The incredible views of Greater Manchester lost to time

It is a view of Britain that was a few years away from being changed forever. Arthur William Hobart took to the skies to picture the country on the eve of the Second World War.

He captured parks, suburbs, football grounds, industrial plants and seaside resorts - including in Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Lancashire, Merseyside and Cumbria. The collection of 242 black and white photographs is known as the Air Pictures Porthleven Collection.

It provides a snapshot of the land before it was decimated by the Luftwaffe, post-war clearance and reshaped by technological advance.

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Amongst the collection - all pictures taken in the 1930s - is an aerial view of Birchfields Park in Rusholme, Manchester; the Duke Street area of Stockport and The Oil Well Engineering Company Works in the town.

The towering Hyde Gasworks and the vast Albert Silk Mills in Macclesfield which were built in 1840 are also captured. Bamber Bridge Cotton Mill, also known as Wesley Street Mill, a huge spinning mill designed in 1907 is pictured, two decades before it was demolished in the 1950s to make way for new homes.

Also in the archive is The North Lonsdale Iron and Steel Works at Ulverston, which was built in 1874, on a sixty acre site beside the canal. It included four blast furnaces, each with a total height of about 100 feet. The tallest building on site was a 150 feet chimney. During the 1940s the ironworks site was redeveloped by Glaxo as a chemicals factory.

This week Historic England has published the Air Pictures Portleven Collection – a unique collection of interwar aerial images. Theywere all taken by Hobart, of whom little is known and have been newly digitised by the Historic England Archive.

The Collection features national landmarks such as St Paul’s Cathedral, and Battersea Power Station, and Southampton FC's original home The Dell.

The content of the photographs reflects the market demands of the time. Photographs for postcards were Hobart’s largest market, but municipal authorities and the press were also principal clients. Photographs would have been taken on a commission basis, as well as speculatively. Targeted for their unique selling point of providing views that people would not have been seen before, Hobart also appears to have been tapping into the emerging demand for aerial photos from other sources such as the construction industry and industrial sectors.

The Collection forms a part of a larger and mostly undiscovered body of Arthur William Hobart’s aerial photography work, thought to be around 10,000 images.

Born in 1882 in London, Arthur William Hobart was an early commercial aerial photographer who started in the business around 1920. To-date no service record can be found for Hobart, however many early commercial aerial photographers had served during the First World War in aerial-related roles, and prior to the First World War he worked as a baker, commercial traveller and a draper’s clerk.

In the 1930s, aerial photography was a young industry which emerged after the First World War. This way of capturing new developments and industry of the time provides a fascinating and informative insight into a changing country. The collection shows how the business evolved to capture the interests and needs of this interwar decade.

The Air Pictures Portleven Collection takes its name from a misspelling of ‘Porthleven’, a Cornish fishing village where Hobart lived.

Duncan Wilson, chief executive at Historic England, said: “Flicking through these photos lets you take flight over 1930s England, to see the changing face of the country in the interwar period. Many of us will not have seen so many well-known landmarks and sites from this fresh perspective provided by aerial photography.

"We are the guardians of the largest national collection of aerial images in the country and hope that releasing this Collection helps inspire people to learn more about their local history through our online Aerial Photography Explorer tool.”

The addition of the Portleven Collection is part of Historic England’s work to expand its Aerial Photographer Explorer platform, as more of the six million aerial images in Historic England Archive are digitised. Historic England’s Aerial Photography Explorer and Aerial Archaeology Mapping Explorer offer an insight into England’s archaeology and the nation’s development.

To view the Air Pictures Portleven Collection, click HERE.