Early days. Prototype content. Dates, identifications and credits are working research positions and are not yet verified.
A new community project · Hilperton, Wiltshire
Hilperton Through Time is a new archive of photographs, maps, deeds, census records and remembered talk — gathered in one place for the first time. The long ambition is to rebuild the village as it was, so that one day you can walk down Church Street in the 1870s, the 1900s and the 1950s.
Reconstruction The painting behind these words is an evidence-led reconstruction of a house that stood on Church Street until some time in the later nineteenth century. It is our reading of one surviving photograph — not a colour photograph, and not proof.
What this is
Nobody has to start from nothing. There are photographs in albums and shoeboxes across the village, postcards on collectors’ shelves, deeds in solicitors’ files, tithe maps and census returns at the record office — and a great deal of knowledge in people’s heads. What there isn’t, yet, is one place where all of it sits together and can be checked against itself.
That is what we are building. It begins small, and deliberately so: 28 images, carefully described, with our reasoning shown and our doubts left in. It grows when people lend us what they have.
We are not a museum and not a council department. We are a small group who got interested, started doing the work, and would like some company.
Scanning is cheap. The record offices are steadily digitising. Photogrammetry and real-time 3D have got good enough that reconstructing a village is no longer a fantasy.
Meanwhile the people who remember Hilperton before the new estates are getting older, and every year a few more albums are cleared out of a loft and thrown away. Both of those clocks are running, and only one of them is running in our favour.
The plan
Five stages, in order. The first two are under way now and depend almost entirely on what the village is willing to lend us.
Collect what survives, describe it properly — what it shows, when we think it was taken, why we think that, who owns it — and publish a small, well-edited selection with its evidence attached.
Under wayAsk the village for what we are missing: photographs, names, dates, permissions. Record people’s memories while we still can, properly and with consent.
Starting now — this is where you come inRe-photograph the historic viewpoints from public land, matched frame for frame, so any street can dissolve between one period and another.
Once the catalogue is solid enough to work fromHistorically informed 3D models, one well-evidenced building at a time, starting with the ones we can actually prove and being honest about the ones we cannot.
As the evidence allowsImaging walkthroughs first, and eventually a virtual reality experience: Hilperton in the Victorian, Edwardian and mid-twentieth-century periods, at walking pace.
The long ambitionThree Hilpertons
These are the periods where the evidence is thickest, or where living memory can still reach. Each is a target for reconstruction — and each comes with a list of what we are still missing.
1830s–1901
7 items published · 1 reconstruction
Stone, render and thatch; a village of weavers, carters and smallholders on the edge of a cloth town. Photography reaches Hilperton part-way through this period, so the earliest layer is thin — one photograph, a tithe map and an engraved county sheet.
1901–1918
11 items published
The best-covered moment in the collection, largely thanks to the postcard trade. Unmade roads, long exposures, and everybody standing still. Shops, carts, boundary walls and a great many unnamed faces.
1920s–1960s
10 items published · 1 reconstruction
Motor vans, tarred roads, glasshouses and Usher’s Ales. Within living memory for many people in the village — which makes this the era where recorded memory will matter more than photographs.
The long ambition
The end point is not a picture gallery. It is a village you can move through, at three different dates, at walking pace.
Matched viewpoints stitched into a route you can move along, dissolving between periods as you go. This needs photography and care, not modelling — which is why it comes first.
Models built from surviving fabric, aerial views, maps and measured features. The Nurseries first: a single oblique aerial photograph fixes its entire layout at once.
Church Street and the High Street assembled from those buildings, with the 1838 tithe map and the 1873 Ordnance Survey underneath as the ground truth.
Standing in the road in the 1870s, the 1900s or the 1950s. A headset is the obvious end point, but everything leading up to it works in an ordinary browser.
An honest warning. A reconstruction is an argument, not a record. Every model we build will carry its own confidence: surfaces we can evidence will look solid, surfaces we have inferred will look inferred, and we will always say which is which. A village that looks certain everywhere would be a lie.
What survivesWhat we think it looked like
Drag, or use the arrow keys. At the left you see the surviving photograph; at the right, an artist’s interpretation of it.
Where we are today
This is everything we have published so far. We would rather show you a couple of dozen items properly described than eight hundred dumped in a folder.
Publication permissions are tracked item by item and shown on every record. Where we do not yet have one, the record says so rather than leaving it blank.
What we need
In roughly this order. Everything is credited unless you ask us not to, and everything stays yours.
Albums, postcards, snapshots, deeds, bills, programmes, school photographs. Nothing is too ordinary — a blurred picture of a garden can settle an argument about a boundary.
Most of the people in our photographs are unidentified, and most of our dates are educated guesses. If you can name a face, a shopfront or a year, that is a real contribution.
What a shop smelled like, which lane flooded, who lived where, what was pulled down and when. Partial memories are welcome — we will record them as memories, clearly labelled.
If you own something we are showing, or you know we have got a fact wrong, or you would rather something about your family or your home was not here — please tell us.
A single dated print can fix a building’s date, confirm a demolition, or give us the control point a whole reconstruction hangs on. If you are wondering whether yours is worth sending: it is.
Open questions
A few of the things we would most like to be told. “I think it might be…” is genuinely useful — we record answers at the confidence you give them, not higher.
Is this the Three Horseshoes? And who are the three men?
Which end of the street is this, and who are the men in the foreground?
Is this an ordinary day, or an event of some kind?
Volunteering
We are at the beginning, so this is a list of people to contact rather than a rota. Tell us what might suit you and roughly how much time you have, and we will be in touch when that part of the work starts. No obligation, and no experience needed for most of it.
Digitising photographs, postcards and documents at proper resolution — often in someone’s front room, so the original never leaves the house.
Recording what an image shows, where it was taken, who owns it, and how confident we are. The least glamorous and most valuable job on the list.
Sitting down with people who remember the village and recording what they say, with their consent, properly stored.
Census returns, tithe apportionments, deeds, probate, trade directories and local newspapers — and writing up what was found and what was not.
Re-photographing historic viewpoints from public land, carefully matched, avoiding private houses, bystanders and number plates.
Turning surviving fabric, aerial views and measured features into models that are honest about which surfaces are evidenced and which are inferred.
Keeping the site, the data and the backups in order — and making sure the archive outlives any one volunteer’s laptop.
Talking to families, the parish council, the church and local groups; chasing the permissions that let material be published at all.
How we will work
A project like this only works if people trust it with things they cannot replace. These are the rules we are holding ourselves to from the start.
Every item carries a confidence level — confirmed, probable, possible or unidentified — with the reason attached. Paintings and models are always marked as interpretation.
We take a copy, return the original, and record you as the owner. We will never treat privately held material as ours to reuse.
Public copies carry no location or camera data. We favour general village scenes over close views of people’s houses, and avoid identifiable passers-by and number plates.
Every item has a place for a contributor, a credit and a publication permission — and you decide whether your name appears at all.
Ask us to correct, obscure or remove something and we will, without argument and without asking you to justify it.
Keep in touch
An occasional email — new photographs, questions we are stuck on, and the odd invitation to a scanning afternoon. No more than once a month.