Trying out, and inspired by … historypin.com

At some point last year I chanced upon a site called www.historypin.com. It looked like a brilliant idea, but I was completely baffled, couldn’t get it to work properly, didn’t think it was worth perservering, and got distracted by something else.

Been having another go today. It crashes a lot on our iPad, so I’m back on the old trusty desktop, and from here have added a small selection of images – all but one being ‘things lost’ (the exception is the frozen Ouse, added to complement a 1963 image already added).

Some of the images are just pinned to the right place. Where possible, if they’re taken from the street, they’re pinned to Street View. Which, when it all works quickly and properly together, is amazing.

I’m a miserable old cynic these days, not often impressed, but when I managed to line up my 1995 photo of the carriageworks (ABB) entrance on Holgate Road with the Google Street View image, and viewed it and saw how it so poignantly captured the changes my generation/recent generations have known, it reminded me of the very best aspects of the internet. How it enables, and empowers, and how it records so many details, so many lives, the things we used to forget to remember.

I hope this link works – ABB York (Carriageworks), 1995. The small orange figure may magically connect you to a more recent view of the scene.

If it doesn’t – that big pink button at the top takes you to my profile page on historypin.com … and from there you can wend your way to Holgate Road. Or Ouse Acres for the sugarbeet factory, or Burton Croft on Burton Stone Lane, or Hungate, or Lendal Bridge, etc …

Would be interested in knowing, via the comments facility below, what you think of historypin.com. Also wondering if anyone with an iPhone fancies using the iPhone app the site offers to do a 2012 version of the views towards the sugarbeet factory, from the same locations.

Might not seem important now, all this recording of recent ‘history’, but it will be.