Photographing Coventry

Just to let people know I've uploaded some street views I took in the 1980s. They are of Canley and Tile Hill areas. Go to Cov street views and select 'recent additions'.

More Street Views added - mostly taken in 2005. No long history but can allow overseas forum members to see what the city looks like since they left.

Thank you Pixrobin, That's the first time I have actually seen the Time Zone Clock after only having seen that area from a different angle before.

I think you all know that this year I am trying to photograph every street in what was Westwood Parish. I got a sharp reminder yesterday why it is necessary. Only a few weeks ago I photographed the cottage where my great aunt lived with her family in Gibbet Hill Road. Yesterday it was gone! The cottage was of no importance in the great scheme of things but that is true of many buildings and houses we speak of in this forum. This post is to ask members to go out and photograph streets and buildings in their own areas of the city. And I mean blanket coverage not merely buildings of significance. It doesn't matter if you haven't got an expensive camera - take the picture on your smart phone. Future generations will appreciate your efforts. I plan to hand over a copy of my images of Westwood Parish to the Coventry History Centre in the new year. They will be given on the understanding that they are on a Creative Commons licence with free use for non-commercial purposes. Many of my Canley pictures can be viewed here

Pixrobin, I've been looking at your photo link again,they are very good photos. If I may suggest you could make them into a "Walk with me slideshow" so the people can see exactly the same thing as you do, I know you'll not be able to follow this walk with me but all the people that live in the area would PS. Go full screen

Dougie, Thanks for the compliments. Your slideshow is great. I have a good many ideas to know what to do with mine. I also have lots of video footage shot with a GoPro camera fitted to a baseball cap. Presently I am running short of time. I need to photograph the rest of the streets in Westwood Parish before we move to winter light. I have been editing as much as I can as I have been going along but that still leaves me a good deal to do over the winter. The slideshow I really want to do is tracing the housing developments in Westwood Parish over the last 90 years: how the houses and estate layouts changed with the changes in lifestyles of their owners and tenants. I just need time and energy to do it all.

That's a timely reminder for us all Dougie: the need to keep duplicate files or backups. Like you I have 3 external hard drives (3TB, 2TB, and 1TB) plus 3TB on a NAS box. The latter needs one of its drives swapping out to increase capacity. It was only last year that I asked myself "What would happen in the event of a fire?" I sent my daughter a 2TB hard drive with duplicates of all my image files to that date. As for important personal files that would cause problems if lost - those have been uploaded to cloud storage.

Very true Robin, you always need to keep your backups in a different location to the originals. I've lost count of the numbers of times I've seen all the backup files in memory sticks on top of the PC.

Allan Hailstone's nostalgic photographs

Hi, Midland Red. I looked with awe at your posting of Cliff Jones's Coventry photographs. The variety and comparisons of locations had me holding my breath. I couldn't believe the photo of St Thomas's church in ruins. Thank you for putting these on the Forum.

Thank you. Sadly we've moved away from the city, and my return visits are very infrequent, meaning that the collection is not added to as much as I would like.