Looking down

From the early days of flight pilots and their passengers have peered downwards on our cities, villages and landscapes in awe.  This, after all, was the perspective on our world which had never been previously experienced, except for the more limited views from the heights of tall buildings; and they were nothing like the height of the Shard at London Bridge.

Companies have, since the end of WW1, taken oblique photos from the cockpit of, or special ports on the underside of, small aircraft.  A collection measured in millions thus accumulated, but there was never an easy method of searching for what people might be interested in, and reels of early negatives on unstable film steadily deteriorated, and continue to do so.

Fortunately, the entire surviving collection is gradually being scanned, digitised and made available online – www. britainfromabove.org.uk    It is a project of considerable timescale, but this week the organisation announced its most recent batch of newly treated pictures.

Among them were a number of 1939 shots of de Havilland's and even earlier pictures of the airstrip, aero club and the firm's swimming pool.  There are fine studies of Welwyn Garden City before WW2, and in St Albans a number of photos, taken from a variety of angles of the Electrical Apparatus Company (EAC) off Mile House Lane.   These complement earlier arrivals on the site of the Rubber Works, Salvation Army Printing Works and the Electricity Works.

It is well worthwhile searching the St Albans' pictures now available.  You will discover enthusiasts skating on the lake in the winter of 1946/7, the business of Mercer's in St Stephen's Hill, the fields beside the St Albans Bypass before Roger Aylett brought his youthful enthusiasm for a nursery there.  It is possible to spot two cottages which once stood to the north of the junction of Hill End Lane and London Road, before the new housing development and school arrived.  You can almost identify the crops growing in many of the allotments behind Springfield.

However familiar the scene, it is rewarding to simply enjoy the experience of picking out little details in each photograph, and of course our familiarity with streets does not always prepare us for discovering what once
lay behind the facades.  Google Earth may cause us to take for granted how our urban landscapes are laid out today.  Seeing the views from the 1920s or 1930s will always surprise.