HUNDREDS of people have been helping to create the 'Wikipedia of Cowley Road'.

Since it was launched in July, residents and former residents of Oxford's famous street have made 2,900 page edits and uploaded more than 350 pictures to cowleyroad.org.

The website, created by current resident and artist Eleanor Greenhalgh, has pages for each of the road's 288 buildings and asks contributors to fill them in with facts, stories and photographs.

Among the recent contributions are photos of the long-gone Uhuru wholefoods shop in the 1970s, stories of Oxford Women's Liberation group meeting on the road and memories of one cafe's 'amazing eggs Benedict'.

One woman, a former nurse, attended a workshop event and helped fill in the page about Manzil Way, which now tells how the road was formerly home to the imposing Cowley Road Workhouse.

In an end-of-year report for the project, Miss Greenhalgh, 30, said she and her small team had been delighted with the number of contributions so far.

Thanking everyone who had helped she said: "Cowleyroad.org would be impossible without the work of generous volunteers who are building up the open-access archive for future generations.

"Historian Ed Pope has painstakingly catalogued former businesses operating at every Cowley Road address.

"He has also made his archive of the Backstreet Bugle, a 1970s radical newspaper, available for digitisation."

She said residents had been collecting oral histories from older people and photographer Martin Stott had donated hundreds of photographs from his personal archive.

Miss Greenhalgh, who grew up in Grove and went to King Alfred's school in Wantage, also thanked the Greening Lamborn Trust for its financial support.

Among the fuller pages on the website so far is the entry for the Ultimate Picture Palace (UPP) cinema, once owned by Oxford Mail columnist Bill Heine, who was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Users have contributed their memories of how Mr Heine bought the cinema in 1976 and changed its name to the Penultimate Picture Palace, after his bank manager described the scheme with the immortal words 'not quite the ultimate in bad ideas, but the penultimate'.

The entry for the Truck record store, meanwhile, recalls how, from 2002 to 2010, it was a branch of Videosyncratic video rental shop run by Jon Spira, who in 2017 published a book about his time running the shop entitled Videosyncratic.

Miss Greenhalgh, who has been helped by programmer Charlie Harvey and historian Liz Woolley, said she wanted to assemble real stories of the living street.

What's more, because all the words, pictures and videos are supplied by ordinary people, the whole archive will be free for anyone to use and reproduce.

Explore the website and sign up to be a contributor at cowleyroad.org