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BBC Domesday Project

I’ve spent the morning travelling back in time to my childhood in 1986 via the BBC Domesday Project!

This picture has me intrigued as it’s taken near my school and must be children within about a year of me at school – how quickly the memories fade, I can’t recognise any of them!

I should probably recognise these kids!

The Story of the Domesday Project

In 1986, 900 years after William the Conqueror’s original Domesday Book, the BBC published the Domesday Project. The project was probably the most ambitious attempt ever to capture the essence of life in the United Kingdom. Over a million people contributed to this digital snapshot of the country.

People were asked to record what they thought would be of interest in another 1000 years.

The whole of the UK – including the Channel Islands and Isle of Man – was divided into 23,000 4x3km areas called Domesday Squares or “D-Blocks”.

Schools and community groups surveyed over 108,000 square km of the UK and submitted more than 147,819 pages of text articles and 23,225 amateur photos, cataloguing what it was like to live, work and play in their community.

This was about documenting everyday life – the ordinary rather than the extraordinary.

The project used the cutting edge technology of the day, and the data was eventually presented on a special type of Laser-Disc, read by a BBC master computer and navigated using an innovative tracker-ball pointing system.

But the technology didn’t catch on and the computers became very expensive for schools and libraries to buy. Very few people ever got to see the fruits of all of their hard work.

As time went on there were fears that the discs would become unreadable, as computers capable of reading the format had become rare and drives capable of accessing the discs even rarer.

Now 25 years later in our age of the world wide web, digital photography, email and social networking, its time to have a look at those entries again, to bring the project up to date, and perhaps to lay down another layer of local history.

Here you can rediscover and explore images and articles from the original project to find out how life in Britain has changed… and how some things have stayed the same. In addition, you will be able to update the project by re-photographing the images today and updating text entries.

With the help of The National Archives this unique record will be preserved for future generations.

This is obviously a rich teaching resource for delving back 25 years into life near your school, and also a great chance to record for posterity life in 2011 in your little corner of the UK.

On a geeky level how interesting it is to see how this information had to be pretty much rescued from the laser discs it was stored on as the technology quickly became obsolete. In this age where everything is stored digitally it’ll be interesting to see if we hit similar problems in the future.

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4 Comments

  1. Betamax was once considered an advanced technology, that was fazed out. VHS is being fazed out as machines are harder to come by and getting more expensive too. Even record players will become collectors items along with their records in the not too distant future. And all our data is being held on hard drives that are starting to be replaced with flash drives. Yet back in 1986 we were on the cusp of a new electronic age and it’s fantastic that the BBC have retrieved this project so that everyone can appreciate it. Thanks for the post.

  2. mrstucke great memories I showed this to my IB class and showed them my village. They couldn’t believe how much slow the BBC micro was 🙂

  3. WHat 3 or more kinds of technology were there at this time – can you give me a bit about each!

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