Interesting finds from The Historic England Aerial Photograph Explorer
Warning: You will lose an afternoon to this website!
We really love The Historic England Aerial photograph explorer. It’s a brilliant tool for finding aerial photos of your house and local area, and totally free to use.
In case you haven’t used it before…here are some things you should know.
Around 400,000 images from 1919 to 2024 have been added to the tool, covering nearly 30% (about 15,000 square miles) of England.
Around 300,000 of these are from Historic England’s Aerial Investigation and Mapping team
The remaining 100,000 images come from the Historic England Archive aerial photography collection (this collection numbers over six million images in total, but not everything has been digitalised yet..understandably!)
The collection includes important historic photography from Aerofilms Ltd, The Royal Air Force, United States Army Air Forces Collection and more.
It is free to search and free to view the images. You can even share them online.
We took a browse around historic London and here were some of our favourite finds. Let us know what you discover!