WORCESTERSHIRE has changed hugely in the last 150 years, and photographers from The Francis Frith Collection were there to record much of that change.

Over 150 years ago the pioneering Victorian photographer Francis Frith set up his photographic company with the intention of photographing all the cities, towns and villages of Britain.

For the next 30 years he travelled around the country with his heavy, cumbersome equipment, either by train or by pony and trap, photographing as many locations as he could as part of his great project.

Eventually Frith recruited a team of photographers and his company produced souvenir prints of seaside resorts and beauty spots for Victorian tourists, and in later years Frith & Co grew into one of the major postcard companies of the 20th century.

After Francis Frith’s death in 1898 his two sons, and later his grandson, continued Frith’s massive task, expanding the number of photographs offered to the public and recording more places in Britain.

The photographic business that Francis Frith created continued in business for another 70 years, and when it closed down in 1970 the Frith archive contained over 360,000 images of 7,000 cities, towns and villages.

Worcestershire is well-represented in the Frith collection. There are fascinating images of bustling market towns and sleepy villages blissfully empty of motorised traffic.

Many of the photographs show the towns before they were changed forever by the redevelopments of the 1960s and 70s, and the 1940s, 50s and 60s views will bring back nostalgic memories for many people of the cars, the fashions and the shops of their local towns in the not-so-distant past.

Francis Frith’s archive was bought by the present owners in 1977, and the new technological age has now made the archive available to everyone.

Francis Frith would not recognise the archive office as it is today – in place of thousands of dusty boxes containing glass plate negatives there are now ranks of computer screens, and Frith would be amazed to watch his images travelling round the world at unimaginable speeds through internet lines.

In the Frith archive today each photograph is ‘digitised’ and stored on a computer system, so the archivists can locate a single photograph within seconds.

Over 120,000 of the Frith images are now available to view on The Francis Frith Collection website, and this computerisation has allowed everyone a more instant access to the photographic archive than Frith himself ever enjoyed: imagine the Herculean task of sorting through 11 tons of glass negatives as Frith and his staff had to do to locate a particular photograph!

Thousands of individual views can now be called up on screen within seconds on the Frith website, enabling people living continents away to revisit the streets of their ancestral home town, or view places in Britain where they grew up, lived, worked, married, and lived their lives. Immensely successful in Frith’s own era, the archive is now entering a new phase of popularity, a century and more on.

The photographs in The Francis Frith Collection have been used to illustrate a wide range of local history books, covering not only whole counties but also a number of individual towns. They provide a unique record of change throughout Britain over a century or more, offering not only an enthralling and colourful pageant of local scenes and characters but also a record of daily life as it was actually being lived in the towns and villages between 1860 and 1970. The books available from The Francis Frith Collection are currently for sale from the Frith website (www.francisfrith.com) at huge discounts off the cover price as the company clears its stock ready for the next technological revolution - digital on-demand printing, which it will be introducing in 2009.

Francis Frith would almost certainly have heartily approved of these modern developments, for he himself was always working at the very limits of Victorian photographic and publishing technology.

Visit The Francis Frith Collection website on www.francisfrith.com.

*** All the photographs have been provided by the Francis Frith Collection and remain their copyright.