History, wherever you stand

We believe every place is worth knowing — not just the famous corners, but the ordinary street, the quiet square, the ground beneath your feet right now.

BeforeNow began with a simple idea: the past is everywhere, but almost none of it is where you can reach it. Plaques weather and vanish. Guidebooks cover a handful of landmarks and skip everything in between. The deep, strange, human history of a place usually stays locked away in archives most people never open.

So we built a way to carry that history in your pocket. Point BeforeNow at where you're standing and it gathers what the world's open records know about that exact spot — the buildings and the people, the disasters and the celebrations, the forgotten moments — and tells it to you like a well-read friend who happens to be standing beside you.

What we care about

Two things, above all. First, that it's true: everything BeforeNow tells you is drawn from cited, verifiable sources, and when the record is thin it says so rather than inventing a better story. Second, that it reaches everywhere: not only the tourist trail, but the neighborhoods and back roads where history is just as rich and far harder to find.

How it's made

BeforeNow stands on the shoulders of the open web — Wikipedia, Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and Wikimedia Commons — the collaborative archives built by millions of contributors around the world. We're grateful to every one of them, and to the historians, archivists, and local societies whose work makes any of this possible.