After 20 years working in the Historic England archive, Mike Evans, co-author of a new book drawn from the collection of an estimated 9 million photographs, still regularly comes upon new discoveries.
“Embarrassingly, one of those I’d never seen before has made the cover of our book, an early photograph of Bristol – a platinum print, so the silvery tones and the detail are really marvellous,” Evans says.
The photograph shows the junction of two medieval streets, Steep Street and Trenchard Street, photographed in 1866 by John Hill Morgan – a few years before the scene was swept away in roadworks.
“What fascinates me, because the detail is so pin-sharp,” Evans says, “is the sign in the shop window, ‘hair bought’ – that must so often have been a last resort for people who were really poor in Bristol.”
The book, Picturing England, traces the importance of photography in documenting the built environment: the photographers often captured startling collisions of old and new, including a beautiful Tudor house in Suffolk loaded onto a wheeled platform ready to be moved to a new site, and a West Country farmer in 1900 bringing in the harvest with a team of shire horses – a timeless scene, except for the Marconi signal station in the background and the new hotel built to house its workers.
A selection of the images is also on display outside Birmingham’s new public library, until 21 September.
The photographers included a wealth of social and political history as well as the buildings, such as a miller in Nottinghamshire looking almost as battered as his soon-to-be-demolished windmill, or a row of immaculately uniformed lift attendants in Selfridges.
Many buildings were recorded just in time, including Beaupré Hall, a Tudor mansion with a magnificent 16th-century gatehouse which was occupied by the RAF in the second world war, and was photographed in 1963 with a row of bungalows almost touching its walls – within three years the hall had vanished. The Oxford Arms, a Tudor coaching inn in the heart of the City of London, looked ready to collapse before the photographer had done his work in 1875, but lasted a few years longer.
The archive is still growing, through occasional purchases and frequent donations. A recent acquisition was the photographic archive of the John Laing construction company, which includes a spectacular view of the now obsolete cement works at Shoreham in West Sussex under construction in 1950.
“I was a bit dubious about that one,” Evans said, “I thought it would be hundreds of photographs of cement drying, but in fact there are wonderful things in it.”
- Picturing England, the photographic collections of Historic England, published July 2015
- The exhibition is in Centenary Square, outside Birmingham public library, until 21 September
