Quote from: hb88banzai on Dec 15, 2016, 08:29 am

Starcross is the person I told about it when I first came across the site..., so is the only one of us that knew about it before now and thus could have posted the url.

Don't drag me into this , the site was useless for Edinburgh so I forgot all about it.
London has some good coverage in 1:2500 scale though. It also covers a fair bit of Kent as well.

I managed to find PA1 Pillars in Rochester, even managed to find a photo for the Pillar at the Bottom of Star Hill. I walked past the spot many times the last time I was in the UK. So it was interesting to see they had Pillars all over the place on the High Street. I wonder if that is the origin for the Chatham Police Museum Pillar?

Quote from: hb88banzai on Dec 15, 2016, 08:29 am
Nope - put a dash between the clauses for a separate thought.

Oops. (Darned stanky old wizzard eyes of mine! Must have been a bit blurry when I read that because I didn't see the dash. Could also be these glasses; I'm about due for a new pair... and an eye exam!)

Quote from: hb88banzai on Dec 15, 2016, 08:29 am
Wasn't sure anyone else was really interested at the time, so sorry, my bad .

No worries, HB. I was mostly kidding... about your comment about posting that map link earlier (presumably before someone else did). I just found my interest in the Edinburgh boxes over this past summer, so I don't feel like I was really missing out on the map.

Quote from: hb88banzai on Dec 15, 2016, 08:29 am
BTW - you don't get an image of the whole map at the NLS site, only the portion currently in your viewer, which is generally a small portion of same when zoomed in enough to really see the Box or Post. You can buy a copy of the whole map, but the expense would get out of hand very rapidly considering the number of maps involved of various dates and sizes for all the Metropolitan Police district (coverage is not complete, either), to say nothing of Glasgow and Edinburgh as well.

I know what you mean. It's like looking at a Google Map of the neighborhood where I grew up, zoomed in enough to pick out the house my great-grandparents built way back when. On that scale just my block alone would take up a 4' x 6' section of wall! Fitting the whole neighborhood together would wallpaper the entire house... from the outside!

I've also seen some historical maps (mostly nautical: ports with roads leading to them; charts of the waterways, etc.) and you're quite right; they are very large and the cost of getting a printed version can enter the hundreds (in USD and GBP). When I was doing nautical living history we would get some reduced prints of those charts and maps for our Navigation displays, 3' x 5' size, and even they weren't cheap. (Thankfully our Living History Association had some modestly semi-deep pockets.

Dino.

Quote from: starcross on Dec 15, 2016, 10:35 am

Quote from: hb88banzai on Dec 15, 2016, 08:29 am

Starcross is the person I told about it when I first came across the site..., so is the only one of us that knew about it before now and thus could have posted the url.

Don't drag me into this , the site was useless for Edinburgh so I forgot all about it.
London has some good coverage in 1:2500 scale though. It also covers a fair bit of Kent as well.

Hmmmm... I thought I found some decent coverage for Edinburgh - at least for early maps. Must have been imagining things again. Sorry - all on me then.

Starcross -- Nope, looks like my original impression was accurate. The interface is incredibly obtuse and non-intuitive to work with, having to go to just the right place in just the right section with just the right bits selected to see what you want, but dig deep enough and they do indeed have 1:1250 and 1:2500 scale maps for Edinburgh in the prime years of the 1940s to the 1960s.  

Click on "Find by Place" up top and on the left side select "England and Wales, Ordnance Survey" and then "OS 1:1250 / 1:2500, 1940s-1960s", then navigate to where you want and click on the point to reference to get individual sheets that are available for that point on the right. Click on one of these and it will take you to the specific sheet, where you can zoom in to very fine detail. It allows you to print a PDF of the current viewer output (framing and resolution), so if you wanted to do the whole map at a usable resolution you would have to laboriously stitch it together from many, many pieces (or you can purchase a copy of the whole sheet from them starting at £9.00 (incl. VAT) for a presumably moderate resolution jpeg digital download, or £15.60 plus shipping for a max resolution TIFF image on CD (benefit of no compression artifacts), or even more for a print at the size of your choice - all the way up to the original map size, with appropriately climbing prices and shipping charges). When done looking at an individual sheet, just hit the back arrow to take you back to where you were on the previous screen to select another sheet or move to a new location.

