100m+ records
Hundreds of millions of records cross-referenced — registers, archives, encyclopedias, the lot
One button · anywhere on earth · free on iPhone
What happened here?
Press one button and find out. Learn about the exact ground under your shoes, and everything anyone ever wrote down about it.
Strata tears through hundreds of millions of historical records — national heritage registers, archives, encyclopedias, the entire structured record of who was where and when — finds the one story running through them, and hands it to you in about a minute. Sourced, checkable, and about a seven-minute read.
30 seconds
from pressing one button to a finished, sourced story about your spot
Anywhere
on earth. No landmark needed — a bus stop has a record, and usually a better one
Never
the same twice. Every street you turn down is a story nobody has told you yet
A simple app with only three screens.
No setup, no feed to scroll, nothing to learn. You will have read your first dig before the coffee arrives.
One
Press dig
A square in Sintra, a bus stop in Leeds, the corner of your own street. Strata reads your location at the moment you ask and never in the background — there is no tracking between digs.
Two
Read the layers down
Not a timeline and not a list. One story with a spine, told from the most recent layer down to the oldest, so the 12th century arrives because the 17th made you ask about it.
Three
Keep it
Every dig goes into your journal, filed by place and readable offline on the plane home. A trip ends up as a shelf of the ground you actually stood on.
The pile it digs through
Hundreds of millions of records. Find out what happened below your feet.
Human history is already written down. The problem has always been that it is scattered across state heritage registers, archives, encyclopedias in a dozen languages, old parish boundaries and centuries of place names nobody uses any more — and none of it is filed by where you happen to be standing.
That is the whole trick. Strata files it by ground. Press the button and everything that pile knows about your exact spot comes back as discrete events — each with a date, a publisher and a link you can open.
National and regional heritage registers
Listed buildings, monuments and scheduled sites, with the dates the state itself recorded.
A structured graph of people, buildings and events
Millions of entities with birth and death dates, construction dates, coordinates and relationships — which is how a dig knows a king was here and when.
Encyclopedic articles and gazetteers
The long-form record for the town, the parish and the building, in the languages the place keeps its history in.
Historic place names and boundaries
What this ground was called before, and which parish, manor or quarter it belonged to when the events happened.
Archive photography and public-domain art
Where a place has been painted, engraved or photographed, the dig shows it — the square as it looked, not a stock image of somewhere similar.
Records, not guesses
Every event carries a confidence. The uncertain ones are never asserted as fact about your ground, and era background is marked as background rather than dressed up as a claim about this spot.
Threads you can pull
The story ends; the threads stay open. Every person, building and event in it has its own note, and pulling one opens the next dig underneath it.
Your journal stays yours
Location is read when you press dig and never in the background. The digs you keep are yours to delete, and nothing published on this site is tied to a person or to a point finer than the ground itself.
Take it somewhere new and it does not shut up
This is what travelling with Strata is actually like: you stop more. The alley you were cutting through turns out to be the old harbour wall. The café terrace was a cattle market for four hundred years. You arrive at the famous thing already knowing what it was built on top of.
And it never repeats, because the ground never does. A guidebook runs out on day three. Strata has something for every corner you turn, including the ones back home.
Download on the App Store
Free to start · unlimited digging by subscription
The chimneys still vent a kitchen nobody cooks in, and the square is full of people who have never heard his name.
From a dig at Eynsham Hall, North Leigh — read it →
The library on this site is the same writing the app produces, published in full and free to read. If these are worth your time, the app does it for wherever you happen to be standing.
Questions people bring to a place
Each dig answers the plain question first, in a sentence, and then earns it over five layers.
What was here before?
Strata answers that for the spot under your feet, not the town you are in — the square, not Sintra; the corner, not the city.
Does it work where nothing famous happened?
That is most of the ground there is, and it is where the app earns its keep. Ordinary places have long records.
Do I need a signal to dig?
Yes for the dig itself. Once a dig is in your journal it stays readable offline.
Is it free?
The app is free to download and comes with digs included. Unlimited digging is a subscription.