St Andrews Harbour - 1921
About
A short clip depicting St Andrews Harbour in 1921. A collaborative project with the St Andrews Preservation Trust.
Today, the Scottish burgh of St Andrews is best known for its golf courses and ancient university. However, it also has a long maritime history, stretching back into the Middle Ages. For centuries, St Andrews Harbour was a gateway between Fife and the wider world, with ships trading with Scandinavia and Germany, as well as along the east coast of Scotland. By the early twentieth century, ships had grown larger, and the harbour at St Andrews was too small for most trading vessels. However, it remained home to smaller fishing boats. To this day, a limited number of crab and lobster boats still work from the harbour. This short video tour shows how the harbour may have appeared in the 1920s.
Gallery
Historical Research
In 2020, we collaborated with the St Andrews Preservation Trust to create a digital reconstruction of St Andrews Harbour as it may have looked around 1921. With photographic material to draw upon from the trust’s archives and guidance from St Andrews man Neil Cunningham Dobson, Marine Archaeologist and member of St Andrews Harbour Trust, we were able to form a picture of the way the buildings stood at that time.
Design and Creation
Firstly, a digital landscape was created using survey data and height maps.
Following extensive historical research and collaboration with specialists, 3D models are created and imported into UNREAL Engine (a cross-platform game engine for creating virtual worlds). Models are textured, scaled, oriented and assembled. Scenes are created and populated with appropriate objects, including furniture and artefacts. Landscapes populated with flora and fauna. Weather settings and atmospheric lighting.
Where applicable, models of characters, animals or 3D digitised artefacts were imported and animated.
Explore this Reconstruction
Team
- Authors: Sarah Kennedy, Iain Oliver, Bess Rhodes, Alan Miller
- Specialist Advisors: Annie Birrell (St Andrews Preservation Trust), Stephen Liscoe (Fife Council Archaeology Service), Neil Cunningham Dobson (Marine Archaeologist and member of St Andrews Harbour Trust) Bess Rhodes (University of St Andrews)