Aerofilms: Britain from above

[Michael Pritchard]

English Heritage has launched a four year project aimed at conserving 95,000 of the oldest and most valuable photographs in the Aerofilms collection, those dating from 1919 to 1953.  Once conserved, they’ll be scanned into digital format and made available online for everyone to see.

More than 15,000 images from one of the earliest and most significant collections of aerial photography of the UK have been made freely accessible online to the public for the first time.

Britain from Above, a new website launched by English Heritage and the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and Wales, features some of the oldest and most valuable images of the Aerofilms Collection, a unique and important archive of over 1 million aerial photographs taken between 1919 and 2006.

English Heritage is working in partnership with the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and Wales on the project which started in 2011. The project has been made possible due to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and support from The Foyle Foundation and other donors.

The new Britain from Above website was launched in June 2012 with thousands of images online. The website will give users the opportunity to share and record  memories of the places shown and to help English Heritage identify some of the locations and buildings.

The project will finish at the end of 2014.

See: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/archives-and-collections/nmr/archives/photographs/aerofilms/ and http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/