Photographs and Postcards

The Association also has a large digitised photographic collection and a substantial archive of originals. We use them at exhibitions, as illustrations for talks and publications and very many of them have been used throughout this web site. They are universally popular. At the monthly meeting in February 2022, when our speaker’s car had broken down, and he couldn’t get to us, we simply turned to the projector and did an ‘old photos’ slide show which went down a treat.  That was fortunate as our relatively new MP had come to the meeting and she seemed absolutely delighted with what she was seeing. Along with the old maps, they are also a great ‘fall-back’ when we have a ‘home-spun’ evening without a visiting speaker.

In autumn 2020 the Town Council asked us if we could supply some old views of Burgess Hill so they could make a selection for the 2021 Town Calendar.  We were happy to, and Alan Seymour supplied them with a lot of images from which they selected 12, one for each month.

However, disaster struck in the form of the 2^nd variant of Covid, which resulted in most of the Town Help Point staff getting it. This led to the Help Point being shut in that critical run up to Christmas when new calendars are usually purchased. The great amount of work which Alan did on the captions rather went to waste, so we have taken the chance to reproduce them here.

We  have hundreds, if not thousands of photographs featuring, our urban and rural past and the people of Burgess Hill. More gallery’s will be added in the coming months with possible themes of rural views, transport, local businesses. please let us know if there are any particular themes you would like to see…who knows you see your road in bygone times, or even one of your ancestors.