The Francis Frith Collection launches new website

Teffont, UK, Apr. 25, 2008. How often do you look at old photographs and wonder about the people seen in them? So many historical images show nameless people, captured for a moment in time before they moved out of frame and back into their lives.

Now you can find out a little more about some of the faces from the past on the new photo library website of The Francis Frith Collection.

The well-known Collection contains some 365,000 fine-quality vintage images, taken by the company photographers between 1860 and 1970, of nearly 7,000 cities, towns and villages across Britain.

The photographs have been used to illustrate over 800 local history books, and the general public have been invited to ‘Share Your Memories’ online via the main website of the company.

This has allowed members of the public to identify people in many images and tell their stories, so that over 6 million words of informative text have now been added to the photographs.

Much of this text can now be viewed together with the relevant images on the new photo library website of the Collection, thus providing valuable information for picture researchers and editors.

The new Frith Photo Library website contains an ever-growing selection of images now available to seach by key-word, as well as by place name and date. Picture researchers will be able to find photographs which meet most requirements for historical photographs from within the newly key-worded images, such as:

• The characters, the fashion, the children, transport and all aspects of daily life in the streets and countryside of the British Isles – our images cover all eras from Victorian to Post War Britain.
• Recreation and holiday - the Edwardian seaside outing, the charabancs of the 1920s or the holiday camps of the 1950s.
• Britain’s industrial past – from blacksmiths and lace making to fishing ports and ship canals. View our images of marvellous feats of engineering from all eras of our history, from Stonehenge to the Forth Bridge.
• The British countryside – as it was before the motorcar arrived and mass tourism altered it forever.
• Regional architecture – from the cob cottages of Devon to the hop farms of Kent and the graceful Georgian squares of Bath.
• The continuity of our towns and villages with our ‘then and now’ images, and the variety – with over 7,000 cities, towns and villages depicted there is no better source!
• Some images also available hand-tinted in full or spot colour.
• An interesting and descriptive text can be supplied for many of the Frith images if required.

All the Frith images are of outstanding clarity, and high resolution files are available for fast delivery, with all rights cleared.

For further information, contact:

Julia Skinner, Photo Library Manager
The Francis Frith Collection, Frith’s Barn, Teffont, Salisbury SP3 5QP UK
Tel:  +44 (0) 1722 717 134, Fax:  +44 (0) 1722 716 881
E-mail: library@francisfrith.co.uk, Web: www.francisfrith.com/library

 

About The Frith Photo Library

The Frith Photo Library is a rights-managed library of local, historic and nostalgic photography. The Collection is widely recognised as the premier source of British topographical photography, and contains some 365,000 fine-quality vintage photographs, taken between 1860 and 1970, of nearly 7,000 towns and villages across Britain. Many locations were photographed at regular intervals and the Collection forms a topographical archive without equal, providing an unrivalled record of the social and physical development of Britain over a dynamic period. 

The Collection was established in 1860 by Victorian photographer Francis Frith, who spent much of his life traveling the roads and lanes of Britain by pony and trap, photographing cities, towns, villages and picturesque countryside. The images that Frith and his professional photographers created were originally sold as souvenir photographs and later as postcards, and depict many of the best known locations in Britain. After Frith’s death in 1898 the archive was added to continuously until the late 1960s.

The subject matter of the Collection ranges from views of small market towns and quiet villages to the crowded streets of busy industrial cities, from sweeping landscapes to the packed beaches of seaside resorts in the hey-day of the great British holiday. Many of the town and city centre views show the architecture that was lost in the redevelopment of the 1960s. The images provide fascinating evidence of history as it was happening, and document more than a century of change.