OV9

This is rather awesome, but view on a comuptah rather than a phone/tablet.

Sliding transparency (bottom left of screen) allows you to view current satellite images and overlay old maps.

Some of the old maps are pretty pish - for my general area I've found a couple of good ones are :

1. OS 25inch 1892-1914
2. OS 1944-1971

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore

The National Library of Scotland online maps are excellent. If they don’t have what you are looking for, SABRE Maps may:
https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/maps/

I used the NLS maps just over a month ago after an enforcement officer got overzealous and starting bringing up planning laws over a forestry track we were repairing. He simply wouldn’t believe that the old gravel/brick track had sunk into the mud since the 60’s - there was about a foot of mud over it!
Anyway the track first appeared on OS maps over a century ago
I did also find google maps historic images useful as the South East has really clear aerial pictures from 1940 on it which showed the road being repaired.

I will have a play later. I’m always fascinated by all the ww2 airfields which litter the Norfolk / Suffolk countryside, you can still make out a lot of the old runways and pads even though they’ve been removed and farmed over, would like to see how some of the less obvious ones match to current landscape / roads / buildings.

Search for Ingleby Barwick and switch between the overlays. Shows the scale of farmland erosion into housing since the 1970s. It’s classed as a town in its own right these days but it is apparently still the largest private residential housing estate in Europe. And it’s still growing

jamcg wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 6:26 am Search for Ingleby Barwick and switch between the overlays. Shows the scale of farmland erosion into housing since the 1970s. It’s classed as a town in its own right these days but it is apparently still the largest private residential housing estate in Europe. And it’s still growing

And it’s a fooking maze! My mate lived in 2 houses there and I used to get lost every time I went.

Zonda_ wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 4:39 pm

jamcg wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 6:26 am Search for Ingleby Barwick and switch between the overlays. Shows the scale of farmland erosion into housing since the 1970s. It’s classed as a town in its own right these days but it is apparently still the largest private residential housing estate in Europe. And it’s still growing

And it’s a fooking maze! My mate lived in 2 houses there and I used to get lost every time I went.

It would have been simpler if the selfish git had just lived in one.

mik wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 4:41 pm

Zonda_ wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 4:39 pm

jamcg wrote: Mon Nov 21, 2022 6:26 am Search for Ingleby Barwick and switch between the overlays. Shows the scale of farmland erosion into housing since the 1970s. It’s classed as a town in its own right these days but it is apparently still the largest private residential housing estate in Europe. And it’s still growing

And it’s a fooking maze! My mate lived in 2 houses there and I used to get lost every time I went.

It would have been simpler if the selfish git had just lived in one.

Some of them you need 2, I’ve had shoes come in bigger boxes. And they all look the same, every time we have a job there I definitely need sat nav on

Thanks for the heads-up about this @mik, some of those are incredibly high-res. Like I said, that's the morning of work gone...

I bought a 1950s map of the centre of Stourbridge from the NLS, printed at original size. Getting it framed, but if anyone else is tempted it's on nice paper with a border of an inch or so and looks well printed. Don't buy the frame before it arrives though; funnily enough, maps didn't just conform to the now standard A1/A2/A3 etc sizing

Thought I'd resurrect this thread as I was just using the site to check out something out from my youth. Reminded me how cool it is when you know an area (or at least know it from a particular point in history).

3 useful maps that might work for areas you know well - just using Heathrow as a reference that everyone will recognise.

> Best viewed on a computer as opposed to a phone
> Each of the 3 links below will open with "current view" as the background layer - use the sliding bar at the bottom left to transition in and out of the older views. (You can change to a other viewing modes also - such as spyglass).

Heathrow Hairport

> This was just fields once. 1892-1914 map

> Rather different. 1944-1984 OS map

> Under Construction. 1944-1950 Air Photos. (As you might expect - air photo coverage doesn't extend across all of the UK).

I both thank you and curse you for sending those links - that's a good half hour of productivity I'm not getting back!

There are some incredible bits and pieces that these throw up - as you say, the stuff close to home resonates. Amazing to see that in the war time aerial shots, a good 25% of the east of Peckham Rye common / park has been turned over to what looks like allotments - presumably following the "Dig for Victory" initiative.

GG. wrote: Wed Aug 06, 2025 1:19 pm I both thank you and curse you for sending those links - that's a good half hour of productivity I'm not getting back!

Exactly - it's a complete rabbit hole!

! I knew someone who lived for a while in a not-particularly-salubrious area of Glasgow officially called The Wyndford. I'd heard others refer to it as "The Barracks" a few times, and noticed that the wall between this area and the main road was pretty "chunky", but assumed it was just a nickname.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/pbWWbG93xamgsLRT8

It was only when I looked at that website that I realised that the entire area was clearly a 1960's redevelopment of an old Army Barracks. Well duh!

Tesco Supermarket sitting where the old station was.

Seen this before but it's very cool indeed.
Great seeing local pubs and churches and street names now, where there were farms or similar back in the day.

mik wrote: Wed Aug 06, 2025 2:38 pm
https://maps.app.goo.gl/pbWWbG93xamgsLRT8

It was only when I looked at that website that I realised that the entire area was clearly a 1960's redevelopment of an old Army Barracks. Well duh!

And that view being on Maryhill Road, named after the Barracks.

I had to use those historical maps to argue with the council so unfortunately know them all too well

JonMad wrote: Wed Aug 06, 2025 3:06 pm And that view being on Maryhill Road, named after the Barracks.

Kind of > mostly stolen from wiki:

"Hew Hill"", the Laird (aka Lord) of Gairbraid, had no male heir, so he left his estate to his daughter, Mary Hill (1730–1809).

Her husband insisted that - on the passing of her father, and the subsequent end to centuries of "Hills of Gairbraid", that the area was to be "in all times called the town of MaryHill" - which then became a Glasgow suburb.

I don’t know if it’s been mentioned in the thread, might even be very old news,

But google earth lets you look back at old satellite images. It varies a lot area by area. The 1999 image of our village is lovely and crisp, but some of the others are very poor. Can go right back to 1945 in some areas, I assume a stitched together archive of old aerial photos. Don’t know whether it’s something they’re able to keep adding to.

I’m strangely fascinated by how roads are upgraded and realigned, the 1945 map shows the road outside ours used to follow the current field hedge line, but was at some point smoothed to allow flow through the village with a sweeping S bend instead of coming into a T junction about three houses down from ours.

I could waste hours on that website, it’s absolutely ace.

On a related note- Stockton library have copies of local maps going back decades, the old Victorian ones even have every single building on them. I’m sure Stockton can’t be the only library to offer this- it’s quite special handling old maps as opposed to just viewing them in screen