BEST WEBSITES
Houses and streets
There’s nothing like a picture of the place where an ancestor lived to put us in touch with our past, says Jonathan Scott
Some streets are more photogenic than others, and some areas will have been more carefully documented than others. Streets may have been surveyed by the local council, or snapped by professional photographers, or be depicted in postcards preserved at a local-history library.
I live in a nondescript building, which replaced an even more nondescript building, which itself stood on land that had once been the corner section of school fields. As a result, it’s been a tricky but rewarding experience to find photos of the land as it used to be, and of the building that existed before 1973.
For your ‘then and now’ folder, you can quickly find photographs of your ancestors’ street, house or area as it exists today using the likes of Google Street View (google.co.uk/maps) or Rightmove (rightmove.co.uk), showing property for sale or rent. We’ve also listed some websites where you can search for aerial photographs, which even if they don’t show your ancestors’ specific street will reveal how the wider landscape has changed.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF IRELAND
It’s worth visiting the NLI’s online catalogue to explore the kinds of images that survive, and see how fun they can be to research when they’ve been well catalogued, regardless of whether you have Irish roots or not. This is the finding aid to all sorts of NLI content, including references to more than 150,000 photographs, of which about half have been digitised. These cover all sorts of subjects, from historic buildings to industry, events and disasters, famous people, civic celebrations and protests. But there are of course many hundreds of images that simply show streets, houses and communities from across Ireland. You can narrow by timeline, creator, region or subject – and there are categories for both ‘Houses’ and ‘Streets’.
FRANCIS FRITH
Although this website is focused on selling you prints, it is nevertheless an excellent place to browse vintage, retro and nostalgic black-and-white photographs of areas across the UK. More are added every month – in February 2022 alone 1,098 photos were uploaded depicting 432 places. The site is also quick and responsive, and there are various new features since it last appeared in this column, including the ability to send free electronic postcards to friends. You can also share memories and stories relating to specific images – more than 82,600 have been added to date. There’s no postcode search, so just type in the name of a town or area to get started.
BRITAIN FROM ABOVE
This website is based around a collection of 95,000 aerial photographs, the majority of which were taken by the company Aerofilms Ltd between 1919 and 1953. It was the result of a four-year project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to conserve and digitise the images. You can search by keyword, image reference or county, or by using the map which is arguably the best way in. The site has been online for some time now and is showing its age in some respects, but remains a useful tool for family historians. Britain From Above is free to use, but you will have to create a user account in order to be able to zoom into the photographs.
HISTORYPIN
Historypin was first on the scene with the idea of superimposing old photos on Google Street View, attracting lots of publicity in the 2010s. It remains a diverting browse, although how useful it will be for your research depends on how much material has been uploaded for the area you’re interested in. Visitors can browse the photographs on the website, and if you sign up then you can upload and curate collections too. WhatWasThere (whatwasthere.com) also allows you to explore historic images linked to Street View. It works well, and has all sorts of interesting stuff if you dig for it, but there are not yet enough photos from the British Isles to make it genuinely useful.
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR LOCAL HISTORY
This smart and spiffy website has all sorts of resources aimed at the association’s members, and will help you track down local-heritage groups. Many of these will have online galleries, often featuring privately owned images of local streets and houses that you can’t find elsewhere. And if you visit a local-history website then always make sure that you check out the links section. This is where you tend to find members’ own websites, which in turn may have all sorts of buried treasure, and are just the kind of sites that won’t turn up anywhere near the top of the results of a web search – no matter how good you are at using Google.
Experts Choice
One of my favourite online sources of historic images for house history is Historic England’s site England’s Places (historicengland.org.uk/imagesbooks/photos/englands-places), an enjoyably absorbing wholly digitised and searchable photographic collection. The images date from the 1850s to the 1990s and comprise street scenes, village and townscapes, and exterior and sometimes interior views of individual buildings. Often referred to as the ‘Architectural Red Box Collection’, the originals were, not unsurprisingly, stored in red boxes in Historic England’s archive.
The collection originated in 1941 when the National Buildings Record began to document built heritage. Subsequent additions to the core of 1930s photographs include a variety of images from both commercial and amateur photographers, lending the collection a wonderfully eclectic air.
An especially endearing feature of this digitised version is its replication of the physical experience of looking through the red boxes – as far as is possible – which many may fondly remember doing in person at the Swindon searchroom. Simply search by place name, and virtually ‘open’ a box to browse a clickable gallery displaying cards with images affixed. Clicking on an image reveals the handwritten details on the reverse, such as building name, date and photographer. Happily, there are zoom and rotate options too.
Looking through the images one by one is a fascinating process, made all the more enjoyable if your house or street pops up. Even if the house you are researching is not included, the views of streets and buildings in the area you are looking at offer glimpses into the past, literally snapshots in time, thereby providing a wider visual context for your investigations.
Karen Averby is a buildings historian and co-hosts #HouseHistoryHour on Twitter.
Go Further
Nine more websites that can help your research
A VISION OF BRITAIN
w visionofbritain.org.uk
Find out how your postcode has changed since 1801 using Ordnance Survey maps.
FACEBOOK
w facebook.com
Local-history groups and libraries often post highlights to Facebook. Try searching for the name of an area together with ‘local history’.
FLICKR
w flickr.com
Many museums, archives and libraries still upload georeferenced images to Flickr.
GOOGLE IMAGES
w google.com/imghp?hl=en
It’s always worth searching Google Images, but you may be swamped with estate agents’ photos.
HOUSE HISTORY HOUR
w househistoryhour.co.uk
This is the website of the weekly Twitter event #HouseHistoryHour, which takes place on Thursdays at 7pm GMT.
LONDON PICTURE ARCHIVE
w londonpicturearchive.org.uk
Many archives and libraries have their own dedicated image catalogues, such as this one from the London Metropolitan Archives.
NATIONAL LIBRARY OF WALES
w tinyurl.com/nlw-gallery-photos
View digital versions of some of the library’s photographic collection.
STREET DIRECTORIES
w tinyurl.com/uni-leicester-directories
Directories can be invaluable for getting to grips with changing streets and house numbers. For Scottish properties try digital.nls.uk/directories.
THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES
w images.nationalarchives.gov.uk
Search 75,000 digitised examples from TNA’s image library, including aerial photographs.