Chelmsford

Chelmsford has a long and varied hiatory: Orginally a Roman camp en route to Colchester, the town quickly developed into a signifcant trading centre and evetually, the County Town. With the increasing industrialisation of the nineteenth century Chelmsford expanded; new factories and workshops attracted large numbers of people and the subsequent building began to shape the town we see today.

The art of photography coincided with much of this development and one local family, the Spaldings, witnessed and charted many of the changes that occurred. Frederick Spalding and his sons are the 'Photographic Artists' to whom we owe many of the fascinating and informative images in this collection. Some of them were even annotated by the photographers, providing us with a unique, personal record of the changing town and a way of life that now no longer exists. The people of Chelmsford, from the visiting Prince of Wales to Dick the Pieman in Chelmsford Market are also vividly represented. The death in 1947 of the third and last Frederick Spalding - a wartime pilot who took the first aerial photograph of the city in 1920 - marked the end of this remarkable photographic dynasty.

Miraculously much of the Spalding photographic collection was preserved by the foresight of the late COunty Archivist and the author, Stan Jarvis, as Deputy Borough Librarian and Museum Curator, who retrieved numerous albums of annotated images from the garage of a house awaiting a vist from the dustman! Now some of those evocative and irreplacable photographs, together with those of the author and skilled local photographer Peter Russell, appear together in this memorable collection which will prove irresistible to all those who know and love Chelmsford.