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.
I was back at Loughborough University for a conference. I have visited the university a few times before. I took this photograph of a view of the Loughborough University Science and Enterprise Park from the first floor of the Holywell Park Conference Centre in September 2007. It was taken with a Nokia N73.
When I looked at the image a few years ago, I couldn’t recall where I had taken it, I knew I had taken it at a MoLeNET planning meeting, but I really couldn’t remember where we had met. MoLeNET was the Mobile Learning Network, which was created by the Learning and Skills Network (LSN) in 2007 to facilitate and deliver a range of mobile learning projects for further education. As well as running projects, I was also a MoLeNET Mentor and helped to mentor other projects in the initiative. We had a fair number of planning meetings, which took place across the UK, sometimes in London, Leeds and this place. Having worked out that this September 2007 meeting was probably in Loughborough, I did a Google Street View search. It wasn’t Burleigh Court (where I had been as recently as October 2016) and I think that’s why I initially I didn’t think it was Loughborough.
So in March 2024 I was back at Holywell Park Conference Centre I realised I could take a similar photograph, so I did with an iPhone 13.
