This week in our core English session we looked at Where the Forest Meets the Sea by Jeannie Baker, who also wrote the fabulous book Window.

The next part of this blog post contains spoilers  so if you haven’t read the book buy it now from here, or here or any good bookshop!

As the blurb on the back of the book states, this story helps to bring together the past, present and give predictions for the future of a beach in North Queensland, Australia. I thought that it would be a great idea if the same sort of thing could be done for our locality. Then I remembered I’d spoken to someone from English Heritage at the Midlands History Forum last weekend who recommended the use of HistoryPin as a way to physically see how our locality has changed.

There are some very useful features built into the HistoryPin website. For example, you are able to select different localities to view in Google Street View and then fade in and out between different time periods. The calendar features allows you to select a date range to focus on finding images from.

The word cloud in this blog post (made using Wordle) gives you a snapshot of what HistoryPin is about (it’s made up of the most commonly used words from HistoryPin’s about page).

You can also watch this short video to find out more.