One of the most well-known collections in the Historic England Archive, the Architectural Reed Box Collection, has now been scanned and made available online.
The collection consists of over 600,000 photographic prints taken of cities, towns and villages around England, attached to cards housed in red boxes. You can now browse this fantastic collection on the England’s Places website – http://historicengland.org.uk/
The National Buildings Record (NBR) started the Architectural Red Box Collection in 1941 to document our built heritage, especially those buildings threatened or damaged by bombing during the Second World War. The initial core collection came from photographic records collected by Courtauld Institute of Art in the 1930s. Over the following years hundreds of thousands were added, including photography taken for the NBR, and other collections acquired from both commercial and amateur photographers. The collection was closed to new material in 1991.