Example for the Box on Pier Place at the Slipway, outside the Fish Market (if this works): http://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/#zoom=19&lat=55.9810&lon=-3.1955&layers=61&b=1&point=55.9810,-3.1954

Going to the "Explore georeferenced maps" up top and "Scotland" on the left (noting the inconsistency with the above) will give you a subset map seamlessly stitched together, with the option of seeing a current satellite overlay superimposed. Only one generic layer representing all that is available is shown and you can't access the sheets directly from there, but this view can be useful for scrolling and zooming to zero in on a place (hopefully finding a Box or Post), even giving you measurement tools and coordinate info (National Grid, as well as decimal Lat/Long and deg/min/sec Lat/Long for the cursor's position on the map  ). You can then switch back to "Find by place" in the header and it will keep you at the same place with the simplified modern map and the available sheets on the right, as described previously.

Example (again if it works): http://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=19&lat=55.9810&lon=-3.1955&layers=170&b=1

Switching back and forth like this is clunky (to say nothing of navigating to the right place in the menus to begin with), but despite all that it should be every bit as useful as I had thought, which is why I alerted you to the site at the time.

I think they have some c1932 Edinburgh maps (in a different series) as well, but haven't re-found those yet (again, have to look in juuussst the right place to find them).

I thought I would give this site a go and tried  both High Wycombe and Hastings...
But it seems that they don't have the  relevant OS maps unless I'm doing something wrong.....

Quote from: hb88banzai on Dec 16, 2016, 09:02 am
Starcross -- Nope, looks like my original impression was accurate. The interface is incredibly obtuse and non-intuitive to work with, having to go to just the right place in just the right section with just the right bits selected to see what you want, but dig deep enough and they do indeed have 1:1250 and 1:2500 scale maps for Edinburgh in the prime years of the 1940s to the 1960s.  

Well how about that!
The link with the scrolling window is very helpful.
WE should toss these instructions somewhere in a reference thread on the Forum.
In fact we should have a thread or something with all the websites we use for research.

Britain from Above
Bob Freshwaters Telephone site
OS maps
Collage
edinphoto.org.uk
Telecommunications Heritage Group
and so on...

We use them quite a bit but even I forget sometimes where/how I find things.
It's be nice to have all these things in one spot.


As an aside, I took a bit of a wander on the NLS map link you gave for the Dock, walked over to Albert Street on the opposite side of the Leith Docks and Found D27.
A quick look on Britain from Above, and the photograph for 1955 shows the area well enough. Though I wouldn't call the blob in frame a Police Box at all. The location is frustrating because the box is in a railyard, behind a wall, beside railway tracks. It makes no sense that a Box would be there if the City Officer was on patrol for the city, though the Railway Police might have made use of it doing their jobs.

Mystery of placement aside, the NLS does have very nice scans of OS maps if you have the settings down just right. I couldn't even make those appear in the drop downs.

Yes, sometimes you have to stand on your head and look cross-eyed to find these things.

And I agree - a commonly used reference source Article with accompanying comment thread to vet additions and changes is a good idea. See what I can do.

As to Boxes in and around the rail yard -- back a couple years ago when I was actively looking around there and matching some things to Mike Knight's Edinburgh list using OS maps and Britiain from Above photos, etc, I found that there were a number of anomalies, especially around this area. Boxes on the List that don't show up on maps or aerial photos, Boxes on maps that don't seem to show on either the List and/or in photos, etc.

In some cases, I think the answer might be along the lines of "when is a "PCB" not a Police Call Box", but instead something like a guard hut, or even a communications point situated in another building or structure like Banstead (and others I've found). There are plenty of cases of things being misidentified and/or not identified per normalized Ordnance Survey standards on these maps (sometimes not being shown at all, especially in the early years), so one must proceed with a certain amount of caution. I had looked right where you just did for D27 and couldn't really see any definite confirmation of an Edinburgh Box there, just a suggestive shape, so didn't post the photo (of course I'm horribly behind on these things as well - have half a dozen aerial pics of Met Boxes alone I haven't posted - then there's Glasgow  ).

As to making sense as a location for a City Police Box... who knows? I mean the Dock area is a strategic resource, so it might well make sense to have a PCB there for a City Police officer on foot patrol in and around the Docks. Lots of examples in Glasgow, and even the Met District, though these are usually outside the gate or fence line. That said, there is something marked at the other end of the yard as a "PCB" that I'm almost certain was a watch box at the main entrance to the yard, because as I recall it doesn't show up as an Edinburgh Box on photos and isn't on the List. Going on an almost two year old memory, so might be wrong. There's also the opposite a little east and closer to the beach where the List says a Box was there, but aerial photos and the maps show nothing. Tried to ask Mike about these back then, if he had any additional details, but didn't get a response.

All in a day's work in the art and science of Box Hunting.  


EDIT: In case it's not obvious what we're talking about in the above photo, here's a blowup with the object that's at the Map's "PCB" location now centered in frame --



The same blowup brightened and sharpened --