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Browse the Frith Memories Community Download hi-res images and example memory text for reproduction Press enquiries: Commercial enquiries: This release ref: 2006062101 |
Release date: 27th June 2006
Photo archive launches local nostalgia community
Public interest in genealogy, local and personal history is at an all time high. Community-style websites and a rash of television programmes dealing with family and local history research continue to fuel this growth.
Now, a new photo-based web community, Frith Memories, invites visitors to read and share memories of their local town or village and to contact old friends and acquaintances through the community. Visitors can also post comments on other memories and making contact with fellow contributors. This offers a chance to reconnect with friends and people from childhood, workplaces, past service in the Armed Forces, holiday romances - who knows!
At the heart of the new community are 100,000 local photographs selected from The Francis Frith Collection depicting 7,000 cities, towns and villages in the UK taken between 1860 and 1970.
The inspiration behind the community’s creation are the thousands of letters and emails received by the Frith Collection from the general public recounting unique personal stories provoked by photographs in the Collection. Far from being an empty shell like most new online communities, Frith Memories is already packed with tens of thousands of contributed memories and captions from 800 local history books published by Frith.
Frith photographs feature real people, people whose names we do not know and whose stories are as yet untold, captured for a moment in the photographer’s frame before they move out of shot and back into their daily lives. Local scenes photographed many years ago show us how familiar neighbourhoods, streets and buildings have been transformed over decades – but it is the stories behind the photographs which truly bring them to life.
"Anyone familiar with a local area can immediately see the changes that have taken place over the last 150 years through Frith photographs", says Frith’s Managing Director, John Buck. "The unique nature of the Collection - depicting the scenes that were part of everyday life for our parents and grandparents - has always evoked personal memories of a local area. This new web community will enable people to renew memories of the places that have been important in their lives, to discover more about their local and family history and to preserve memories for future generations that might otherwise be lost."
For those of us who are old enough to have memories the Frith Memories community is a wonderful opportunity to share your own memories of UK towns & villages with others interested in your community – wherever they may be in the world! To get involved in this visit the Frith web site at www.francisfrith.com/memories.
The Frith Memories community can be found at www.francisfrith.com/memories/
Notes for editors
Several example memories inspired by Frith photographs and contributed to the Frith Memories community are available here.
Hi-res versions of featured images are available to be downloaded for use in your feature.
Background – The Francis Frith Collection
Established in 1860 and recognised as the world’s first specialist photographic publishers, The Francis Frith Collection is a national treasure. The Collection comprises some 365,000 photographs of nearly 7,000 towns and villages across Britain. Taken between 1860 and 1970, these form a topographical record of Britain without equal.
Founded by Victorian photographer Francis Frith, who spent much of his life travelling the roads and lanes of Britain by pony and trap, photographing our cities, towns, villages and picturesque countryside. The images he and his photographers created were pasted into family albums by the Victorians as mementoes of holidays and days out. After Frith’s death in 1898 the archive was added to continuously up until the late 1960s. Today, The Francis Frith Collection is world famous, offering fine-quality historical photographs of over 7,000 British cities, towns and villages, and is the only nationally important photographic archive still in private ownership. These beautiful photographs are now being seen by a new generation as part of a continuing programme of local history publications. Over 100,000 Frith photographs can be viewed online at www.francisfrith.com.