A Vision of Britain through Time

Much of our data is freely available on-line to everyone as part of a separate website we created called A Vision of Britain Through Time. This website presents the history of Great Britain through places since 1801. It includes maps, statistical trends, a gazetteer of British administrative units, on-line versions of a selection of tables and early printed text from some of the published Census Reports as well as historical descriptions of places and journeys. The site is free to use and does not require any registration. Please note, the site does not identify individual people, buildings or addresses. Instead it puts historical places into context and gives an indication of how life in England, Scotland and Wales has changed since 1801.

The original construction of this public website was made possible as one part of a major grant worth £3/4m. from the Big Lottery Fund, a distributor of funds from the UK National Lottery. It took a specialised team three years to create and was launched in October 2004. The site was built through a collaboration between the Great Britain Historical GIS team at the University of Portsmouth together with the Centre for Computational Geography at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at the Queen's University of Belfast.

The site was re-launched in July 2009 thanks to a large grant from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). This re-launch incorporated a new look and feel and major modifications to the contents including; substantial additions to the historic map library, the incorporation of two new map viewers and a map catalogue system, Parliamentary boundaries and election results from General and By-elections back to 1832 and a new Learning Resources area providing guidance on how to use the web-site, where the information behind it comes from and how it is used.

Since then we have continued to make further modifications to the site and its content as we do new work and this has aided our consistently high usage figures.

A website which links historical information together through place.