The Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Bringing the war closer to home
LEST WE FORGET
As each generation passes, our personal connections to those who passed away in the first and second World Wars become more distant. And the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission becomes less relevant. We needed to create a modern, relevant connection to our past. This is too important to drift from living memory.
A LOCALISED EXPERIENCE
Our solution was to bring the people that lived on our streets, back to our streets. For War Graves Week we built a new application that let people search by postcode to discover who from their street died in the first and second World Wars. What can be more visceral than looking at the house across the road and thinking, “the bloke who once lived there, died for us.”
FILLING GAPS IN THE DATA
Our biggest challenge was to map the exact location of casualties’ homes, from a time when postcodes didn’t exist. Extensive work on the client’s database, along with clever customisation of Google APIs, allowed us to create a service which calculates the nearest casualty to any postcode, and display it in Google Street View. A visceral and personal connection to events we must all remember.
