The Vision of Britain system aims to bring together all our information about each place in Britain in one set of pages on our site, so most users begin by saying where they are interested in. There are three ways to do this:

• Type in a place name: We ignore punctuation and capital letters. This option searches a simplified list of towns and villages, but if we cannot find anywhere we tell you about other ways of looking. If we find somewhere, we take you to a place page, but if you are interested in long-term trends you need to look at one of our unit home pages. We recommend going to the page for the modern local authority covering your chosen place, but you will also often find interesting historical information for parish-level units, local government districts and Poor Law Unions/Registration Districts named after the place.
• Type in a postcode: We then work out which modern local authority covers that location, and take you straight to the unit home page for that authority. You can view pages covering various themes: population, industry, social structure and so on. You can also go to pages for related units: other units that covered the location - other units named after the same place, via the place page - other units which were part of the unit, via the boundaries and relationships page.
• Click on a region in the map: This will take you to a more detailed map of that region, which lets you select a particular modern local authority and go to that unit's home page. If you want to go directly to historical units covering a location, go instead to historical mapping and start zooming in - more detailed maps will start to appear. When you can clearly see the place you are interested, choose the "select district" option and click on the map. This is just like typing in a postcode: you are taken to the unit home page for the modern local authority covering that place, but the Other units link shows you the historic units.