In 1986 – the 900th anniversary of William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book – the BBC mounted an ambitious project to record a snapshot of the everyday lives of the people of the United Kingdom.
The idea was to leave a record for future generations that would be as graphic and useful as the original Domesday Book has been. A million volunteers, many of them school children, took part – writing some 148,000 pages of text and collecting more than 23,000 photographs.
The project used what was then adventurous, cutting edge technology based on ‘video discs’. Unfortunately, this proved too costly for schools and individuals to buy, so most people never saw the completed project. But now the BBC have brought it back to life on their website as Domesday Reloaded.
