In 1986, 900 years after William the Conqueror's original Domesday Book, the BBC launched its Domesday Project to record a snapshot of everyday life across the UK for future generations. A million volunteers took part, from schools to Women's Institutes, providing nearly 150,000 pages of text and over 20,000 amateur photos. Each group worked on a different 4 x 3 km area called a D-block. The project used the then-new technology of the Laser Disc; unfortunately the technology did not take off and many of the original contributors never even saw the results of their work.

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For background information on the BBC Domesday Project, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project.

Now, 25 years later, the data has been rescued and made available online by the BBC as Domesday Reloaded, and the National Archives will help preserve it for the future.

Search Facility

You can search from any part of the site by using the map or by key words. This can be filtered by text and or picture. Clicking on a result will take you directly to the article or picture. From there you can also explore the rest of the D-block or search for more content. You won't get a result for everything, but as long as there is an adult to encourage children to try another search term, this is the ideal platform to demonstrate thinking skills around research.

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I searched my own postcode and although there were only four photos, there was a range of text in the content. Some was written by children:

   There is a Waterworks between Park Avenue and Waterworks Road. Part
   of the Waterworks is old, perhaps Victorian, but there are also a
   lot of modern parts. There are eight settling pools. One for each
   section. There are Victorian cast iron railings surrounding all of
   it. The big old building houses machinery. The workmen wear special
   protective clothing. The Waterworks cleans the river water. Four
   pools hold clean water and four pools hold dirty water. The dirty
   water runs through the Waterworks machines to clean it. Then it is
   piped into our taps.

--pages 13-17 by St George's C. E. Primary School, Worcester

(The Waterworks have now been replaced by about 100 detached houses, although I'm pleased to say St George's School has not. …