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History · by Emir Kaya · 2026-10-30

Have you ever found an old map of your own street? What changed the most?

I went down a rabbit hole with my city's old insurance maps (the ones that mark every building's material and use) and found that my flat sits where a small brewery used to be in the 1890s. The street names were mostly the same but the whole block had been rebuilt twice. If you've looked up historic maps of where you live, what surprised you most, and where did you find them?

29 sparks · 3 comments

Comments

Bianca Santos · 7 likes

found out my house was built on what used to be an orchard. explains why the garden still throws up random apple trees

Noah Miller · 2 likes

Sanborn maps are amazing for this in the US, the Library of Congress has a ton of them scanned

Maksym Bondar · 6 likes

and in the UK the National Library of Scotland map viewer is ridiculously good, covers england too