Between-the-wars images from the air

[Happy Face 29]

 

The Tyne Bridge on the day it opened.

 

 

Greys Monument

 

Story from the Shields Gazette has their spin, but the whole country is covered...

 

THE Old Town Hall sends a summer shadow lengthening across the Market Place in Shields, surrounded by buildings that a little over a dozen years later will be smoke and ruin.

 

The North and South Marine Parks are luxuriously verdant, the Figure of Eight at the Pier Head still the white knuckle ride of its day.

 

 

The river, at Tyne Dock, is black with coal staiths and the funnels of ships.

 

Further up, Jarrow town centre is dense with houses and industry; while at Hebburn, the Tyne Sulphur and Copper Works streams the smoke of chemical processing into the air.

 

 

The camera clicked, then clicked again and, from the sky above, a now lost-tapestry of Tyneside as it was less than a decade after the end of the First World War began to emerge.

 

And now you can see it for yourself.

 

 

The pictures here, dating from 1927, are among more than 15,000 images of the country from one of the earliest and

 

most significant collections of aerial photography of the UK, now made freely accessible online to the public for the first time.

 

Britain from Above, launched this summer by English Heritage and the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and Wales (RCAHMSW), features some of the oldest and most valuable images of the Aerofilms Collection, a unique and important archive of more than one million aerial photographs taken between 1919 and 2006.

 

 

Its chronological and geographical coverage is superb and documents the face of Britain during a period of intense and unparalleled change.

 

The photographs featured on the website date from 1919 to 1953, and include a number of the North-East coast, including South Shields, Tynemouth, Whitley Bay and Cullercoats; as well as the River Tyne, Wallsend and Newcastle; also Sunderland and the Wear.

 

 

All have gone through a painstaking process of conservation and cataloguing. Due to their age and fragility, many of the earliest plate glass negatives were close to being lost forever.

 

The Aerofilms Collection was acquired for the nation in 2007. With the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Foyle Foundation, English Heritage and the Royal Commissions embarked on a programme to conserve, catalogue and digitise the collection and make it freely available online.

 

 

Highlights include the 1935 FA Cup final at Wembley Stadium; the Thames Flood of 1947 and crowds on the banks of the River Clyde watching the first voyage of the newly-built RMS Queen Mary in 1936.

 

The website features a high degree of inter activity and is designed to encourage public participation: for instance, can you help identify the locations of a number of mystery images that have left the experts stumped?

 

 

The collection was created by Aerofilms Ltd, a pioneering air survey company set up by First World War veterans FL Wills and C Grahame-White just after the end of the war in 1919.

 

Wills brought to the partnership knowledge and enthusiasm for air photography.

 

 

Grahame-White, on the other hand, was a pioneer aviator and was the first Englishman to qualify for an aviator’s certificate (Aero Club de Paris) and became famous in England four months later when he made the first night-flight during the London-Manchester air race.

 

With just £3,000 seed capital, the company grew from strength to strength, spurred on by the rapid technological advances during the Great War, both in aeroplane engineering and aerial reconnaissance.

 

 

At first, flying planes were borrowed from the London Aeroplane Club and glass plates were developed in a bathroom at the London Flying Hotel on the Hendon site where Aerofilms had set up office. Anna Eavis, head of archive at English Heritage, said: “The Aerofilms Collection embodies all that is exciting about aerial photography.

 

“What is equally remarkable is the skill of the expert staff in England, Scotland and Wales who have saved and conserved these vulnerable negatives and prints and converted them into the high-resolution images you see on screen today.

 

 

“We are pleased that the items have been given safe, long-term, and that each of the organisations involved has been enriched immensely by their addition.”

 

Rebecca Bailey, head of education and outreach at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), said: “Between 1919 and 1953, there was vast and rapid change to the social, architectural and industrial fabric of Britain, and Aerofilms provides a unique and at times unparalleled perspective on this upheaval.

“We hope that people today will be able to immerse themselves in the past through the new website, adding their own thoughts and memories to this remarkable collection.”

 

By the end of the project in 2014, 95,000 images taken between 1919 and 1953 will be available online, showing the changing face of modern Britain

 

 

 

http://www.shieldsgazette.com/community/cookson-country/between-the-wars-images-from-the-air-1-4921938

 

 

http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk

[JawD 99]

Canny shot of SJP there

 

[Monkeys Fist 41456]

Zoom in on the Gallowgate and you can see Rob.