About

This project will study the largely overlooked impact that the interaction of camera technology and rail travel had on people’s leisure practices and, consequently, on their understanding and use of the British countryside and its heritage between 1880s and 1930s. It will do so by bringing into conversation with one other, for the first time, the collections of technologies, visual material, and associated ephemera relating to photography, railways, and tourism held by the National Railway Museum (NRM) and the National Science and Media Museum (NSMM).

From the early 1880s, a growing number of middle-class photographers used cameras in their leisure time; by the 1900s, cameras had become almost ubiquitous amongst tourists, a class whose profile broadened significantly during the interwar years. Despite competition from road transport in the 1920s and 1930s, during the period of this PhD the train remained central to tourists’ experiences. That this era of new technologies of mobility and image-making engendered a modern tourism industry is well known. However, the story of how camera-train combinations empowered their users by enabling them to travel and to photograph independently, ultimately transforming what people expected from natural and cultural sites, is yet to be told.

This project will uncover the wider ramifications of the cultural entanglements between camera and train technologies and, through this, allow us to ask larger historical questions about the role played by rail travel and photographic practice in Britain at a time of significant cultural, political, and socio-economic change. Moreover, it will develop new interpretative directions for photography and railway collections previously understood by focusing on the experiences of manufacturers, inventors, and famous photographers. Finally, it will help today’s public understand the histories of use and the experience of technological change inherent in the NRM and NSMM collections through new display, talks, and online content.