The Domesday Brock

On August 12th, Brockley Central readers and the Brockley Flickr community are asked to take part in a mass-observation exercise - taking pictures of the local area and uploading them to the Mass Observation of Communities Online (MOCO) website to create a snapshot of life in Brockley in 2010.

It's like Streetview, but instead of barricading our village to prevent people seeing what our garden gates look like, the people of Brockley are being asked to capture daily life in all its glory.

Participants are asked to take six pictures of a street and upload them to the dedicated Brockley Central page on the MOCO website. Communities from across the country will be doing the same thing.

If we can get dozens - maybe hundreds - of people to create a photographic database, historians will pore over Brockley for the rest of time. They'll use this record to help answer questions like "why did anyone ever think illuminated plastic signs on the front of shops were a good idea?" and "what must life have been like in the days when people were allowed to park lumps of metal in the middle of pavements?"

We hope it sounds interesting to you all and that as many of you as possible will take part. We'll give you a few reminders in the days leading up to the 12th.