About the project
Know Your Place is a digital heritage mapping resource to help you to explore your neighbourhood online through historic maps, collections and linked information. Watch our short film to find out more.
Know Your Place provides unprecedented online access to a range of historic data, but more importantly provides a place where users can add information about your local area, building a rich and diverse community map of local heritage for everyone. Its free to use and anyone can add to the map.
Know Your Place – West of England was a project which ran from June 2015 to July 2017 to expand coverage from Bristol to the six surrounding counties of Bath & North East Somerset, Gloucestershire, North Somerset, Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. Read more about how the project was supported. It continues to be managed by committed partners in each county.
As part of a later extension to the project the county of Devon has now been added. This expands the coverage for the West of England by another 2,590 square miles.
Know Your Place now spans eight counties and 7279 square miles, with other counties around the UK interested in putting their areas on the map in future.
Our Aims & Achievements
Know Your Place West of England achieved the following Approved Purposes:
- To scan, digitise and geo-reference historical maps from Gloucestershire, South Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset, North Somerset, Bath and North East Somerset and Devon. Read about our work on historic maps
- To expand the existing ‘Know Your Place’ Bristol website to include historical maps from the West of England area. Read more about heritage data now available
- To recruit and train volunteers. The project recruited c.100 individuals and 70 went on to volunteer for the project, giving 4946 hours’ work to the project.
- To deliver basic conservation of fragile maps. Maps were stabilised for safe digitisation and their access online is reducing physical handling and wear and tear of the original documents.
- To create a mobile app. Know Your Place has been designed to be compatible for use by smartphones, tablets and other devices while on the move.
- To create an exhibition to be toured to six venues. Our exhibition toured 12 venues, remains available online and continues to tour with partners across four counties. Visit our exhibition
- To deliver a range of heritage learning activities including talks and presentations, a blog, heritage walks, school resource packs and oral histories. Our events programme ran 98 events reaching 2689 people and has now ended. You can download our Learning Pack here.
- To upload condition surveys of heritage assets to the website. By July 2017, 1197 public contributions had been added to the Community Layer, at an average rate of 180 per month. Join our growing community and add your information too.
