Website delves into Britain's past

Budding historians can access a collection of historic maps, stories and statistics that show how Britain has changed over the centuries.

Vision of Britain combines statistics from every census from 1801 to 2001, original ordnance survey maps and over 90,000 articles from three gazetteers written during the 19th century.

The site, the creation of the Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GBHGIS) project at Portsmouth University, aims to offer something that is “quite new” and “which can only exist on the web”.

“Most heritage sector web projects are designed to get you to go and look at "the real thing" in the museum or archive it is on display in, but this website is our real thing,” said Dr Humphrey Southall, project leader. “Because of the sources we hold, we can guarantee some information on the history of everywhere.”

Unfortunately, the site has suffered a few teething problems since its launch earlier today with some sections slow to load. But Dr Southall said some of these issues were inevitable due to the level of interest in the site.

Dr Southall told Web User: “There are a couple of technical issues, in particular one database query which we did not pick up during stress testing. However, at the moment so many people are trying to access the site, problems are inevitable.

“I decided some time back that if launch publicity was successful we would have this kind of initial problem. If the site is still unusable at the end of the week I will be much more worried.”

To use the site, which took over ten years and £1.5m to create, enter a postcode or a place name into the search engine to find out what is known about a particular area.