Update on my Historic Churches Website

For my #weeklyblogclub blog this week I’d thought I would do a quick update on my Historic Churches Website, www.peterandsusan.co.uk/church

The story so far - I started photographing pretty looking churches. I set up a website to display the photos, I added a section to list churches I’ve yet to visit. Mainly to list stuff that is interesting in that church so I don’t miss it when I visit. This lead me to download the Places of Worship data from the Ordnance Survey Open Data website. This gave me 22,000 points on a map of various Places of Worship, some modern, some historic. And also some missing e.g. Westminster Abbey and the like.

Since then I’ve been working on that data. Deleting the modern churches and putting names (dedication) to the historic ones. It’s a big task. Whilst all counties have had some work on them, so far I managed to ‘complete’ three counties. I’ve deleted all the modern churches and put names to all the historic ones. Those counties I’ve done are Hampshire, Dorset and Norfolk. I’m not saying that my list is the definitive list of historic churches in those counties but I’d like to think that it’s the vast majority of them. My next step on those pages is to add photos and a bit of text about each church.

So far this has taken me some 18 months of work. There is still a huge about to do. So any information from #weeklyblogclub people would be very welcome. Adding names to churches, useful information about them and any photographs would be very gratefully received. Even a line to say that church number 12345 on your site is a modern building would help. So I can remove that dot on the map and concentrate on the historic churches. Any general comments on the site, constructive criticism would also be very welcome either as a reply to this blog or direct to peterolding at gmail.com. In the mean time, I’ve got some work to do!

My New Twitter Account

This week marked a milestone in my Historic Churches of Great Britain Website. It now has a twitter account @Hist_ChurchofGB. Does this mean that I’m ready to go Full Metal Jacket with publicising the site, Well now not quite.

Let me start by giving a quick recap on the story so far. I started photographing churches after getting bored in a Cambridgeshire Travelodge one evening and went for a drive. I’d been admiring some of the countries churches from a distant up to then. A website was displayed to display those photos. As my interest grew I started collecting books on churches. As a way of keeping information gained on each church from these books a background website was created. The those lovely people at Ordnance Survey released their Open Data. One product was Map Vector District which had many categories of buildings in it. One was Places of Worship. It took many many hours to extract the data and insert in into my website. This gave me the Easting and Nothings of each Place of Worship. At the time I downloaded the data they had some 23,000 Places of Worship. However looking at my website you will see many churches not listed. The Ordnance Survey data was a great step forward but it is no where near complete. One day I do hope to give something back and provide some of my data back to the Ordnance Survey.

The Ordnance Survey also released county boundary data and these were used to obtain which county each Place of Worship was in. However more hours were spent refining the data, for example Bournemouth being a unitary authority was listed on its own and not part of Dorset. A bit of data manipulation was needed.

Next stage was to add town/village names to those Places of Worship. Again Ordnance Survey Open Data came to the rescue and they have data on the location of town and village names labels on their Landranger series of map. Using specialist GIS software I was able to locate the nearest place name to each Place of Worship as viewed on Landranger maps. This gave me a good reference point but again more data manipulation is needed. For example a church might on the edge of one town but the closest place name label might be for the next town. I’m slowly working through the whole 23,000 records trying to correct the more obvious errors. It has taken well over six months so far. And I’ve still got about 4 English Counties to do as well as most of Wales and Scotland.

During this time I’ve been adding in the churches that the Ordnance Survey Open Data didn’t have using a combination of my own sightings, books, wikipedia and the excellent geograph.org.uk website. Who’s photos I’m using on many of the pages of the churches I have not visited yet.

Once I’ve got place names checked the next stage will be to add dedication or the name of each church, as well as make a note of all the Places of Worship on the site that are modern buildings therefore out of scope of the website. Once that is done then I will go Full Metal Jacket with the publicity. I reckon that is still a good year away yet though.

However I realised long ago that this was too big a project for one person to do all the research on and so there is a basic user form on those pages where the dedication of the church is still not known by me. I’m hoping to gain information from users via this method and so far I have had some responses. Feel free to check out the website www.peterandsusan.co.uk/church and help where you can please.

The reason for the twitter account now is that I was looking at the page of a South London Website who had their own twitter account. I am beginning to start pushing advertising the website more in the hope that people will supply information and thought a twitter account would help me contact this and other churches with accounts in the hope that they could add more information on their and local to them churches. As at the moment getting information is my priority.