R.A.F aerial photography over Leeds in 1951.

[Phill_dvsn]

Leodian wrote: That is a fascinating set of photos Phill. Many thanks for taking what must have been a great time and effort uploading them. Glad they were saved from being destroyed. My pleasure Leo It was a guy who used to work at the R.A.F who got in touch with me and asked if I wanted to make use of them. He said he was a keen model railway builder and had been using various websites for info to build his layouts. He said wherever I looked your name popped up. I thought if these photos can go to a good home I bet that lad would use them He said you would have cried if you saw what was destroyed in those archives, everything the R.A.F ever took apparently. Some stuff going back nearly a 100 years. It was decided to sort this huge archive out and anything over 50 years old was likely to be burnt. It was our job to sort through it all and see what needed saving.They found the actual aerial reconnaissance photos of the Möhne and Edersee Dams taken prior to the Dambuster raids. Lots of historical stuff like that was saved and went to various archives. They tried to give the stuff that was going to get incinerated to various universities, libraries, and archives. But when they realised how much there was of it - they simply couldn't afford the transportation!As far as I know these Leeds photos are the only images left from the 1951 R.A.F mapping of England. I've also put one flight path of images together on a short video.I haven't cropped those, I've left them the same ratio the R.A.F took them. When viewed one after the other it gives you the illusion of flying over Leeds in the actual plane.I'll add the link to it in a while when I've got my flickr stuff sorted.            

[Johnny39]

Well done Phil.

[gbdlufc]

Cheers Phil, much appreciated, thank you.Garry

[Cardiarms]

Fascinating stuff!It's not uncommon, before I knew od Secret Leeds and the Leodis website, in one of our sheds I found a crate full of photos of leeds taken in the 60s for LWW. The photos were mainly of manhole covers, and excavations but had loads of street scenes and incidental detail in the background. They were destroyed.    

[Steve Jones]

It is stuff like this that makes Secret Leeds such a valuable resource. The many and varied interests of members help keep stuff like this around instead of being carelessly destroyed.The old saying "One man's rubbish is another man's treasure" applies often.

[raveydavey]

By heck, no wonder you've been quiet for a while! A huge thanks for taking the trouble to get these images saved and posted online and for sharing them with us. I've just spent the last 20 minutes poring over the EEP pics - another evening about to vanish

[tilly]

Many thanks Phil your a star.    

[Phill_dvsn]

Thanks everyone, glad you like them so far. I've got as far as adding links to the full size photos on probably half the photos.I want to add some info and maps in time.Make it an interesting thread. I'll send the link to Leodis and other websites if they want to use them when it's done.But it's slow work, Secret Leeds is extremely hard to do anything like this.Having to embed photos from hosting sites, manually create links e.t.c. It's like using Windows 95 But I'll get there, eventually

[Loiner in Cyprus]

What a fascinating set of photos. Thanks Phil for sharing them. Ironically, I remember more of Leeds from those photos than more up to date ones.    

[Leodian]

Purely as an aside to this superb thread I wonder what aerial photographs of Leeds may still exist that were very likely to have been taken from the German airship 'Hindenburg' that flew over Leeds in 1936 (before my time, honest ).