Gone Shopping

Q: But why?

A: Have you ever walked past a new building on a familiar street and wondered what used to be there before? And then realised that, whatever it was, you must have walked past it hundreds of times? Yet you paid it so little attention that you have no idea now what it was that has been replaced?

I have. And it bugged me.

It bugged me so much, in fact, that I tried to find out what the previous building had been. And I failed. There was simply no easy way to find out. And so, I found myself wishing that there was some sort of website where one might easily see what the various buildings on a street used to be. Alas, there was no such website that I could find.

Would it even be possible to make such a website, I then wondered? It would depend on whether the information was available at all to be researched but, I thought, with some effort it ought to be possible. With a horrible sense of inevitability I then realised that I was going to try it, if only to prove the concept. I chose to do so for Broad Street, the main shopping street in the town of Reading in Berkshire.

Q: Why choose Reading of all places?

A: Fair question. I could say that it's England's largest town not to be granted city status. I could say that it was the site of the only actual battle during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 but, while true in themselves, they wouldn't be the reason.

The truth is that it needed to be somewhere I knew well and had a sufficient connection to that I would actually care. And I grew up in East Berkshire, although I don't live there now. In other words, I went with what I knew.

Q: Why that art style?

A: At its simplest, I needed a consistent look for all the images, to aid in visual comparison.

I mean, you might wonder why I didn't just use photos. The answer to that is that photos vary wildly in angle, focus, colour saturation and so on. I wanted pictures of a building in two different years to look different on account of how it had changed not due to a photographer's choices and/or ambient lighting conditions.

I chose a flattened 2d art style because it was the most illustrative for the things I wanted to show. I could have made the images much more realistic, but then important details would be hidden in shadow and distorted by perspective.

Q: How accurate are the images?

A: Quite. Ish. Sort of.

With respect to the actual buildings, they are as accurate as I could make them within the constraints of the art style, while judging them by eye. Unlike James Gafford, who sketched something similar in the 1880s, I didn't take any measurements, so my proportions might be slightly off in places. And while I show brickwork where appropriate, it's not brick-for brick perfect so much as giving an accurate impression. It should be close enough that details are recognisable, but my images aren't architectural drawings by a long shot.

With respect to shop fronts, they are as accurate as I could get them with the available visual references. That's the physical shop fronts, mind you, not displays in the windows. Displays are more abstracted, with advertisement posters typical to a retailer and period, but I made no attempt to show exactly what each shop had in its window in a given year. It took me two years to draw all the images I do have for Broad Street 2001-2025; had I tried to do that I'd never finish!

I have been especially stylistic when it comes to building work, where I have just adapted the same stylised scaffolding and hoarding assets with no attempt to accuracy. Similarly, with vacant shops I have generally shown them as signless and empty when, in reality, some of them retained their old shops signs after closing. Had I shown them with those old signs, they would have looked confusingly similar to the shop before it closed down or moved out.

Q: How did you even go about this?

A: Well, the first step was to determine whether I could even find out what shop occupied which address when. And also, could I find out what they looked like?

To this end, I started by scouring the internet for every third party photograph or artwork of Broad Street I could find. Which, it turns out, was quite a few - over 3,800, in fact! These covered a range from 1870 to 2025, although the bulk of them dated from 2007 onwards, that being about when uploading photos to the internet really became a thing. A bunch of pictures from the 1960s to 1990s came courtesy of bus enthusiasts, a fandom I don't pretend to understand but who have my undying gratitude for capturing partial streetscapes around the edges of their beloved buses.

People, it turns out, are absolutely terrible at accurately dating their own photos, so I needed additional information to fill in gaps and confirm dates. I therefore turned to a variety of written records. These included online local news sites, newspaper archives, planning applications, phone and trade directories and Goad maps. I spent a lot of hours in Reading Central Library - the staff of which were extremely helpful - and even more online, but the end result was a ridiculous spreadsheet that, barring a few annoying gaps, populates Broad Street back to the mid 19th century.

I've indicated which references contributed for a given address and year by displaying a series of reference icons under Building & Occupier Details.

Q: If you've got over 3,800 photos, why don't you show them all?

A: Because most of them are not mine to show.

Contrary to the belief of several mistaken individuals I've seen arguing in social media spaces, a photo being on the internet does not make it public domain. For that to be the case, either the copyright holder needs to have explicitly released it into the public domain, or else they generally need to have been dead for 70 years. The latter's no problem for a photo from 1870, but photos from 2010 still belong to the people who took them. And, while they may indeed have posted them on sites like Flickr, that doesn't entitle me to steal their work and display it here, as though it were mine.

I have taken some photos of my own, however, and 243 of those are available to view. Plus another 100 photos that were freely available for my reuse under Creative Commons licenses. I intend to contact the owners of some of the other photos and seek their permission to include them.

Q&A