Then and Now Take Two – Edinburgh Tram

This is a regular series of blogs about photographs of the same place taken years apart. The first of the posts in this series was of a council building in Manchester. I always thought I should give then and now photographs 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. Now this has come to my attention I have started to intentionally take photographs of the same place.

This photograph was the Airport Tram stop in Edinburgh. 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.

I was back in Edinburgh in November 2022 and I intentionally took this photographs from the same perspective on the 16th November 2022.

It’s actually more central than the other two and it was taken directly into the sun!

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