Last updated 15:17, Wednesday, 03 September 2008

When Francis Frith set out to photograph every city, town and village in Britain he needed a pony and trap to move his heavy, cumbersome camera equipment from place to place.

Market Place, Carlisle, 1935

• Slideshow: more old photos

He could not have dreamt that today those same photographs could be sent whizzing around the world at the click of a button.

But Francis Frith’s massive archive of photographs – which was begun 150 years ago when pictures were taken on heavy glass plate negatives – is now joining the information superhighway.

The owners of the Francis Frith Collection are in the process of transferring their entire archive of 360,000 images, of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland onto the internet.

About one third of them are already available online, and can be viewed via their website at www.francisfrith.com, while in the next few years the remaining two-thirds will also be computerised.

Next year they will also be made available in book form through digital on-demand printing, with books of photos being produced as and when customers ask for them.

Cumbria features prominently among the photos in the collection. After Francis’s death his sons and grandsons continued the work of chronicling British towns and villages, so the images range in time from the late 19th century, when Francis started, to the second half of the 20th century, when his grandson finished the task.

And this range of several decades therefore shows how many familiar places changed over time.

They allow us, for example, to see Penrith’s market place as it looked in 1893 and contrast it with a picture of the town centre taken in 1955.

The photographs are often quite important historical records, as spokeswoman for the collection Julia Skinner pointed out.

“Workington bus station on Murray Road was the first purpose-built covered bus station in the country,” she said. “It has been extended over time, but the core building is still there.

“It was quite an important building when it first opened, and the photograph, dating from the mid-1950s, shows how it would have looked then.”

And of course for those who remember the 1950s and before, the photos are bound to bring back nostalgic memories.

Ms Skinner said putting the photos online would help them reach a wider audience than published books in British bookshops could.

“The computerisation has allowed everyone more instant access to the photographic archive than Frith himself ever enjoyed,” she said.

“It’s enabling people living continents away to revisit the streets of their ancestral home town, or view places where they grew up, worked, married and lived their lives.”

Francis Frith was born in 1822 into a Quaker family in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and after leaving school he built up a large and very successful grocery business in Liverpool.

But he was fascinated by the invention of photography and in the 1850s he decided to sell his business and devote all his energies to this new technology.

In 1856 he made the first of three travels with a camera to the Middle East, visiting Egypt, Palestine and Syria.

At this time most people had no idea what the Biblical lands looked like for real, having only seen drawings and paintings.

To be exposed to actual photographs of features such as the Pyramids was for many an astonishing experience.

“It was these early photos of the Holy Land that really made his name,” Ms Skinner said.

On his return in 1860, Francis set up his company Francis Frith & Co in Reigate in Surrey, and soon set out on his colossal task that became his life’s work, of photographing every town, city and village in Britain.

He travelled throughout England, Scotland and Wales with his heavy photographic equipment, at first taking the photos himself but later employing others to help him.

It soon became apparent that there was money to be made from the project, and the company began producing souvenir prints for visitors and holidaymakers. Frith & Co later grew to be one of the biggest picture postcard companies of the 20th century.

When Francis died in 1898 his sons and grandson continued the task and finally some 7,000 cities, towns and villages were recorded.

In the 110 years since Francis Frith died, photography has advanced immeasurably – with new cameras, colour film, digital photography and the ability, via the internet, to transmit images around the world in seconds.

His photo lab had contained thousands of boxes of cumbersome glass plate negatives, and he would never recognise the lab today, with ranks of computer screens and each image being digitised.

But as someone who was at the forefront of technology in his own era, he would be sure to approve.