West Sussex Past Pictures is a free to access online database of the best scanned photographs and pictures, with detailed descriptions, owned by the County Library Service and seven of the County's museums. West Sussex County Council hosts and maintains the database.

Our aim is to maintain a resource on behalf of all sectors of the community in West Sussex. We provide free downloadable images for use in private research and homework and offer a premium service of higher resolution digital files for publications, exhibitions and for commercial use.

Funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the website has been live since June 2004. The images represent the best photographs and pictures from the partner collections listed below. The Library Service continue to add to this total from its own holdings year on year.

The Collections

Together the partner institutions hold nearly 2.5 million images of West Sussex in the past. If you haven't found the image you need, contact any of the 8 partners below or West Sussex Record Office which holds another 250,000 originals.

The partner collections include unique Victorian photographs, 20th century postcards, rare engravings from the 1640s & 1700s and original works of art. The collections are in many respects unique and nationally significant. Of particular importance are views illustrating the social history and changing landscape of the chalk downland, rural life, early aviation, maritime and seaside topics, military history, the development of historic towns, the South’s industrial heritage, and traditional buildings special to the Weald and Downs.

The County Library Service has a comprehensive collection of over 2.2 million photographs & pictures. These cover every town, village and hamlet in the County and most periods back to the mid-17th century. The collection is strong on the 20th century, World War Two and post 1950 periods which represent over 90% of the total. A detailed list is available to download.

Three of the museums’ collections are of national, even international importance, namely Amberley (industrial heritage), Fishbourne Roman Palace (largest Roman building in Northern Europe), and the Weald & Downland Open Air (traditional vernacular buildings). Four of the museums have specialist collections, which are the most comprehensive available on a particular town and catchment area, that is Arundel, East Grinstead, Littlehampton, Marlipins (Shoreham) and Steyning.

Visit the partner websites and contact them about their image collections:

Image Formats

The images chosen are the best quality, most popular, educationally enriching, historically significant and rarest examples carefully selected from the collections of the partner organisations.

Photographs

Over half of all the images included are paper, or card-mounted, photographs, which number over 7,000. The earliest date from the late 1850s and some of these are stereoscopic photographs of Lancing and Worthing in the Library Service collections. Some images, from the museums at Arundel, East Grinstead, Marlipins and Steyning, are as old as the 1860s, but most in the database date from the 1880s to the early 1930s. Where we believe there are no copyright difficulties, we have included photographs from the Second World War and the 1950s and 1960s. Particularly outstanding are over 800 World War Two photographs, most from the Frank L’Alouette Collection of Bognor Regis (courtesy of Jeanette Hickman) and the Walter Gardiner Photography Collection of Worthing.

Postcards

Nearly 4,000 views in the database are from picture postcards, most of which date from 1902 to 1918, although we have included 1920s and 1930s views in our selection. Substantial numbers have been contributed by all the museums and by the Library Service.

35mm slides

This sort of transparency, mounted on 5cm square card or plastic, did not become widespread until the 1960s. The vast majority of the 1400 slides in this database show timber-framed and other historic buildings, from the Roy Armstrong Collection at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum. Most of the others are images of mosaics, artefacts and structural remains from the Fishbourne Roman Palace slide collection.

Drawings and Paintings

Over 300 original works of art have been scanned for the website in total.

The 140 drawings were executed mainly in pencil, pen & ink and ink & wash. Most are from the Library Service collection and depict many towns & villages in the County. The date range is from the late 18th century to the 1920s, with the great majority being 19th century, especially Victorian.

Over 180 paintings have been included. Most are watercolours from the period 1800-1925, with the great majority being Victorian. Their principal importance is that most views are very early, that is they were painted before 1860 and so pre-date photography. Their use of colour is also important, although artistic licence may have been used in this and to interpret other features. Arundel, Shoreham-by-Sea and Worthing are particularly well represented.

Negatives

We have added around 500 negatives to the database to date. Most are portraits, with some street & rural scenes, 1890s to 1930s, from the Walter Gardiner Photography Collection owned by the County Library Service. The large glass plate negatives are of exceptional clarity having been taken using high quality equipment. A smaller number are medium format negatives taken of framed paintings at Arundel and Marlipins (Shoreham-by-Sea) museums, too large to scan.

Lantern Slides

The Library Service has over 2,000 lantern slides, most dating from the 1880s to the 1920s, covering the whole County, together with a small collection of early Crawley New Town views from the 1950s. A selection of over 200 have been included in the database.

Prints and Engravings

Prints are original sketches or paintings redrawn onto metal printing plates; and engravings are engraved directly onto the plate. Types include copper, steel and wood engravings, etchings (using wax on metal) and lithographs (on stone). Images were included in some books soon after the invention of printing, but the earliest in our collections date from the 1640s. Although there are examples in the 20th century, notably illustrating private press books, the golden age of the print was the 19th century. Again they are particularly important in the period before photographs become common, that is pre-1880. Most are black and white, but some were hand-coloured, for artistic effect rather than accuracy. They appear both as loose, separately published items and in local guidebooks and histories. Over 200 are included, the great majority from the County Library Service.

Hardware and Software Used

Scanning was carried out at the Digitisation Unit (now defunct) in Worthing Library. Now all scanning and printing is carried out at West Sussex Record Office.

All images are saved as 3 files:

• Master TIF on DVD [average file size 15 to 50 MB]
• Jpeg with factor 6 compression [average file size 400k to 1MB]
• Web page version at 500 pixels in the longest dimension [average file size 70 to 80k]

West Sussex Past Pictures uses Calm version 10 database software and CalmView as the website platform, both supplied by Axiell Ltd.