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We Want Your Shoeboxes!

user image 2017-04-08
By: admin
Posted in: OTS Announcements
We Want Your Shoeboxes!

There's nothing more frustrating than trying to find old pictures of the UK, especially when you're looking for the views that don't appear on old postcards. Of course, there are lots of pictures of the squares of pretty market towns, and the popular seafronts of the Victorian era, but lots of people desperately want to see the more mundane images - of their old corner shop, or even just their great-gran's street!

We get so many visitors (literally thousands) from the UK and abroad looking for these more 'obscure' views, but what's so frustrating is that although they probably do exist somewhere - in a shoebox, or a photo album or a loft somewhere - but they've never made it to where they can be looked at. Take this amazing picture of the inside of Pennington Mill in Leigh, Lancashire.

http://ourtownstory.co.uk/iamtimbo/gallery/73/interior-of-pennington-mill-leigh-lancashire-c-1970

Taken by Reuben Edge, and kindly submitted by his family, it was shot just before the mill's demolition, and is arguably one of the last photos of the mill that for nearly 100 years was one of the significant employers in the town. If Reuben's family hadn't heard about what we were doing, there's a good chance the photo would never have seen the light of day again.

You have photos like this - you probably just don't realise it! Perhaps you've inherited them and don't know what to do with them, or you took them, and you've just never quite got round to labelling them. Well, this is your opportunity to help preserve these priceless visual milestones in our nation's local history, and make them available for researchers and the plain old curious.

We're not worried about artistic merit, just the images, a title, some background info, and the ability to locate them on a Google map - do that, and perhaps you can help one of our thousands of visitors find out about the places that are important to them!

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