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Then and Now – St Pancras Railway Station

St Pancras Railway Station

I took this photograph of St Pancras Railway Station in March 2019 from an office building across from the station.

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.

I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart.  The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!

Back in August 2007 I took this photograph of St Pancras Railway Station.

St Pancras Railway Station

At the time the station was undergoing an £800 million refurbishment to become the terminal for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link as part of an urban regeneration plan across East London.

London St Pancras International, is a central London railway terminus on Euston Road in the London Borough of Camden. It is the terminus for Eurostar services from Belgium, France and the Netherlands to London. It provides East Midlands Railway services to Leicester, Corby, Derby, Sheffield and Nottingham on the Midland Main Line, Southeastern high-speed trains to Kent via Ebbsfleet International and Ashford International, and Thameslink cross-London services to Bedford, Cambridge, Peterborough, Brighton and Gatwick Airport. It stands between the British Library, the Regent’s Canal and London King’s Cross railway station, with which it shares a London Underground station, King’s Cross St Pancras.

This is the (similar) view of the station which I photographed in June 2016.

Two years later I was back and took a similar shot in September 2018.

This time I was actually catching a train from St Pancras to Paris (and then onto Brest) for a conference presentation.

I was back at St Pancras in August 2021, however I took a photograph from a different perspective.

St Pancras Railway Station

Close by to St Pancras is Kings Cross Railway Station.

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Then and Now Take Two – Snowing in Weston Village

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I published back in February some photos of Weston Village in the snow, so when I was there recently I decided to (intentionally) take a similar photograph and add it to the photographs I had taken there before. This time no snow, just some spring sunshine from April 2020.

Weston Village

However the following photographs were intentionally taken from the same location. I have over the years (when we had snow) taken a particular photograph so here is the 2018 version.

This with the wind and the cold was actually some of the worst weather I have seen down here, but as you can see it doesn’t look too bad…

This was how it looked in December 2010. Back then we had very heavy snow.

This was how it looked in eleven months earlier in January 2010,  again heavy snow.

And here it is in February 2009. At this time this was some of the worst weather we had seen in twenty years. This was taken from the other side of the fence.

 

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Then and Now Take Two – Moor Lane

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I published back in March some photos of Moor Lane, so when I was there recently I decided to (intentionally) take a similar photograph and add it to the photographs I had taken there before. This time no snow, just some spring sunshine.

Moor Lane

My other photographs of Moor Lane though did contain some intentional similar shots. The first of which was taken in January 2010 when we had some of the worst snow for forty years. I had woken up to a deep blanket of snow on the ground, so myself and my son got all wrapped up and headed off to Morrisons to do some panic buying of milk and bread (as advised by the BBC, well I think that was what they were saying. I saw this view of Moor Lane in the snow and it reminded me so much of how I pictured Narnia.

This was taken with a Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera which at the time was pretty good on taking photographs and video.

We had snow again in December 2010, so I took a similar photograph. Though we had snow by the time I got to Moor Lane a lot of it had melted and turned to slush.

In March 2012 the sun was out, and no snow.

We had snow again in January 2013, so yes, I took the same photo.

In 2016 the Moor Lane Bridge was closed to traffic for six months and then permanently closed to traffic. This has obviously had an impact of traffic on this stretch of road.

In March 2018 we had the Beast from the East and so I took a similar photograph again of Moor Lane.

So there is a distinct snow theme with these photographs, which is one of the reasons I took a new photograph of Moor Lane in the sun.

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Then and Now – Trinity Lane, Cambridge

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart.  The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!

I grew up in Cambridge, but moved away when I went to university in York. I remember rarely visiting the University of Cambridge as a youngster, why would I? However I did do some specialist maths classes at Trinity College, so would walk down Trinity Lane.

When I was at a JISC RSC Eastern event in Cambridge back in 2009 I did take the time the day before to walk around the town and took this photograph of Trinity Lane in March 2009.

It was taken in the early evening with a Sony DSC-W53 camera, which to be honest struggled with the low light conditions.

I stayed over in Cambridge back in January 2020 and as on previous visits I had a walk around the city before heading to my hotel. I took this photograph of Trinity Lane. I hadn’t recalled I had take a similar photograph already, and it was only when reviewing some photographs that I recalled that I had taken two very similar photographs of Trinity Lane.

I took this with an iPhone 8 in late afternoon I did edit and enahnce the image with Snapseed, but the iPhone was able to deal with the low light  conditions so much better.

 

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Then and Now – Moor Lane

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart.  The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!

