London Street Views (1840) | Hacker News Reader

London Street Views (1840)

davidrumsey.com

172 pointsjfil23 comments

It’s quite a bit more recent, but this reminded me of David Bleicher’s Instagram page “Then and Now London.” He takes photographs in the same London locations as photos taken decades ago and puts them side by side:

https://www.instagram.com/thenandnowlondon/

That’s a nice find. Thanks for sharing.

Unfortunately it’s very hard to enjoy these kinds of blogging now that Meta have completely locked up the internet.

This is also sometimes known as rephotography. Some of the most striking examples I've seen seamlessly blend the old and new. Such as this campus location, which really illustrates how similar people are across time: https://blogs.ubc.ca/difficultknowledge/files/2016/09/UBCLib...

You can find more "then and now pictures" (rephotography) on re.photos. It has an archive of around 3000 pictures from around the world. (I developed the website as a final project during my studies. It's a bit dated but still alive and kicking.)

https://www.re.photos/en/compilation/

I like the British Pathe films from the late 1890s / early 1900s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtRiMS34KxQ&list=PLxYjYcgwal...

(More examples in the playlist.)

Large parts of London still look the same, but the way of life is vastly different. Just on a surface level, you can see how roads are used differently (there are a few horses and a lot of pedestrians) and with poorly insulated buildings everyone has to wear insulation.

I love seeing the (1840) in the title.

For a split second it makes my pre-coffee brain think, my god that’s an old post!

I was shortly excited because I expected Google Street View from the 1840s, oh well...

That's what should me made of the old 2D maps. Should be possiblel thanks to LLMs now.

Once you zoom into the individual maps, you can see that this is as close to Google Streetview as they could get at the time. It was surprising to realize it's basically the same thing.

Feature request, can someone integrate this into the DOOM engine so one can navigate 19th century london?

I was going to say, that or put it into a Google Street View style map. That would be amazing.

looks great once you zoom in but I don't get it. how do I open one of them to look at it - I can only zoom into the whole mosaic - why can I not click on one of them and bring it to the front or go to a page that deals with that view/street?

You can't, because it's a single composite image of all of them.

I think this is 1 to 77 but I couldn't find/figure out a search for 78 to 88

https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/view/search?search=...

There seems to be quite a lot of detail in all of these drawings, I wonder if one can't reconstruct an actual street view given all that data, and a few historical paintings to "seed the color and style" a bit. Probably not impossible to do with modern LLMs

Ran these through some AI color/restore workflows: https://imgur.com/gallery/london-street-views-1840-set-1-Ss1...

Ed Ruscha's riff on this 120 years later: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/146931

I love it. Never seen this kinda concept before. But it totally makes sense to map whole streets like this.

Looks like the image in thumbnail preview is all you’re getting, and at that low resolution.

I thought the same thing, I'm guessing you're also on mobile. If you switch to desktop mode then it lets you zoom in to more detail.

There is a download link

On desktop, it's scroll to zoom.

If there's a map, and a sidebar with overflow, please don't have a page-level scrollbar, put the scrollbar on the sidebar that needs scroll functionality =(

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