The history of Lorryspotting (1)

The very start of Lorryspotting can be traced back to March 1997 when a chap by the name of Doug Chinnery decided he was going to stop updating his own personal site that had a fleet list of Eddie Stobart vehicles. He wanted someone to take it on and the rest they say is history. Back in the early days it was run on the back of the Braunton Cricket club website and to say it was dire would be an understatement. It only contained the fleet list of Eddie Stobart and all pages were "Hard coded" in that everything you saw had to be typed in and uploaded.

The first person who came on board to help with the site was Colin Wilson and his help in those early days and in the following years was invaluable.The site was free to view and was creating an enormous amount of email requests so I decided to turn the site into a commercial venture.

On 25th March 1999 the new look professionally designed site came into being and the cost per annum was £17 and we offered the fleets of Eddie Stobart,John Raymond,Langdons and James Irlam. The site was updated through a very basic web updating page and was somewhat difficult to use. At this stage it cost exactly £100 every time to add a new haulier to the site but we were lucky enough to be generating sufficient income to be able to put 2 or 3 new hauliers onto the site every month.

The photo is courtesy of and copyrighted to John Martin.

« Back