Wakefield - A Journey Back In Time

Now that the textured map is complete I thought I’d show some random examples of it at 100% resolution. You can appreciate details like gardens and railway tracks which seem to get lost on more distant images. Note these are from the unlabelled version of the map, so don’t include street names, building names etc.

Here’s a bit of technical stuff. There are two two master textured map documents, one with and one without labels. Each document uncompressed is 12.21GB in size. The resolution is 64,000 by 64,000 pixels. To put that in perspective, if I were to print it out at 300 ppi (pixels per inch) then it would measure approximately 5.4m x 5.4m (17.8ft x 17.8ft)!

Facebook only gives a tiny glimpse of the detail involved with the limited size of its image uploads. In fact it would take 1089 individual images to show the complete map at full resolution.

The following images show the area around the Darnley estate in 1850 long before any major developments took place, along with current day satellite images for comparison. Note the field boundaries in 1850 and how they influenced the layout of the original estate.

Alverthorpe Beck (now named Ings Beck) is largly unaltered in the 170+ years between images, with only slight diversions to its original course; most notably around the Mill Chase developement which commenced in 2001 following the demolition of Alverthorpe Mills.

Balne Beck has undergone more substainal re-routing over the centuries. Shown on an earlier 1790s map encroaching the area later occupied by the extended House of Correction. This continued several times as the prison grew in size, with the beck being repositioned to flow around it’s western boundary. The beck was also relocted to flow beneath the backstreet in between Marlborough St and Anderson St to where it joins Ings beck at the bottom of Westgate.

Wakefield 1850 showing the original short-lived Westgate Train Station on the south side of the road. I’m not aware of any illustrations or photgraphs of what this station looked like. All I know is that by the time the next ordnance survey map was surveyed in 1880-1890 and published in 1894, station access had been relocated to the north side of Westgate. Also note the much narrower bridge in 1850 compared to how it appears today. Again, is anyone aware of images showing the bridge in its original form?

Here are some images to illustrate the typical level of detail the 1850 map displays when zooming in.