I am delighted to have been offered by the editor the chance to describe here an online local history project now at the pilot stage. When looking for funding to take it further, it will be an enormous help to have an idea of its potential – in other words to know whether you, or your local history society, might like to be involved. So please read on!

 

The concept was inspired by the arrival two years ago of the amazing Google Maps, which make it so easy to find a building one is interested in and to display it in an extraordinarily detailed satellite view. This facility seems to me to offer a very exciting new dimension for local historians. Much of our material relates to a specific location, whether a public building or private house, a factory or mill or shop, a park or a garden, a town square or street, a hospital or prison.

 

But local events and documents are usually also located with similar precision in time. And the internet has brought us an entirely new and flexible way of exploring time, in the form of the interactive timeline. The aim of Places in History is to bring together, in an ever-growing database, the twin elements of time and place as they relate to local history. The partner in the scheme with Google Maps is a website, HistoryWorld, which makes much of timelines. It is something I have been developing over the past nine years.

 

So how does Places in History work? Well, it starts with the place. A contributor, invited to join in by a local history society, finds and tags the place in Google Maps and then builds up a couple of pages relating to it. The first page displays an image of the place together with the event or events that happened there – and, if required, any supplementary notes. The optional second page is for other images connected with the place.

 

Let me give you an example through screenshots. St Helena Terrace is on the bank of the Thames in Richmond. Figure 1 locates it very precisely in Google Maps, opposite the island in the centre of town. The terrace is of historical interest only because of two famous people who lived there – the Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen in 1854, and from 1955 an Edwardian heart-throb, the actress Ellaline Terriss. So on the place’s own page (not displayed here), these two people provide the second and third events. The building of the terrace in 1834-5 is the first.

 

Figure 2 shows the top of the terrace’s page of images (an enchanting postcard of Ellaline Terriss is out of sight below the bearded revolutionary and is followed by historical prints of the terrace). And Figure 3 is something automatically created by our own Historyworld software. Each event of local history becomes part of our large database of national and international history. So the local event can feature in many different timeline contexts. In this case I have imagined someone wanting to find out what else was going on while the terrace was being built. The Tolpuddle martyrs and the burning of the Houses of Parliament are just two of the other events that we have in our database for 1834.

 

Our pilot scheme contains two projects, one regional (the borough of Richmond-upon-Thames) and the other thematic (the life of Richard Trevithick). You can browse in them yourself by starting at www.historyworld.net/placesinhistory/richmond.asp   and www.historyworld.net/placesinhistory/trevithick.asp ..

 

It is important to emphasize that Places in History is not a rival to the websites of local history societies. It enhances them, by displaying their material in a wider context. Twickenham’s museum, for example, has an absolutely brilliant website and the Twickenham contributors to Places in History have inserted frequent links back to it. The project, if it reaches its full potential, will become a rich national database of local history – achieving wider exposure for everyone, and more links back to each society’s own site.

 

So the question I began with. If you or any of your colleagues might like to be involved in Places in History at a later stage, do please email me at bamber@historyworld.net .