Historic UK aerial photography

Although some photography was taken during the war years across Britain this was mainly training film and was taken by the USAF. The majority of photography of Britain from this period came during the immediate post war years, during the reconstruction of Britain. It was realised that OS maps of 1935 were out of date and the RAF undertook to survey from the air the whole of Great Britain.

The RAF survey took place between 1945 and 1954, flying at scales of approximately 1:10,000 and 1:25,000. Some of the aerial photography was used by the OS to create the first photo sheets, these were large map tiles made up of mosaiced aerial photos. Over 2000 of these sheets were produced. This was not successful and the publication of these sheets was stopped in 1954.

These sheets however were subject to censorship, many military sites were removed, or clouds were simply painted over secret installations. Much of Cities Revealed's efforts has gone into uncovering these sites and replacing the censored material for you to see for the very first time. These sheets have now been scanned and form part of the 1942 - 1954 photo layer, the rest of our material comes from the original films that were flown at the same time but were never made up in to sheets. As a consequence this is the first time much of this material has been released. As time passes on this archive will continue to grow.

The German Luftwaffe were photographing towns, cities and military establishments many months before war was declared on Sept 16th 1939. Much of the photography was taken under the guise of civil flights prior to 1939, however when war broke out and the bombing started in 1940, the Luftwaffe continued to photograph before, during and after raids.

Generally flying at around 20,000 ft the images captured then show a very different London to today, images show other bombers, bombs falling over London and explosions on the ground and even in the Thames.

The majority of the Luftwaffe imagery was gathered courtesy of a digitisation partnership with the Imperial War Museum. This partnership has ensured that all of these images taken by the Luftwaffe are now preserved in a digital form for use by future generations.

The Luftwaffe images that form the core of the 1939 - 1942 imagery archive are centred on the towns and the industrial centres, as it was these areas the German Luftwaffe had to target. Many documents come with original interpretations and markings describing targets to bomb. These target documents, of which there are over 2000 will soon be available as a separate service.

All the Luftwaffe imagery has been scanned at resolution between 600 and 1200 dpi, to give 50cm ground resolution, about 1:2,000 map scale. The images have been rectified to match modern day mapping and are available as stand alone images or seamless mosaics within a GIS. The images available are mainly covering towns and cities along the South Coast of England and the regional towns.