can contribute!

Building History is a specialised wiki site, much like the (in)famous Wikipedia and the Liverpool Wiki. It encourages users to submit information about any road or building to its database, even the one you live in! Almost 200 roads and nearly 300 buildings have been added, and the site’s only been online since October 2009.

All you need is an email address, and you can get going. The Warwick page is the most complete, so use that as a template. Liverpool is there, waiting for someone to add something, though note that it’s placed in Lancashire!

For those privacy-concerned individuals (like me), it’s good to know they only allow publicly-available data to be added (census data, for example).

Liverpool Signs, Mosaics, Words and Graffiti is a set of photos on Flickr which collects together a huge number of images of… well, signs, mosaics, words and graffiti.

The most obviously interesting ones to readers of this blog are the ancient signs painted on the sides of warehouses and shops, or the tiled signs such as this Liverpool Co-operative sign in Bootle. But the collection also includes a huge number of other examples, from the formal to the most informal.

Of especial interest to me, as a ‘hidden landscape’ geek, is the boundary marker from Smithdown Road. I’m not sure whether this is a township boundary post or one for the London and North Western Railway (that’s the stamp on the marker), but Smithdown Road crosses the old boundary between the Toxteth and Wavertree townships.

Two other Flickr Groups you might be interested in are the Old Liverpool and Secret Life of Smithdown Road groups.

Finally, we have the Open Plaques project. This, in its own words, is “a service that aims to find and provide data about all the commemorative ‘plaques’ (often blue and round) that can be found across the UK and worldwide”.

You can browse their database via peoples’ names, places, or organisation, and the site wants all the plaques photographed, tagged with their geographical location, and have their colour identified. There’s a neat little graph on the home page letting you know how they’re getting on.

The data comes from a variety of sources (including English Heritage’s blue plaques site and Freedom of Information requests) which have been cleaned up for presentation on the site.

You can help them by getting in touch, or taking a photo of one and uploading it to Flickr. If you tag the photo correctly (as explained on the site) it will appear next to the relevant entry. Brilliant! All the data is free for you to reuse, and the maps are created using OpenStreetMap. You can follow the project via Twitter: @openplaques, or on their .

There are nine plaques for the city of Liverpool.

Impacts of Capital of Culture

The University of Liverpool and John Moores University are assessing the impact of the 2008 Capital of Culture year in a project called Impacts 08. Research has gone on since 2005, and is now at the stage of judging the effects the year had on the city of Liverpool.

Already a whole load of reports are available divided into themes of economics, taking part, culture and the arts, as well as others. My eye was naturally drawn to Liverpool 08 – Centre of the Online Universe, which covers the web and social media (unfortunately my own sites don’t get a mention :)).

You can follow Impacts 08 on Twitter, or on the Impacts 08 blog.

I was going to pick and choose a couple of read, but to be honest, these all look like interesting stuff! Let me know what you think of these in the comments section below. Do they reflect your experience? Did they miss anything out?

Trading Places: A History of Liverpool Docks

Trading Places - a history of Liverpool's dock system

Trading Places: A history of Liverpool docks

This looks like a fairly old corner of the Liverpool Museums site, but Trading Places is a simple and informative interactive map of Liverpool’s dock system and its history. The left-hand menu highlights the docks involved in trade with different parts of the world, as well as the docks’ names and the very reason for the dock systems construction. There’s also a timeline of significant dates along the bottom.

This is a great little tool, and its slightly old-fashioned look and pop-up windows just reflects the simplicity of getting the information across. I’ve been playing around with interactive web maps for a good few years now, so it’s great to see what can be achieved very simply. There’s even an accessible version (click on “begin the voyage”)!

Kudos to Laura Davis’ blog on the Daily Post website, whose advent calendar pointed me to this site, and which has been an lovely little source of historic websites over the last week! Trading Places is the destination behind door 11.

Liverpool History Society Questions online

Some very interesting bits from the Net recently:

Liverpool History Society Questions is a blog I always watch – readers ask questions and (more often than not) Rob Ainsworth of Liverpool History Society comes up with an answer. Topics range from buildings to family history to maps, and two recent topics will be of interest to readers of this blog. From October 15th there is a great and detailed description of court houses in Liverpool. These cramped, airless and dim dwellings were thrown up around Liverpool in the 19th Century, and hundreds of families lived in them. I know that a number of my own ancestors lived in such conditions in Toxteth and around the Cathedral area (as it is now). The famous Dr. Duncan played a key role in their investigation, and there are only a couple left in the city (listed in September this year).

On October 19th a reader asks about the 1725 Chadwick Map, which should be familiar to anyone having researched Liverpool’s urban history for any length of time. The authenticity of a copy for sale in the US is in question, and Rob Ainsworth does a great job in describing the map’s history. Chadwick’s map is annotated with road names and landmarks in the margins, and can be seen in many Liverpool history publications, such as Aughton, and Liverpool 800. A decent reproduction can be found on the Mersey Gateway (though the labels are barely readable.) A paper copy can be bought from Scouse Press.

In a few other bits of news, the forever-delayed tram system may never see the light of day: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/8314734.stm

In a follow-up to my recent post on ShipAIS, you can keep track of the Queen Mary 2 while it stays in Liverpool: http://www.shipais.com//showship.php?mmsi=235762000