Historic Churches of Great Britain

It started a few years ago. Travelling round the country in search of aircraft and trains etc like I do. I was noticing old churches more and more. Some very grand others modest but still pleasing on the eye.

Later on Sue and I stayed at the Travelodge at Fourwentways in Cambridgeshire. Not to be repeated as there was too many boys racers racing round the local roads during the late evening. However during the early evening I got bored and went out for a drive taking my camera with me. I stumbled across a rather pretty looking church, St Mary’s at Little Abington. Looking across the fields I say another church. Drove round and it was another St Mary’s this time at Great Abington. These were the first churches I had photographed. More were to follow.

It took me a while to get the idea of going into the churches and seeing what was inside. This opened up a whole new chapter. The objects, the symbols the history. Most churches have a guide to them written by a local historian. I started to collect them and so far have four box files full of them. Books on churches were soon bought and given to me as Christmas and Birthday presents. Sue will say I have far too many of these.

I built a website to display my photographs of the churches I had visited. Thanks to Ordnance Survey (referred to an OS from now on) I added mapping to it. I know that other mapping products are available but I have a great deal of respect for the OS and think their mapping is second to none. Having spent 35 years with OS Landranger maps I’m more than brand loyal.

The website is powered by an Access database and to date I’ve visited about 100 churches in about 10 or so different counties. Then I thought it would be good to at least add in a reference in the database to the churches listed in all my books. It was frustrating to read up about a church after I’d been there and realise that I’d missed something interesting. So a second database was added, ‘churches not yet visited’. I built little admin pages so that I could update each database and move a church from not visited to visited after I had visited each one. I then had a quest to add more and more churches into the not visited databse with a view of maybe added them to the website. Maybe letting people comment on the church and so adding to the information I had on them. So when I do visit I knew what to look our for.

Chatting to our GIS team at work, they pointed me to the OS Open Data site. In OS’s Vector Map District mapping is a category called ‘Places of Worship’ Data is free and available on CD or download. I started to download each grid square and process in to fit into my database. Plus I ordered the CD with all the data on it. Again this was totally free.

The data comes in ESRI shape files, specialist GIS software was needed to extract the data. SQL queries written to just select the Place of Worship. My website if split down into Counties and I wanted the OS data to also have counties. Again OS Open Data came to the rescue. Boundary Line data having a ‘Counties’ element. However. I could do an entire blog on the issue of counties. In fact I do plan to add something to the website to explain why I chose the counties I did. Many an hour was spend getting counties sorted. Basically I’ve gone for a mostly pre-1974 county map. I had no idea of any Welsh or Scottish Counties, so plenty of research and the like went into them. It was a long process sorting out Counties. Parts of Essex being now in Greater London. Should City of Bristol be on its own? Are people aware of the area that Middlesex used to cover, or do they think of it as just London? Birmingham? Again and entry on its own or part of a county.. or just West Midlands? I settled on the latter in that case.

Now with OS boundary line data they use current ‘Counties’, So Bournemouth being a unitary authority isn’t in the Dorset. Indeed many parts of the country aren’t in any ‘County’ area on the OS boundary line data. So I had to bring in Borough/Parish data to give me some idea as to where the churches were, Again this was free data from the OS.

So I ended up with text files with Co-ordinates of each place of worship with some County data and some borough data. So far this had taken several weeks to sort out, working a couple of hours each day.

As I wanted each ‘Place of Worship’ to have at least which county it is in. started processing the borough/parish information on all those not in a ‘County’. I turned to Wikipedia for help. On ever town/parish/borough page I looked at had something along the lines of ‘This place was in the historic county of whatever. Or ‘For ceremonial purpose This place is in the county of Whatever. Wikipedia was invaluable in helping me fill the missing gaps in my which county is that place in list. That took another couple of weeks looking up stuff, checking maps and doing find replaces on the text files. Quite a chore but so pleased when it was finished. .

One last thing I could now add before uploading the data to the database. Each download was one OS grid .E.g. SZ, TH etc. I had the Easting and Northing co-ordinates of each location and so I could create an OS grid reference for each Place of Worship. E.g. SZ 347623 . This I thought would be useful to put on the site. However I did make the mistake of rounding down all value, Means my 4th and 6th digits might be one out. Oh well, People should still be able to find the church on a Landranger map or sat nav – hopefully!

