Belfast, today and yesterday: unique merged photos document the city’s evolution. Trams trundle along a city centre street alongside double decker buses in fascinating snapshots of life in Belfast that contrast life today with bygone times. Archival images of Belfast taken around the turn of the 20th century have been published by the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), and merged with them are modern-day pictures of the city. They show how life on our capitals streets in the late 19th and 20th centuries has changed in some ways - even though many landmarks have stood the test of time. Many areas are instantly recognisable, even without the present-day comparisons, and, as Sam Cromie from PRONI explained, the results are striking. It shows how much things have changed in the past hundred years, but also how much they have stayed the same. The streets and buildings are still there for the most part, and its still Belfast, but the life around them is almost unrecognisable, he said. Looking at the photographs, the biggest change is transport. Boats and trams have been replaced by cars and buses, and the infrastructure of the city has evolved with this. Cobbled streets have given way to roads; tram tracks are now bus lanes. The idea was born during PRONIs preservation week, as a new way of presenting the archives. Mr Cromie said: We had so many brilliant photographs of street scenes in the collections, we wondered what it would be like to go out and take them again today, and put the two side by side. Locations such as the Shankill Road, City Hall and Castle Place are among those chosen to revisit. People had to recognise the places, and we had to be able to take the photographs, so the locations needed to be accessible, Mr Cromie said. But we wanted to bring a splash of colour, thats why you have buses and even a fire engine in one. Weve already had plenty of feedback, and people have their own favourites, but the most popular seems to be the photo of Queens Bridge. However, it is the scene that has probably changed the least over the last 100 years. Mr Cromie added: You wonder what the people who took the original photographs were thinking about, and whether they realised that someone would be following in their footsteps a century later. And who knows, maybe someone else will come along in 2115 to add another update. The photographs can be viewed on PRONIs Flickr feed: https://flickr/photos/proni/
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 20:15:01 +0000
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