In Britain in old photographs: Luton a second selection, the author Stuart Smith reproduces on page 126 another road in Luton that he has not been able to identify. That being said I thought that I’d have a go a geolocating the image. A tricky one really with not that much to go on, but well worth a shot.
Original historical photograph. Click here for a larger version.
Initial evidence
Analysing the image there were more clues than I had expected at first glance, although not much in terms of larger context:
Annotated historical photograph, showing initial evidence. Click here for a larger version.
The first thing to stand out to me is what looks like a shop front, replete with signage on a wooden fence.
A “H” fire hydrant sign that is affixed to the fence.
Some form of “junction box” at the foot of the lamp post.
An old fashioned “Brookbond Tea” enamelled metal sign on the fencing. It looks like an old Brookbond sign to me. The word “Tea” is visible in the photograph, so suggesting a general shop.
VHF TV antennas on the houses.
Three pip like brick features just below rim of a chimney stack.
Roof shape, window location, and extension on the first property.
Some Silver Birch trees planted along the road. They look like they have just come into leaf, so the photo was probably taken in late April to May.
With not much larger context to go on I needed some leads fast. I hypothesised that the shop front was probably located on the corner of a road. Corner shops in that era were just about everywhere, so it seemed a reasonable starting point.
The corner shop dataset
Using OpenStreetMap I downloaded all the modern shop locations and road paths in Luton. The objective was to create a road intersection database, and in combination with the shop locations, set-up a geospacial query against the dataset searching for shops that were less than or equal to 25m from a road junction. This helped to eliminate a chunk of the shops that are in Luton, as there were 925 of them listed in the dataset, which reduced to 693 shops within 25m of a road intersection. Still a a fair bit of work, although I expected the road in the photograph would probably be in the suburbs rather than close to the town centre where the highest shop density was located.
The map of shops within 25m of a road junction. Click here for a larger version.
Searching
The next step was to systematically work through my corner shop GIS map grid square by grid square. I did this as a combination of examining each marked corner shop against the satellite imagery backdrop, and if a location looked promising, I’d then take a closer look at it in Google Street View. About half-way through this process I got lucky.
Results
At the western end of Woodland Avenue at the junction with Leagrave Road, there is a corner shop.
Woodland Avenue corner shop. Click here for a larger version.
Woodland Avenue map, showing the approximate position of where original photograph was taken. Click here for a larger version.
Looking at the scene from approximately the same location as where the historical photograph was taken:
Woodland Avenue, showing correlating evidence to the original historical photograph. Click here for a larger version.
Chimney feature comparison of historical and modern images. Click here for a larger version.
Mature Silver Birch trees a little further down Woodland Avenue. Click here for a larger version.
The Roof shape, window location, extension and shop frontage are consistent with the historical image. The fencing in the original image has gone.
The lamp post is located in the same position. The junction box has been replaced and relocated.
The fire hydrant sign has been repositioned from the fence in the original and affixed to the lamp post. Clearly there is a water access cover nearby, although I could not find it in the modern imagery.
The first house in the road is set back as in the original, although it has been significantly modernised. The gable end window that was in the original is missing in the modern scene.
The chimney brick feature on the second house is still present in the modern image.
The first and second Silver Birch trees are missing in the modern photo, although there are still a row of them further down the road.
A time period for the original photograph
The 405 line VHF TV antenna in the historical photograph gives a clue to when it was taken. VHF TV transmissions on this frequency began in 1936 and were decommissioned in 1982-85. Given this, I expect the original was taken in the 1960’s or perhaps earlier.
As mentioned above regarding the Silver Birch trees, the photo was probably taken in late April into May.
In the original photo, a shadow is being cast by the lamp post and running along the axis of the road. Now that I had the orientation of the road from the map, I was able to calculate the position of The Sun for the 1st of May, the shadow would run along the axis of the road at around 1500hrs. So realistically only having a rough date estimate, the original photograph would have been taken roughly mid-afternoon.
Conclusions
Given all the above and considering the match between the historical and modern evidence, I’m very confident that the original photograph was taken on the corner of Woodland Avenue in Luton. Another mystery solved.
Of course had my original hypothesis about the shop being on a corner been wrong, then clearly much more search work would have been required, or even worse the shop may have been redeveloped into a dwelling and not listed in the geographical database. With this kind of work a healthy dose of intuition and luck does go a long way when dealing with such limited initial information.