BLR Yesterday is an online archival mapping project that enables users to explore Bengaluru's history through a collection of historical maps layered against the present-day city. By allowing visitors to move between different decades, the portal highlights the dramatic changes in Bengaluru's geography, infrastructure and neighbourhoods. More than a nostalgia project, it serves as a valuable record of urban transformation, preserving the city's collective memory and helping residents better understand the Bengaluru that existed before the one they know today.
Before Google Maps, before satellite imagery and before Bengaluru became a city best understood through traffic updates and pin drops, there were paper maps. There were survey drawings, planning documents and hand-marked records that captured the city at different moments in time. And though not exactly similar, but in school we used to learn geography on topographical maps, and they were these extremely detailed and minute maps that were 2D representations of a 3D landscape. BLR Yesterday, an online archival portal, brings these fragments of Bengaluru's past together, allowing users to travel through decades of the city's evolution with a simple slider.
At first glance, the platform feels deceptively simple. Users can zoom into neighbourhoods and switch between historical maps from different years, watching the city transform in real time. Familiar localities appear in unfamiliar forms. Lakes that have since disappeared come back into view. Roads that now pulse with traffic seem to end abruptly in open land. Entire neighbourhoods that define contemporary Bengaluru are nowhere to be found. The number of times I've driven around this city with my grandmother and heard her tell me that the area I live in didn't exist until about 15 years ago, or point to a stretch of road and say, "This is where I learned to boat," even though the lake no longer exists, has made me feel as though we came of age in two entirely different cities.
BLR Yesterday serves as a visual archive of urban change, documenting how Bengaluru expanded from a relatively compact city into one of India's largest metropolitan regions. By layering archival maps over contemporary geography, the portal allows users to trace shifts in infrastructure, land use and settlement patterns that are often difficult to grasp through photographs or written histories alone.
For long-time residents, the portal offers a chance to revisit the Bengaluru they grew up in. For newer arrivals, it provides a valuable lesson in understanding the city beyond its present-day identity as India's technology capital.
Across Bengaluru, researchers, archivists and urbanists have been working to preserve historical records that help explain how the city came to be what it is today. BLR Yesterday contributes to this effort by making archival material accessible to anyone with an internet connection, transforming historical maps from static documents into an interactive public resource.
A few clicks can transport users from present-day Bengaluru to the city of 1948, 1969 or 2002, revealing layers of history hidden beneath familiar streets. It feels a little like moving between my grandmother's Bengaluru and my Bangalore, two versions of the same city that coexist in memory but look remarkably different in reality.
Check BLR Yesterday out here.
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