See also Postcards and Aerial & Satellite Views

The Francis Frith Collection

This is a huge collection of over 330,000 high quality photographs taken between the the mid-nineteenth century and the second half of the twentieth century. They cover the whole country and they claim that there are 15,000 of Cornwall alone. They are available for sale via their web site, by mail order and from many other outlets. (This advertisement is spontaneous from a satisfied customer, I have no connection with the vendors.)

Originally I had a list here of the ones that I could discover from the catalogue for West Penwith but there are now over 1300 so I must ask you to go to their catalogue.

Dating Frith photographs

By studying a large sample of examples of Frith photographs and postcards I offer this table to relate the serial numbers to the date the picture was taken. There are some anomolies but the large majority conform to this pattern, the XX digits given are the first two of the five digit serial number.

XX	Date	XX	Date	XX	Date	XX	Date	XX	Date
4 digits	<1880	35–36	1895	52	1904	72–73	1922	83	1930
1x	1880s	40	1897	56	1906	76	1924	84	1931
22–27	1890	41	1898	59–61	1908	78	1925	86	1935
29	1891–92	47	1901	65–66	1913	79–80	1927	87	1936
31	1893	49–50	1903	69	1920	81	1928	88	1939
								Letter	>1945

Cornwall CAM

This is a web service provided by Charles Winpenny—he regularly goes out and takes pictures for his own and our pleasure.

Cornwall Clicks

This is a similar service provided by Stuart Lindsay, he doesn’t update quite so often but does archive the pictures and will do requests.

You will find pictures from both of these photographers on my Gallery pages.

West Penwith Photographs

Another excelent set of photographs by Mark Hattam, mostly of the St. Just in Penwith area but spreading a bit.

Chris Bond’s Photographs

[may require sign-in] A set of new photographs mixed with scans of an extensive postcard collection.