THOUSANDS of images of Worcester’s past collected by two brothers over a 50-year period are set to go on public display.
More than 6,500 original slides, prints and glass negatives have been handed over to archivists at The Hive to be stored in optimum conditions making them more accessible to people.
The images, many of which formed the basis of the fondly-remembered ‘Changing Face of Worcester’ project seen by nearly 70,000 people since its first showings in the early 1960s, have been gathered by brothers Clive and Malcolm Haynes who recently teamed-up with Tudor House Museum in a bid both to preserve the collection and to make copies more accessible to a wider public.
The biggest single collection of Worcester photographs ever amassed, volunteers from Tudor House Museum have spent more than five years restoring and digitising slides, prints, engravings, maps and notable advertisements, billboards and posters considered ‘priceless and irreplaceable’.
The final set of 2,000 was this week handed over to Adrian Gregson, archival Policy and collections manager for Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service at the Hive.
“The significance of the collection for the city is that it gives people a welcome and increasingly forgotten view of Worcester as it was, and it is great that the collection now has a permanent, safe and secure home,” he said.
With the future of the original images now guaranteed, digitised and restored copies are set to form the basis of a series of exhibitions to be mounted at the volunteer-run Tudor House Museum in Friar Street and made available to historians, researchers and schools.
Many of the images are now viewable on the ‘Changing Face of Worcester’ pages on the Tudor House Museum website at www.tudorhouseworcester.org.uk.
