The Britain from Above website was launched today by English Heritage and makes over 16,000 aerial photographs of Great Britain from the Aerofilms collection taken between 1919 and 1953 available to view online. The original glass plate images have been cleaned, digitized and restored in an ongoing project which hopes to eventually make over 90,000 images available.
I’ve had a quick scan through and a search for “Norfolk” and “Norfolk Broads” produced very few Broadland related images. However, if you search for the individual towns and villages it does bring up a number of fascinating photographs. Clicking on the thumbnail on the right will take you to a photograph of Hoveton and Wroxham on the Britain from Above website which dates from May 1928. I downloaded a copy from here and on studying it in closer detail noticed that the Daisy Broad villas about which I’ve previously blogged can be clearly seen left of centre. This now puts the build date back to some point during the 1920s! It’s quite remarkable to see how the boatyards were really beginning to be heavily developed at this time (such as Ernest Collins yard in the centre foreground), but little of the surrounding area had been touched at this point. Going back to the Daisy Broad Villas – I was contacted by Alison Yardy last week who had discovered a photograph of one of the villas in a 1939 J.R.E. Draper brochure. The villa was being sold at this time and was named as “Emscott”. Which one of the villas it was is probably impossible to tell as they all looked rather identical at that point, but it’s interesting to know that the names have indeed changed over the years.
The Britain from Above website includes this aerial photograph of Loddon and the River Chet which was also taken in May 1928. Bridge Street can be seen running from left to right and it looks as though there may be a wherry moored alongside what I think were the premises of Woods, Sad, Moore & Co. The warehouses were apparently destroyed by fire in 1930. As I write this, the Britain from Above website is experiencing a very high volume in traffic and keeps crashing, but do persevere with it or try again later!
