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About Frith Homepage
The Francis Frith Collection
The Frith archive is recognised as being the only photographic archive of national importance still in private hands.
The archive was founded by Francis Frith, the pioneer Victorian photographer, in 1860. Today the archive contains over 330,000 photographs of some 7,000 towns and villages throughout Britain.
Taken between 1860 and 1970 these form a unique and unequalled topographical record of Britain. The Archive provides an extraordinarily detailed visual record of the enormous social and structural changes that have taken place in Britain since 1860.
For each town or village there is an average of 80 photographs. These were often taken from the same spot but many years apart, giving historians a unique opportunity to study landscapes, streets and buildings across a century and more of change.
Whilst some of the photographs are undoubtedly artistically outstanding, the real value of the archive lies in its sheer scale.
There is no other archive that can illustrate this period of British history so extensively, nor by way of images of such a uniformly high quality.
"A unique and priceless record of life in the last Century"
Financial Times
