Streets of London now... and then

[dipsydoodle]

Stand still and picture yourself in history with app that creates hybrid images of present and past.



Streetmuseum app can recognise a user's location and then overlay a historic image onto the camera view

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From Shakespeare to Hitchcock, London's streets are full of incredible stories – and now your iPhone can become a time machine to explore them.

These incredible images are part of a series launched by the Museum of London's Streetmuseum app which lets you walk side by side with Londoners from the 19th and 20th century.

They reveal just how much has changed in the intervening years. For instance, Blackfriars station as it is today is pictured alongside the entrance from outside 179 Queen Victoria Street in 1930.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2567739/Streetmuseum-app-creates-hybrid-images-London.html

[Skittles]

1. I love hybrid pics!

[dipsydoodle]

3. Having done this here in London

I would expect the app to be spread to other cities - maybe NY to start with.

[BBR Esq]

8. NY would be great.

[My Good Babushka]

2. Neat!

I love Victorian era London. I love all the history and folklore of the United Kingdom from medieval through Victorian times. I hope to visit there someday.

[dipsydoodle]

4. I'm old enough to remember the city before it was modernised

when visiting the museums and monuments was almost an obligatory exercise with parents and in my case my grand parents too - legging it on Sunday mornings for example.

[MADem]

5. That is just hypnotic!

The times, they are a changin'... indeed!!!

[dipsydoodle]

6. I wasn't sure if Foyles was still in Charing Cross Road.

I remember about, what must be about 14 years ago , when Ray's Jazz moved into Foyles bookshop. There were two main sellers of jazz records in London - Ray's and Mole Jazz which closed in 2012.

[MADem]

7. Good news...they are staying in the neighborhood!

http://www.foyles.co.uk/Public/Biblio/Detail.aspx?blogId=1224

As you may well be aware by now, in 2014 our flagship store on Charing Cross Road is moving out of its home for more than 80 years at 113-119 Charing Cross Road and into the former Central St Martins College of Art and Design building at no.107, just a few yards down the road.

[pink-o]

10. Ahhh! I used to work in Covent Garden 1980...before it became all touristy

That was the last year I could afford to live in London--Thatcher had pretty well made it too expensive for working class people. I came back to the US in 81 and have spent most of my time traveling in other (cheaper) countries.

Thanks for this! Brings back so many memories; London in the 70s was distinctly British, not this NYC moshup I see these days. And yes, I spent a ton of time in Foyles on Charing Cross Road--when I wasn't across Oxford st buying electronics on Tottenham Ct Road!!!

[MADem]

12. Thanks are due to our dipsydoodle for finding the article...

I'm just piling on, as a gasbag who used to live in UK, and loves this sort of thing!!!

[JHB]

9. The scale seems off in some of them

The people in the past seem markedly smaller than their present-day counterparts. And that Mercedes must be huge to be as big as as a horse team and wagon.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. That last one's odd - the building seems well matched

but there is a significant difference in the size of people - maybe an artifact of a zoom lens used on the left/old, and wide-angle (thus closer to the people) on the right/new?

[MisterP]

13. and all the Ripper sites *still* loke like places someone would get stabbed at night

[dipsydoodle]

14. That's a fact

I've done the walk from the Tower and back again.

[freshwest]

15. I'll have to update and get this eventually. One of my ancestors was part of the government of the

City of London in the 1500s.

He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, did some good works that are in Wikipedia and Google, was knighted and served in Parliament in other positions at that time.

He had a busy and diverse career or life. I'm guessing that was common back then. My direct paternal family record goes back a thousand years. I know where the family lived for hundreds of years before they moved to London, and they did very well there also.

My branch of the family went to Amsterdam, then to America 400 years ago. And lost contact with all our English kin forever.
I don't think it matters now, but I've always wanted to see what they saw. This looks like my only chance. Thank you for posting this.

[dipsydoodle]

16. See here for stills from 1927

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/198876/rare-color-film-shows-what-london-looked-like-in-1927/?-4

And computer generation of London pre-5th Sept. 1666 which was when the Great Fire started and destroyed much it

My own family on my father's mother's side goes back to Holland. My father traced that side of the family back to 1545 doing it the hard way back in the eighties - not online. Getting back prior to 1545 becomes increasingly difficult - was when church records on vellum were transferred to paper and many errors occurred. We already knew that my mother's mother's side was Saxon and her father's Russian/Polish. I think we're all Heinz 57's when you get down to it.