Historic Aerial Photo Resources

A great source, shame we don't have access to the RAF coverage of the UK for the same period. The downloads are low quality but adequate fro most potential uses and I suspect easier for people to decide whether its worth paying out for high quality.

HES have made SCRAN free during lockdown, I already have access through a couple of Scottish libraries but they have some good photographs on the site - I was able to help someone researching WWI airfields by sending him a few.

www.scran.ac.uk/

Details on that page.

My old Scran account didn't work so created a new one and successfully logged in and added the sub to my basket but on checkout it said I need to have a valid account so I logged in again without a hitch and place a new order and it didn't recognise me again. So I logged out and logged back in again to try again. Failed second, third and fourth time. No luck, so I bought some ping pong balls off Amazon.

This has come up on ACADEMIA

Landscapes through the Lens: Aerial Photographs and the Historic Environment

I eventually got into SCRAN and after setting up a "new" account and not getting very far it turns out that my old account now works again with the old password. The various archives got very confusing and I have multiple accounts with different passwords and it gets worse when I try and download purchase items as it never seems to be consistent in which password is active!

So far I have:

RCAHMS (presumably renamed?)
RCAHMS SHOP (why this had to be different I don't know)
CANMORE
SCRAN
NCAP

The latter I use to purchase quite frequently and the download seems to come via the old RCAHMS SHOP option!!!. I have given up trying to fathom out any logic behind this.

At last a New aerial photo website, well new to me! This only covers Greater London and has two mosaics from 1945 to 1949, one higher level and one lower and therefore more detailed. Both are excellent quality and knock spots off the feeble quality on Google Earth. It is very fiddly to get used to but worth the effort.

www.layersoflondon.org/map/collections

So far I have used it for the following:-

1) The large ex-naval AA gun that was sited across the road from where I grew up
2) Further confirmation of the two known Crayford Bofors towers plus another suspected one.
3) Confirmation of the Willesden Junction Bofors Tower location (also in lareger scale coverage)
4) My old school on Shooters Hill and the nearby defences.
5) Better quality coverage of the Rainham Marshes bombing range and clearer target and arrow.

I suspect London is not an area most are interest in but it does contain quite a few AA gunsites and a handful of airfields - just

I passed the details of the site to some friends.

One was quite pleased:

I navigated to Barnet and found RSS Box 25 Arkley View. I had previously found it in the Herts County collection but the new source was much better.
Attached is the best resolution I could obtain. One of the biggest differences is that you can now see the shadows of antenna poles in the field at the back.
You can now see a number of new buildings as well as the white L shaped one.

A few have been added since I was told about the link. Unless they have been captioned since I have no idea where that harbour is - yet

EDIT:

It is Newhaven, as captioned in recently added ones