O.O'Brien

So, SLOW had the second City of London race on September 12th. I extended the map west to encompass the Temple and Holborn areas, but left the planning to Alan L, who produced excellent courses that caught out a lot of people. The race was a great success with around 500 competitors this year (up 25% on the previous race) and again some lovely sunshine. The assembly was in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral this year which added a certain “wow” factor. ClifBar again sponsored the race, giving finishers a tasty snack as they crossed the finishing line.

See the planner’s comments for the full details of what unfolded – there were some minor problems but few people had their run impacted significantly by them. Roll on next year!

Here’s the layers that were brought together to produce the map (once again, in Adobe Illustrator CS3) – from the top down, they are:

• The course – this layer was produced by the planner, Alan, supplied in EPS format and placed as a top layer.
• The adornments, including the title, logo and scale.
• The north lines.
• Tunnel walls.
• Point features – mainly trees and statues.
• Buildings. The most important layer.
• Construction sites. Mercifully few of these in the new west part of the map.
• Walls, fences and other barriers. Quite difficult for orienteers to spot sometimes!
• Out-of-bounds-areas – the largest one is Lincoln’s Inn.
• Water, including of course the River Thames.
• Steps and path boundary lines.
• Underpasses and canopies. The cartography for these may be tweaked for next year.
• Vegetation, including the few small parks and open spaces in the City.
• Pavement boundaries for the major roads on the map.
• And finally the road colour, which lies under everything else.

Here’s my planned mapping for the next extension to the City of London orienteering map:

The plan is to do one of the nine sectors every three weeks between January and June next year.

The sectors are:

1. St Katherine’s Docks
2. Shad Thames
3. Pool of London
4. London Bridge Station
5. Guy’s Hospital
6. Borough
7. Southwark
8. Bankside
9. Borough Market

Now that I’ve taken on maintaining the SLOW website, I’ve been digging around the myriad of directories in the site, and elsewhere on the web, to find out the history of the site. The site itself generally only has information going back as far as 2005, there certainly was a website before then, but malware attacks and space constraints mean the older content has been long deleted. I’ve only been in the club since 2003, so had no idea what it was like before.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is, as ever, a treasure trove of old content. Through it, I’ve found versions of the website going back as far as 1996 – which means, slightly annoyingly, it predates my own website by a year. It’s changed web address several times, although it’s been at sloweb.org.uk since 2002 [Update: and slow.org.uk since 2014.] The current design dates from as late as 2007, although the current logo debuted in late 2004.

Some highlights:

Here’s a version of the club’s logo from the last century:

Through the digging, I’ve discovered two older versions of SLOWprint, the club newsletter – issues 116 and 122, from 1997 and 1998. I’m pretty sure that these are the oldest on the web. The club has been around for several decades though, and there’s over 100 issues of SLOWprint not online – a project for a future club archivist, maybe.

Here’s the logo for the 1998 Southern Express series of orienteering events in (the series started in 1996 and has ceased only quite recently), which amused me a little bit:

The OK Nuts pages from 1996 are amongst the earliest I could find – they include this quote at the top:

Welcome to SLOW’s first web site for information about Orienteering. It is an experiment, so please bear with us as we try e-mail entry, the map, advance details and results. This has tremendous potential so I hope you support this venture. Any comments will be gratefully received. The site will run from November until the end of December.

Remember the foot-and-mouth crisis back in 2001? It decimated the orienteering season.

Street-O races have been going on for longer than I thought – here’s a mention of one back in Richmond back in 1998.

ASTROFEATURE sounds like something we could definitely do with in Clapham Common or some of our other “feature-light” areas.

Here’s a link to the pages from 1997-9.