Enhancing Know Your Place
Know Your Place is an online digital map of Bristol created by Bristol City Council. Originally conceived, and still used, as a tool for planners to view historic land use, Know Your Place allows the public to to explore your Bristol neighbourhods through historic maps, images and linked information.
One of the central strands of the Know Your Bristol project is enhancing Know Your Place by helping to facilitate the addition of crowd-sourced content. This content will add a ‘human’ or ‘community layer’ to the map in the form of photographs of places or objects, stories and sound recordings uploaded and linked to particular places by volunteers. While some of this new content may come from attics, lofts and tucked-away boxes of people’s homes, some will consist of already existing-archive material that has been digitised but not yet linked to a place. For example, the Vaughan Collection held by Bristol Record Office consists of around 8,000 digitised postcard images of Bristol, but is not easily accessible and shareable. Part of the Know Your Bristol project will bring together community volunteers to research the postcards at Bristol Record Office and upload their findings on to the Know Your Place Map.
Uploading of this content to the map not only makes the content much more accessible, but begins to tell different stories of the city. The selection of what to upload, be it people own photos and stories or those already held in archives and the choices of which physical sites to link content to, are not innocent practices. They are practices imbued with the lives of those that chose them. The enriched re-mappings of the city that will be co-created through this process thus tell a story of the present too – they reveal what we deem ‘important’, what counts as ‘heritage’ and as ‘valuable’ history. Where this process of selection, mapping and history-writing has traditionally been done by professional historians and cartographers, through this project we open it up to much wider participation. What would the historical geography of Bristol look like if written by all of us? What would it tell us about the past and how might this re-imaging of the past begin to re-shape the present?
All of the Vaughn postcards of Whitchurch Airport are positioned in the wrong place.
They are at the North side (the newest end) of the airport they should be at the South site near the still existing Airworks hanger, the North buildings and the runway was built 1939-40, way after the photographs were taken.The clubhouse was single story until 1938-39, so that dates the photographs as pre 1939.
Bob,
Many thanks for your comments on the Whitchurch Airport postcards; we will get these repositioned as soon as possible. Feedback like this, and your local history knowledge, is just what we need, and is enormously important not just to the project but also to our goals in community engagement. If you have the time, we still have many more Vaughan postcards waiting to be added to Know Your Place, and we are still short of volunteers to help with images of transport around and about Bristol.
This is just the coolest thing ever! We’ve uncovered some wallpaper in a property we’re refurbing in St Nick’s St which is what led me to the Know Your Place service (trying to date it) and it’s my new favourite time-suck!! Such a rich resource. So grateful to those who conceived and are working on it. Would happily volunteer to help actually – who would I approach?
Anyhoo, I just spotted that a Hartley photograph is positioned in the wrong place.
“Collection reference number: 263595
Restoration & stone cleaning of Martins Bank, Corn Street, Bristol.
Historic collection reference: HC209”
Img URL: http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace/images/her_pc/1863.jpg
It’s currently positioned on the corner of St Nick’s and Corn Sts. It should be on the corner of Corn & Small Sts. That’s the The Commercial Rooms to the left in the image.
(It was Stuckey’s bank on the corner of St Nick’s & Corn, as shown in the Vaughan postcard image which is correctly positioned.)
Not sure if this is the appropriate place to report things like this, if not, please tell me where/who I should tell.
Thanks again for this awesome tool. Oh, and the wallpaper is 1830s, made in London according to the UK’s leading wallpaper historian!! 🙂
Claire,
Thank you very much for your feedback and I’m so pleased that you enjoy using the resource. We’re aware of a few errors on the Hartley layer that we are gradually working through, but thank you for letting us know about this one.
We’d be very interested in any details about your wallpaper. It would be great if you felt like adding a photograph and information about it to the community layer.
You might also be interested in the new mobile/ipad enabled version of the site that we’ve just launched at http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/kyp
Many thanks again,
Pete Insole
Vaughan postcards: P.S Westward Ho, Hotwells, early-mid 1900s, BRO 43207/9/10/62, is shown in the wrong place. The picture has Rownham Hotel in the back right, which make the picture further west. Rownham Hotel was on the junction of Charlton Place and Hotwell Road, Charlton Place being at the bottom of Freeland Place. The correct place should be just west of Vaughan postcard: Hotwells, Bristol. c.1900’s. BRO 43207/9/29/67, which has the hotel back centre.
Terrific site, by the way. Keep up the good work !
Mike,
Well spotted, and thank you; we will move that as soon as we can (it’s a bit of a manual process, but we’ll get there).
Coincidentally, just in the last couple of days I have been looking at other paddle steamer postcards for a new project we are working on, ‘Wish You Were Here’, in which we are looking into the handwritten side of the cards, at the messages, addresses and journeys that are shown there.
‘Wish You Were Here’ is funded by the Brigstow Institute, University of Bristol.