Welwyn Garden City from Above

These aerial photographs of Welwyn Garden City taken in the early part of the town’s history are from The Britain from Above   website which features images from the Aerofilms collection, a unique aerial photographic archive of international importance.

The collection includes 1.26 million negatives and more than 2000 photograph albums. Dating from 1919 to 2006, the total collection presents an unparalleled picture of the changing face of Britain in the 20th century. It includes the largest and most significant number of air photographs of Britain taken before 1939. The collection is varied and includes urban, suburban, rural, coastal and industrial scenes, providing important evidence for understanding and managing the built and natural environments.

The collection was created by Aerofilms Ltd, a pioneering air survey company set up in 1919 by First World War veterans Francis Lewis Wills and Claude Grahame-White. In addition to Aerofilms’ own imagery, the firm expanded its holdings with the purchase of two smaller collections – AeroPictorial (1934-1960) and Airviews (1947-1991). This very large collection of historical air photographs was bought by Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), English Heritage (EH), and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) from Blom ASA in 2007.

The Britain from Above project is 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 are scanned into digital format and made available on The Britain from Above website for the public to see. This project has been made possible due to a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and support from The Foyle Foundation and other donors.

Terms & Conditions for the Use of these Images. You may : copy, print, display, and store for your personal use at home and you may copy to a blog or personal web page as long as the page is freely available with no login restrictions and no charges 

Under these conditions : Display Attribution [no cropping of watermark]. Include link to source page. No Commercial Use or Sale, No Sub-Licensing, No Advertising Use 

See full Terms and Conditions for The Britain from Above website. If you use any images online you must provide a link to the source page for the image ie, (http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/ image/epw014808). To capture the image, right click and select ‘Save image As…’

The Britain from Above web site can be found at:
http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk