IF you’re looking for a Christmas present with a difference, the Daily Echo’s new book is just the ticket.

Dorset Then & Now presents vintage pictures of the area alongside new pictures of the same locations.

The ‘old’ pictures in the book range from 1910 to 1993 and include busy town centres and unspoilt village scenes, as well as other locations in bygone times.

The new pictures show how drastically some areas have changed. Bournemouth’s Pier Approach, for example, has seen Victorian shops give way to swimming baths, the Waterfront Imax and now to an open air performance space, and the arrival of a major flyover.

Parts of Poole, meanwhile, are almost unrecognisable today from the same scenes more than 40 years ago, with the arrival of the Arndale Centre (now the Dolphin Centre), new road schemes and Barclays House transforming the town.

The Echo’s team of photographers went to great lengths to replicate the vantage points used by the original photographers as closely as possible, to give the reader the best possible sense of how things had changed.

Unique to this book is the use of ‘blends’ to marry old pictures with new ones, making it dramatically clear how some scenes have changed.

The scenes were painstakingly put together by Echo multimedia designer John Nesbitt.

The 160-page book draws on pictures from the Daily Echo’s own extensive archives and those of other local collections and museums. Like previous books from the Daily Echo and Dorset Echo books, it is already proving a bestseller alongside national titles at local bookshops.

Take our online quiz and see if you can identify eight Dorset locations from our new book.

Go to bournemouthecho.co.uk/ thenandnow to put your knowledge to the test.