New views of Greater Manchester
City benefits from new Ordnance Survey image app and 3D modelling
Historical photo-mapping web app Timepix has launched in Greater Manchester, with approximately 21,000 photographs of the area in the 1940s and 1950s being published online.
The pictures were taken as part of a detailed postwar survey of Manchester and surrounding towns such as Oldham, Rochdale, Stalybridge and Stockport.
Surveyors from Ordnance Survey (OS) took measurements at chosen locations called Revision Points and photographed a fieldworker holding a white arrow, accompanied by a hymn board with technical information. The photographs also capture the Greater Manchester streets as they were at the time and the faces of passersby, including children who will be in their sixties and seventies now.
Timepix was founded by OS education manager and part-time historian Elaine Owen to put historic images of the UK online in a searchable map. Owen said: “We’d love people to visit www.time
pix.uk and search the places and streets they know to see if they recognise anyone, or even themselves.”
She added that the collection captured a “rich heritage” from the era, including shop fronts and goods on sale, billboards promoting movie stars, local landmarks and advertising slogans. In many cases street corners were chosen as Revision Points, meaning that a large number of corner shops feature. The images are available on www.timepix.uk/#/
map, along with a small selection of photographs from other parts of England and Scotland. Low-resolution watermarked copies can be downloaded for free, but there is a fee for high-resolution copies, starting at £3.99, in order to fund the site.
Timepix aims to publish 25,000 other images of Greater Manchester shortly, followed by pictures from across the UK. The project is part-funded by Geovation, OS and HM Land Registry’s innovation hub.
Video recreations
Older historic images of Manchester have also become available in two new 3D models by animator Neil Millington. He works for Ocean Cad, which makes 3D visualisations for the offshore construction industry, but creates models of Manchester in his spare time using the Brian Godfrey series of antique maps, based on detailed 60-inch-to-the-mile OS maps. They are available as short videos on vimeo.com/oceancad. The latest models show the north of the city and the area around its cathedral as they were in 1850.
His videos also include views of Manchester as it would have looked from a hot-air balloon or a steam train, and a recreation of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre.
Hamilton can trace his ancestry to the Hulme, Moss Side and Chorlton-upon-Medlock areas of Manchester in the Victorian era, and was inspired to create the models “to try to get a better idea of what the Manchester of those times was like to live in”. He aims to reconstruct all of the OS sheets from 1790 to 1850.
Hamilton can create fly-throughs or still images of an address in central Manchester in 1850 for family historians, for a small fee. Email neilmillington58@gmail.com or call 0777 4010174 to get in touch.
We’d love people to search the places and streets they know