Views of England and Wales: A New Online Collection

Since its formation in 1948, successive members of the Centre for Regional and Local History (CRLH) – formerly the Centre for English Local History – have collected printed images of English buildings and landscapes (and some from Wales). Most of the material dates from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there are a few items from the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. By 2019, the collection – numbering over 2000 prints – was underutilized and showing the effects of sub-optimal storage and repeated handling. Andrew Hopper (now at the University of Oxford), Angela Muir and Richard Jones of CRLH – together with one of us (JB) – launched a project to digitise the collection to ensure its preservation and extend access and usage.