Wish you were here!

Wish you were here? - rediscovering Frith's postcard-style composites.

The archive you are browsing on this website was founded by the pioneering Victorian photographer Francis Frith in the 1860s with the aim of photographing every city, town and village in Britain. Frith’s successors continued his project and The Francis Frith Collection now contains over 300,000 images of places all round the country.

Francis Frith’s company originally produced small paper prints that people could paste into a scrap book as souvenir pictures from their holidays. Postcards as we know them today (with a photo on one side and address and message on the reverse) were legalised in 1902, and the Frith company subsequently became the leading publisher of postcards of the twentieth century.

The range of Frith postcards included the ‘composite’ style, seen in these examples, with a collage of interesting local features, landmarks, buildings or scenery, and sometimes with a quirky design feature such as a Cornish pixie in the centre.

To see all our postcard-style images, click here: http://www.francisfrith.com/search?q=composite or Search the Archive for the keyword "composite".