Dorset has changed hugely in the last 150 years, and photographers from The Francis Frith Collection were there to record much of that change.

More than 150 years ago the pioneering Victorian photographer Francis Frith set up his photographic company with the intention of photographing all the cities, towns and villages of Britain.

For the next 30 years he travelled the length and breadth of the country with his heavy, cumbersome equipment, either by train or by pony and trap, photographing as many locations as he could as part of his great project.

As business prospered, Frith recruited a team of photographers and his company began to produce prints of seaside resorts and beauty spots for Victorian tourists to paste into family albums as holiday souvenirs.

A few years later Frith & Co were in the vanguard of postcard development, and the company grew into one of the major postcard companies of the 20th century.

After Francis Frith's death in 1898 his two sons and then later his grandson continued Frith's massive task, expanding the number of photographs offered to the public and recording more and more places in Britain.

The photographic business that Francis Frith created continued in business for another 70 years, so that when it closed down in 1970 the Frith archive contained more than 360,000 images of 7,000 cities, towns and villages.

Dorset is particularly well represented in the Frith collection. There are evocative views of rural landscapes that Thomas Hardy would have recognised, as well as fascinating images of bustling market towns and sleepy villages blissfully empty of motorised traffic.

Francis Frith's photographic archive was bought by the present owners in 1977, and by the early 1980s a new technological age was beginning that was to make the archive more readily available than ever.

In the Frith archive today each photograph is carefully digitised', then stored on a computer system, so that the archivists can locate a single photograph within seconds. Computerisation has made it possible for the images to be accessed almost instantly, and more than 120,000 are now available to view on the website of The Francis Frith Collection, www.francisfrith.com All the Dorset books available from The Francis Frith Collection are currently available to buy from the company's website at huge discounts as the company clears its stock ready for the next technological revolution - digital on-demand printing, which it will be introducing in 2009.

  • We have 10 copies of Francis Frith's Victorian and Edwardian Dorset Photographic Memories book to give away. See Looking Back in the Echo today, Tuesday, July 29, 2008, for full details.