Museums and art galleries
These usually have good
collections of local topographical drawings and
paintings. Since collections tend to be formed partly from gifts, it is a
matter of luck whether they also include views of buildings in other parts of
Britain. For example, a Victorian patron might donate to his local museum or
gallery sketchbooks filled on his holidays at seaside resorts. If the building
of interest to you has been attracting tourists for centuries, or lies in an
area popular with 18th or 19th-century travellers, it may be worthwhile to
spread your net wide.
- Catalogues. Few collections have a published catalogue.
However the trend is towards computerised catalogues, some of which are now
available online. Those which include image databases with a local focus
are listed geographically in image finding
aids. Combined catalogues or databases:
- Ask About Ireland a national collaboration of libraries, museums and archives in the Republic of Ireland to make available online publication of material from their local studies collections, including photographs, maps and documents.
- BBC Your Paintings aims to make available online all 210,000 oil paintings in public ownership in the UK. The Public Catalogue Foundation has spent a decade photographing artworks in museums, galleries, universities, councils and hospitals. About 80% of these paintings are not on public view.
- Bridgeman Art Library has images from British museums and galleries which have granted reproduction rights to the BAL. Searchable online database of images.
- The British Library/Flickr: The library has released over a million images from printed books onto Flickr Commons. These cover a great variety of subjects, including buildings and topography.
- Cornucopia is an online database of information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK's museums, galleries, archives and libraries. It briefly describes collections, rather than individual items.
- Discover includes material from English Heritage's ViewFinder, the British Library's online gallery and several local repositories in England. Text, image and bibliographic databases are mingled, but it is possible to specify results with thumbnail images.
- Europeana combines images, texts, sounds and videos from museums, galleries, libraries and other repositories across Europe. The British Library has contributed material from its online collections and Scran (see below) has contributed its huge collection of photographs.
- The Heritage Image Partnership Picture Library has images from the British Library, the British Museum, the National Archives, the National Monuments Record of English Heritage, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, the Royal Photographic Society, the National Railway Museum, the National Motor Museum, the Museum of London, the Corporation of London Libraries and Guildhall Art Gallery. Searchable online database of images, which can also be browsed by subject, such as locations and buildings.
- HistoGrafica hosts a world-wide collection of historic images drawn initially from the US Library of Congress, but enlarged by user contributions, which can be browsed via a Google map.
- Scran has a vast online collection of images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media in the UK. It is particularly strong on images of Scotland, since it is based there and began with the collections of Scottish repositories, but it now includes images from the V&A, the British Museum and some local English repositories.
- Sepia Town is very similar to Histografica. It hosts a world-wide collection of historic images taken from Wikipedia and public online collections, which can be displayed in conjunction with a Google map.
- For museums and galleries with national collections see: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales for locations, collections and links.
- Barley, M.M., A Guide to British Topographical Collections (1974), briefly describes collections in England, Scotland and Wales. He gives a helpful index of drawings located outside the counties to which they refer, but with no detail of specific buildings.