Plaque hunting in the wild

This weekend I went to a wedding in Stoke, and stayed overnight. As I knew I’d be travelling back today, I planned to find some plaques to photograph between Stoke and my home in Sussex. I looked at the map showing all the plaques in we know about, and after clicking on a few of the map icons, chose Leamington Spa and Banbury to visit. these were ideal, as none of their plaques had been photographed, and they were both close to the M40.

I printed the street maps after zooming in on the map on each town’s page. Once I got to each town, it would be easy to find the plaques. As it happened, two of the Leamington plaques were slightly misplaced on the map, but I found them both nearby. Also, the one-way system and road-closure meant a few detours. Once I had taken photos of the seven Leaminton plaques, I eschewed the M40 for the beautiful B4100 to Banbury and photographed the two plaques in the town centre.

Once I got home, I set about adding the photos to the site:

• I uploaded the photos to Flickr.com
• Added a Creative Commons Attribution licence to each photo
• Added them in turn to the map (using the Add to your map link on the photo page)
• Changed the title to the name of the person(s) being commemorated
• Added the machine tag, e.g. openplaques:id=1835 to each photo
• Created sets called “Leamington Plaques” and “Banbury Plaques“, and added the photos accordingly
• Added the photos to the Open Plaques Flickr pool

Although we had the locations and names of the commemorated people in our database, we didn’t have the inscriptions, so I added those to the open plaques pages too.  The overnight batch process will find the photos on Flickr and automatically link them to the correct page in Open Plaques, so they should show up on the site in the morning.

Photograph: Simon Harriyott