For the record

I have a few prints in my house of photos of Kirkby Lonsdale from, I think, the earlyish twentieth century, the 1930s maybe. There's a picture of young man, for example, standing by a newspaper board stating that the king has been on an aeroplane. The road seems unfinished, not even cobbled, but the quality of the photo and the print makes it hard to tell. 

It's funny when there just so many photos these days - so much digital noise - to realise just how few there were back then. And apart from that handful of photos that I have plus an oldish book about Kirkby Lonsdale, I really don't have any access to a visual record of the town's development.

What did it look like in the sixties? Just when, I wonder, was new road built? Booths has been in the town for only ten years or so but already I can't remember what that bit of town looked like beforehand. The road it's on wasn't even there. I think the lower car park was, though. All this incremental change that one notices at the time, that drifts unanchored through our memories.

When I arrived home with Dan and Abi, this afternoon, we found that the town council (I presume) are renovating the one armed lamp in the square, which was previously covered in flaking black paint and getting a little rusty. I doubt this yellow is the final colour; it must be a primer. (That building behind it and to the left was a TSB when I first lived here.)

As we all take our photos, putting them on here and Instagram and Flickr and Facebook, theoretically creating a very rich and dense archive of photos, you'd think that we'll never again be unable to look back at any point in this town's history and see exactly what it was like. Except just how will we access it? Suddenly, I'm beginning to see the value of tagging our photos for posterity.