Western Morning News: cataloguing and scanning project

Plymouth and West Devon Record Office holds in excess of 35,000 glass plate negatives, the earliest of which date from 1941. The images are part of a larger collection of material deposited by the Plymouth-based Western Morning News newspaper. The images are an important record of life and events in Plymouth and its surroundings over more than thirty years. Images in the collection cover events, big and small from the blitzing of the city and its reconstruction, through to human interest stories and pictures of everyday life.

A project is underway to catalogue these images and to scan a significant sample of the glass plates, making the images available online through our online archive catalogue.

Due to the considerable size of the project, it is expected to run for a number of years and is very dependent on the work of our volunteers who contribute a huge amount to the Record Office and its collections.

You can browse the catalogue descriptions and images using our online catalogue. You can view them in a number of ways:

• See all of the catalogue entries for the Western Morning News collection.
• See all of the catalogue entries for the Western Morning News collection which include a copy of the image.