This series of photographs of Moor Lane though did contain some intentional similar shots. The first of which was taken in January 2010 when we had some of the worst snow for forty years. I had woken up to a deep blanket of snow on the ground, so myself and my son got all wrapped up and headed off to Morrisons to do some panic buying of milk and bread (as advised by the BBC, well I think that was what they were saying. I saw this view of Moor Lane in the snow and it reminded me so much of how I pictured Narnia.

This was taken with a Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera which at the time was pretty good on taking photographs and video.

Back in the 1990s I use to drive down Moor Lane in attempts to avoid traffic getting out of Weston. However by the late 1990s Moor Lane was the heart of a new housing estate, which we moved to in late 2000. They turned it from a road into a footpath, however this section of Moor Lane is still available to vehicles.

We had snow again in December 2010, so I took a similar photograph. Though we had snow by the time I got to Moor Lane a lot of it had melted and turned to slush.

In March 2012 the sun was out, and no snow.

We had snow again in January 2013, so yes, I took the same photo.

In 2016 the Moor Lane Bridge was closed to traffic for six months and then permanently closed to traffic. This has obviously had an impact of traffic on this stretch of road.

In March 2018 we had the Beast from the East and so I took a similar photograph again of Moor Lane.

So there is a distinct snow theme with these photographs.

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Then and Now – Bristol Airport

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.

I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart.  The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!

I took this view of Bristol Airport from the departures lounge on an early morning in August 2016.

I took a similar picture in February 2017.

Not quite the same shot, but pretty close.

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Then and Now – Snowing in Weston Village

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.

I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart.  The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

However the following photographs were intentionally taken from the same location. I have over the years (when we had snow) taken a particular photograph so here is the 2018 version.

This with the wind and the cold was actually some of the worst weather I have seen down here, but as you can see it doesn’t look too bad…

This was how it looked in December 2010. Back then we had very heavy snow.

This was how it looked in eleven months earlier in January 2010,  again heavy snow.

And here it is in February 2009. At this time this was some of the worst weather we had seen in twenty years. This was taken from the other side of the fence.

 

 

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Then and Now – Kings Cross Railway Station

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.

I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart.  The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!

I took this view in July 2016 of Kings Cross Railway Station in London having noticed that they removed the front ticket office and as a result you could see the Victorian brick structure of the station behind it.

And this was (almost) the same view in January 2018.

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Then and Now – Birmingham

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.

I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart.  The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!

Next door to the ICC in Birmingham is a canal and there is a bridge across there from Brindley Place, and it would appear quite often when crossing the bridge I would take a photograph down the canal looking towards the what was the NIA (National Indoor Arena) and is now known as the Utilita Arena Birmingham.

This was the view in May 2011 in the early evening.

In the preceding years the NIA had undergone refurbishment and renovation and had had a glass facade added. It was renamed the “Barclaycard Arena” in November 2014 after Barclaycard won the naming rights. This was the view in March 2015 over lunchtime.

Here we are four years later in October 2019 in the morning.

Finally on my most recent visit to Birmingham in March 2020, also in the morning.

It’s quite surprising how little has changed over the nine years between the photographs.

It would also not surprise you that I have a similar set of photographs looking the other way…

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Then and Now – Edinburgh Tram

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart.

I quite like those Then and Now comparison photographs that you see in books or on the Twitter or Facebook.

I always think I should give them a go. However what I have started to notice is that I have been doing Then and Now photographs unintentionally over the years and have been taking photographs of the same thing or place from the same view or perspective years apart.  The first instance of this that came to my attention was last year in May when I went to Manchester.

It only really came to my attention that I was doing this a lot, when checking the Places function on the Apple Photos Mac App that I could see I had taken the same photograph of the same thing just years apart!

The Edinburgh Tram started running in May 2014.

Though in the early 2000s I travelled to Edinburgh a fair bit, by the 2010s I had stopped travelling up there. In the 2000s I would catch the bus from the airport to the centre.

On the 1st December 2014 I made a trip to Edinburgh for a conference, it my first opportunity to travel on the then new tram. I took a photograph from the Airport Tram stop down the line.

Of course you take a photograph and then think nothing of it.

Five years later I am heading off to Edinburgh once more,  I hadn’t been to Edinburgh in the intervening period, though I had been to Glasgow a fair few times. Arriving at Edinburgh Airport and heading towards Haymarket the obvious thing was to take the Tram. Waiting at the stop I decided to take a photograph….

Not quite the same photograph, but pretty close.

I was back in Edinburgh in November 2019 as well, but didn’t take a photograph of the Tram stop.