So I now had, Co-ordinates (Easting / Northing) Grid ref and County for every Place of Worship in Great Britain or so I thought.

I uploaded the files to my database. Came to over 23,000 places of worship. Built a test page in my site, hidden at the moment, to show each county with churches marked on an OS map. Was pleased with the efforts until I zoomed in. None of the Bournemouth Town Centre Places of Worship were marked. I know that they are there I can see two of them from my office window. Christchurch Priory wasn’t marked, Romsey Abbey, not marked. Blimey even Westminster Abbey didn’t make it onto the Ordnance Survey Places of Worship List. Are you going to tell William and Kate that or shall I? So the OS data as a very good starter for 10 but is no way complete.

So I first wrote an admin page that added Places of Worship to the list. It’s a simple OS map that you can click on where each one is. Its basically very similar to the code I have on the Work website for people to report graffiti etc and have a map where they can click on the location of the graffiti etc. This is fine and I’ve added loads but its going to take time.

I also want to start populating the database with place names and dedications. To help me I’ve written another web page which displays a Place of Worship that I have no place/dedication data for in my database plotted on an OS map. The map gives a useful hint to its town/city/village etc. For dedication I have a link to geograph.org.uk. This is a website that people are uploading photos to and they are trying to get a photo from ever 100m grid square in the UK. My link is to the square my unknown church is in and more often than not, someone has already photographed it, uploaded it to geograph.co.uk and tagged it with the churches dedication. Bingo, I can then add that data to the database. .Again I’m about two weeks into that and I’ve not finished Dorset yet.

In chatting to the GIS people above, we talked about the site becoming one where users can update it. Add data etc. I’ve thought about this a bit but wasn’t fully committed to it. I know it works for geograph and wikipedia but could I do something like that? Also I don’t want to loose the fact that this is my website of the churches I have visited with my photos on it. However, it will take me years to complete the project and so getting other people involved is a must.

I had a twitter chat to my good friends Stuart Harrison (@pezholio) and Andy Mabbett (@pigsonthewing) about this project and they pointed me to

a) openplaques.org. It being similar to what I want to do but with Blue plaques around the world. I have been hugely inspired by that site. It is so much what I want to do.
b) They also pointed me to openstreemap.org as they will have ‘Place of Worship’ data on it.
c) Also going back to Wikipedia, some Places of Worship will have their own Wiki page. I could bring that info into my site…

My head was spinning at all of this, the same excited feeling I get at the unconfrences that the three of us attend. Being bombarded with brilliant ideas. Great stuff.

One thing I love about the blue plaques website is the way they link to photographs, The users upload their photos to flickr and then use a special tag which the site picks up. Thus the site can add photographs with not much work from the admin and the user is still in control of the photos. Brilliant, must learn how to do that.

I’ve never looked at Openstreetmaps that much. That is also on my must learn how to do list. Also learning about how to link to and extract info from Wikipedia is another skill I need to do. I’ve got a bit of a head start on that as I have created and updated a few wikipedia pages, but need to learn more. Much more.

So I’m really excited about using all of the above to push my project forward and dare I say it, make it into something epic. The possibilities are defiantly there.

One final note on 'Big Society' and how I think the above fits into it. Now I when I say Big Society I'm not talking about the stuff Cameron bangs on about. People going to work in Libraries for nothing and all that. People like Stuart Harrison were talking Big Society long before Cameron jumped on the band wagon and is trying to make it his version of it. Here is how I feel the Big Society should be and how the above fits into it. For this project I’ve had help from Ordnance Survey, Wikipedia, geograph.org.uk and getting inspiration from openplaques.org. In return I’ve added data to openplaques.org. Will be adding photos later. Probably get more involved in Wikipedia and as to where my journey with openstreetmaps.org will take me, who knows? To me this is ‘Big Society’. Person A helps person B, Person B helps person C, Person C helps Person A and Person D. Person D helps.. well you get the picture, we all help each other, Open Data, Free Data and we all benefit.