{"id":9753,"date":"2025-06-08T15:05:25","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T15:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/?p=9753"},"modified":"2025-06-08T15:05:26","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T15:05:26","slug":"1930s-england-stokesay-castle-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/?p=9753","title":{"rendered":"1930s England: Stokesay Castle ‘Then and Now’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I like to try and reproduce views taken in 1930s-40s or before. To this end I have several old travel guides that I use when I am visiting different parts of the country. Because of their age I believe the photos are out of copyright but if I am wrong and you are the copyright holder then please contact me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this set of images I visited Stokesay Castle – a fortified manor house in Shropshire managed by English Heritage. I took with me a copy of the photo I wanted to recreate and was given directions by the kind people in the visitor centre. Below I show the ‘then and now’ photos of the castle starting with the old photo I wanted to recreate:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An old photo (1930s?) of Stokesay Castle from across a pond<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

First I tried lining the original image up with this photo:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My initial view of Stokesay Castle used for alignment<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With some basic, rough alignment ended up with these two images which I am showing using a ‘Before and After’ comparison slider:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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A slightly cropped version of the original photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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My 2025 version in rough alignment with the original<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The alignment it somewhat off. A little of this is due to the fact I needed to walk a little further around the pond (but this did look far enough at the time). Doing so would have meant dropping down a few feet over a ledge and also risk losing the right side of the castle to the trees. But I was puzzled by the different perspective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just for interest I put the old photo in the middle of the new one to show it in the modern landscape:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The old photo superimposed on the modern landscape of 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I then tried another new photo and used different manipulations to try and get better alignments. This is the best I could do:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Manipulated old photo to give better alignment to the new<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The modern 2025 view used for alignment of the old photo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

The alignment is better but I had to do some quite extensive ‘stretching’ to correct perspective differences. I am suspecting that some perspective changes were originally made when the print was being created in the darkroom (I have tried this in the past when I had a darkroom and an enlarger with bellows that could be manipulated).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An interesting exercise. I took a few other views on my trip to that part of the country which I have yet to process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I like to try and reproduce views taken in 1930s-40s or before. To this end I have several old travel guides that I use when I am visiting different parts of the country. Because of their age I believe the photos are out of copyright but if I am wrong and you are the copyright … Continue reading “1930s England: Stokesay Castle ‘Then and Now’”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,66,141,138,102,3,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-before-after","category-buildings","category-comparison-slider","category-english-heritage","category-historic-houses-and-gardens","category-photography","category-shropshire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9753"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9778,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9753\/revisions\/9778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pmstudios.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}