Update on my Historic Churches Website

For my #weeklyblogclub blog this week I’d thought I would do a quick update on my Historic Churches Website, www.peterandsusan.co.uk/church

The story so far - I started photographing pretty looking churches. I set up a website to display the photos, I added a section to list churches I’ve yet to visit. Mainly to list stuff that is interesting in that church so I don’t miss it when I visit. This lead me to download the Places of Worship data from the Ordnance Survey Open Data website. This gave me 22,000 points on a map of various Places of Worship, some modern, some historic. And also some missing e.g. Westminster Abbey and the like.

Since then I’ve been working on that data. Deleting the modern churches and putting names (dedication) to the historic ones. It’s a big task. Whilst all counties have had some work on them, so far I managed to ‘complete’ three counties. I’ve deleted all the modern churches and put names to all the historic ones. Those counties I’ve done are Hampshire, Dorset and Norfolk. I’m not saying that my list is the definitive list of historic churches in those counties but I’d like to think that it’s the vast majority of them. My next step on those pages is to add photos and a bit of text about each church.

So far this has taken me some 18 months of work. There is still a huge about to do. So any information from #weeklyblogclub people would be very welcome. Adding names to churches, useful information about them and any photographs would be very gratefully received. Even a line to say that church number 12345 on your site is a modern building would help. So I can remove that dot on the map and concentrate on the historic churches. Any general comments on the site, constructive criticism would also be very welcome either as a reply to this blog or direct to peterolding at gmail.com. In the mean time, I’ve got some work to do!