An interesting historic look by ITN at monitoring Mao’s China from 1967.
Category: History
A Viaduct for Staithes

A little more from my trawl through “The North Eastern Railway – Its Rise and Development“ – this time it’s a nice (and, as far as I can tell, unique) shot of the Whitby, Redcar and Middlesbrough Union Railway’s viaduct over Staithes Beck, just south of the village itself.

Described as a ‘light iron viaduct of novel construction’, it has an almost American feel to it and looks very out of place look to the modern eye. Given the failure of that particular line – even before the car and the van out competed it – It’s certainly not something we’ll ever see rebuilt again.
Prints of York’s Old Station
Not quite a Tour of Old York but, whilst scrabbling around in the Internet Archives library, I came across two rather wonderful illustrations of the first York station and the sidings that used to extend towards Lendal Bridge.

Maps – Mid March 2025 Update
It’s time for another little update and this time it’s 238 Ordnance Survey maps of various towns and cities across North Yorkshire.
Interesting map sets include:

Maps – Early Spring 2025 Update
It’s time for another little update and this time it’s 182 maps of Cardiganshire taken from the ‘Ordnance Survey Maps – 25 inch England and Wales, 1841-1952’ series.
Interesting places covered this update include:

Tours of Old York #3: The City of Legions
And onto another Tour of Old York. This time our video comes courtesy of the British Pathe YouTube channel and brings us two and one quarter minutes of footage of York shot between 1930 to 1939.
‘The City of Legions – York’

Using Machine Learning for Geoglyph Detection
PNAS has an interesting paper on using AI and Machine Learning to try and identify new Nazca Pampa geoglyphs in the Peruvian Nazca Desert. It’s a fun little lunchtime skim with a few nice images of some of the newly found geoglyphs.

Happy 30th Birthday ‘Anglosphere’!
So here’s something of an oddity; the Oxford English Dictionary thinks the word ‘Anglosphere’ is a mere thirty years old this month.

How the BFI uses 3D printing to help maintain it’s archive machinery
A nice short on how the British Film Institute uses 3D printing to maintain and improve it’s archiving tech.
Archivery: The Oldest Pages in the Wayback Machine
This is something I’ve been meaning to write up for a little while and, with the success of the Internet Archive’s recovery from it’s attack, it makes sense to do so now.
