Thousands of pictures taken by British artist John Piper have been published online today. But while many of the locations were documented by Piper when Tate acquired the negatives in the 1980s, and research is ongoing, nearly 1,000 remain to be identified.
Piper began taking the photographs when he worked with John Betjeman on the Shell County Guides in the 1930s, capturing shots of ruined abbeys, churches, old shop fronts and country inns. There are nearly 6,000 black and white photographs celebrating Britain’s countryside and architectural heritage, spanning 50 years from the 1930s to the 1980s, and covering many parts of the country.

Now the Tate Gallery is asking for the public’s help in identifying the location of the photographs.

You can view the photographs in one of two ways:

View all of John Piper’s photographs

View all of John Piper’s photographs by county

If you have any information on the locations and date of the images, please email Tate’s archivists at archive.enquiries@tate.org.uk referencing the Tate Gallery Archive (TGA) number.

The gallery would  also love to see how the places that Piper photographed look now. Upload your own content to their website by creating an Album and don’t forget to make it public.

The new items are published as part of the Archives & Access project, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund with a grant of £2 million. The project draws on the world’s largest archive of British Art – the Tate Archive – and brings it together online with Tate’s art collection, giving unprecedented worldwide access to original materials.

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