Reader Mike Hawes requested that I do the Google Earth overlay trick with last weekend’s Aldridge Northwest 1914 map, so I’ve done just that. This was a very difficult one to align, as something seems erroneous about the drafting of the canal to the south west. I suspect either drafting error, or an imaging distortion. Since so much has changed under this map, it’s a bugger to line up anyway. Trust no apparent correlation between surface features and draft to be accurate, or be an verbatim depiction of what lay where. Having said that, it should be accurate to 5m or so.
You can download a copy of the overlay (7.1Mb) for use within Google Earh by clicking on the link below…
The overlay applied in Google Earth. By downloading the overlay, transparency of it can be adjusted. Click for a larger version.
Aldridge North West 1914.kmz – hosted at Box.com
There are instructions on how to use overlays like this one in my previous post “Mapping the past’. Note that you can also use this file as a basemap in most modern, mapping handheld Garmin GPS units – GPSmap 62 series, Colorado, Oregon, Dakota etc. Again, I can’t guarantee accuracy, but it shouldn’t be too bad. Just take care not to fall into the canal whilst using it…
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Nice one Bob, almost centred on my house.
Excellent work yet again Bob, thanks for all the effort you put into these intriguing maps and overlays.
That’s brilliant – thanks for that Bob, I can click on the main map but even with the details in the other post I can’t get the KMZ files to work. I can see quite clearly on the map the location of the two pools I posted about before, even with the distortion on the map they are still less than 100mtrs from my house. The water flows downhill and I think nature is trying to recreate the pools.
As I mentioned the trees felled over the last decade have meant the soil is much wetter and after rain like recently next doors garden had a visible stream running through it were 10 yrs ago it never did.
A map like this from 1940 or there abouts would really show Aldridge just before the mass housing was put up. In the later 40’s and early fifties the two giant estates were constructed at Leighswood and Redhouse for all the workers for the nearby factories, coupled with private developers like MacAlpine putting up estates too , the population of Aldridge must have exploded in a a few years. Someone here said – *oh it doesn’t show the bottom half of Aldridge* , and I pointed out that at the turn of last century there were just fields there and no building at all.
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