I click "skip intro", then I get a three panel thingy. The middle one is "TimeMap". Do you have Microsoft Silverlight installed? It's their online interactive software viewer.
Some great shots of the vast American hospitals south of Malvern. The Admiralty TOB site on St Andrew's Road is however empty fields. The remaining ex-War Office TOB north-east of Copcut at Droitwich becomes a large site with five such blocks. Cheltenham's GCHQ doughnut at Benhall becomes a poor quality array of half a dozen? War Office / US Army SOS blocks. The doughnut is missing in the 1999 view. The other six blocks (now demolished) to the east at Oakley can clearly be seen in 1945.
Quedgley MU is completely missing. Two Air Ministry TOBS can be seen at Gloucester (Still extant). Where are / were the other four?
An excellent shot of RAF Melksham
This '1945' label is a bit of a joke. Cheddington 1999 is the same as 1945. Wing is missing in 2002, Westcott, Little Horwood in 1945. Graveley and Warboys are good, but Wyton certainly isn't December 1945.
Google have got their work cut out here - sadly it's a case of their current policy of quantity over quality - been taking lessons from Microsoft .
Graham
Plan A is always more effective when the problem you are working on understands that Plan B will involve the use of dynamite
I will not grumble too much about quality or labelling as the alternative it heavily logo'd and very pricey commercial sites that work out more expensive than better quality laser copies from NMR! One site will charge over £100 for a quality print that NMR will do for you for less than £20. Admittedly the commercial sites may have scanned and made proper geo referenced aerial maps but I can't see them making much from sales to the general public at such high prices.
No Amount Of Evidence Will Ever Persuade An Idiot (probably not Mark Twain)
These Google image layers are comprised of a variety of different dates - some pre and others post 1945, it really depends on the sources used by the image providers who have passed this on to Google. This can make it difficult for doing serious research on military sites which change so fast between 1940 and 1950. On google, thedifferent dates / chronology of images has been ironed-out into a single layer that is dubbed i.e. 'historic' or '1945'. Most of these images are, however, derived from scans of OS photo maps - which are mosaics made from the RAF post-war survey 1945-47. These didnt cover the whole country - mostly southern and eastern england and include censorship of military/industrial sites as has rightly been pointed out. Some libraries and record offices have sets of these maps which you can look at and have a bit more confidence on the date of flying. If you want full photo chronology for a site in England then I recommend the National Monuments Record in Swindon which has air photos from the 1920s onwards, the majority being post-1940. They will do a search for you for free for a site if you can give a co-ordinate and give you a list of all available images (on-line form at English Heritage National Monuments Record web site). The snag is you have to go to Swindon to see photos- but worth it if you want to see the wartime pics (RAF and USAAF, dont have Luftwaffe)
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