It's a small world

MAPS can tell you a lot about how a place used to look, but only from a very limited perspective.

Drawings and paintings can often tell you more, while photographs help enormously, especially aerial photographs, as they give you a vantage-point you're not readily familiar with (and if you haven't yet travelled the world today courtesy of Google Earth then try and treat yourself some time).

However, if you really want to get a feel for how a place used to be, you can't beat a good three-dimensional model.

Tudor Plymouth, Plymouth at the time that the Pilgrims Fathers called here, old Plymouth: it's all been done before and there are a few excellent models around; one in the Guildhall, another in the Prysten House and a third, the biggest, in the building alongside Cuisine Spontanée. However, I'd never seen a decent model of pre-war Plymouth until last week.

Incredibly, it's smaller than the other models and yet it takes in a wider area. Measuring just two feet by two feet, the model was begun some 10 to 20 years ago by David Moore, who used to work in the Civic Centre in the surveyors' office, I think. Sadly David died before he'd made a great deal of progress. Certainly he'd done much of the ground work – quite literally, inasmuch as he'd made the base, shaped the terrain according to the natural topography and sketched a number of preliminary drawings. He had also laid down the municipal buildings and Guildhall, St Andrew's Church and a few surrounding streets. In other words he'd made a good start, but sadly that was all.

Then, two or three years ago, David's widow got in touch and asked if I'd be interested in a number of old Plymouth books that David had collected (including a few of my own!) I was only too happy to have a look through the material and then, as an aside, she showed me the model, which she was about to throw in the bin. "You can't do that," I cried. "All that work, all that time …"

And so I became the custodian of a part-finished model of Plymouth circa 1933.

Enter local model-maker and pattern-maker Charlie Joseph Sells. Charlie, who specialising mainly in superb scaled-down versions of boats and planes – some up to seven foot long – came in to see me about a story for Looking Back; it was a charmer, and we featured a number of pictures of Charlie the model-maker from his pre-teen days to the present. I showed Charlie the part-finished Plymouth pre-war model. To my amazement, and delight, and to his own surprise – particularly given how long it's taken him to complete the darn thing – Charlie volunteered to finish the model.

Eighteen months and goodness knows how many hundreds of man-hours later the model is, at last, finished, much to his and his long-suffering wife Margaret's relief. "Can I have my dining room back now?" she asked.

Yes, indeed: for the model now has a new home, in the Plymouth Barbican Association's South West Image Bank at 32 Looe Street (open Monday to Friday 9.30am-4.30pm, closed for lunch 12.30-1.30pm).

Small but splendid it is, too. Charlie, who has taken hundreds of photographs of the city and studied hundreds more, has painstakingly worked at the incredibly difficult 1 to 2,500 scale and in the process has produced something that will help everyone have a better idea of what Plymouth looked like before the Blitz and before the Plan for Plymouth radically changed the city's street pattern. With all the main routes neatly labelled and all the buildings easily identifiable, it's a joy and a wonder to behold; every time I look at it I see something new and while I didn't know Plymouth in the Thirties personally, I feel a lot more familiar with it now.