Source Information

Ancestry.com. UK, City, Town and Village Photos, 1857-2015 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.
Original data: The Francis Frith Collection, England.

About UK, City, Town and Village Photos, 1857-2015

The Francis Frith Collection contains photographs of almost every city, town and village in Great Britain, with some coverage of other countries including Ireland. The photos are primarily topographical - of towns, landmarks and landscapes. These include thousands of individual streets, churches, castles, landscapes, businesses, bridges, municipal buildings and locations that have been important in individuals' lives.

Founded by Francis Frith in 1860, the company published over 300,000 photographs which were sold to tourists as souvenirs, and later as postcards. Frith is recognised as one of the great pioneers of photography, having undertaken three expeditions up the Nile to record the pyramids and antiquities of the Middle East between 1857 and 1859. He is best known today for the amazing archive his company created. Today the Collection is famous as an outstanding record of British towns and villages over 110 years and provides a lot of information about everyday life over that period. The company continues to add to the archive and publish in the Frith tradition.