Introduction

About the Fill the Gap Photo Project

From the 1890s to the 1990s many photographers took high quality photographs to record the heritage of the county – these included the local newspapers, the in-house photographer of the County Council and a number of photographers—both amateur and professional. Since the dawn of the digital age, the demise of local newspapers and the reduction in local government in-house facilities, Bedfordshire Archives Service has received very few record quality images of the county and few photographers take and deposit photographs of a suitable standard for preservation as records for historical research. This leaves a significant gap in the archival record.

Funding from the Greensand Country Landscape Partnership and Heritage Fund, gave an opportunity to begin to fill the gap. A group of volunteer photographers were recruited to take images of Greensand Country that captured the area as it is now and how it is changing.

Bedford Road, Ampthill, view from the end of Swaffield Close looking south east.

Left: April 2000; Right: 2 March 2020

Greg Harrison Z1749/2/7/1-2

Greg Harrison had taken a series of photographs of Ampthill in 2000 and realised that the Fill the Gap project was a good opportunity to make a series of the same views to show the changes. This was one of the more dramatic changes – the Waitrose store having replaced completely the Shell garage and former Zonita cinema, both demolished in 2005. The sites of many petrol stations have been redeveloped during the last 20 years but this redevelopment often goes unrecorded.

About Bedfordshire Archives

Founded in 1913 the service collects, preserves and makes available the documentary heritage of the historic county of Bedfordshire. Photographs have long been included in the material that the service collects for the evidence they can give about the county. To be useful photographs do not need to be artistic or beautiful but do need to be clear and we need to know what they show and when they were taken.

About Greensand Country Landscape Partnership

The Greensand Country Landscape Partnership is a National Lottery Heritage Funded programme established to deliver projects helping to raise awareness of the heritage value of the landscape and to reverse the gradual decline in the distinct landscape character of the greensand ridge and the surrounding vales running across Bedfordshire from Leighton Buzzard in the south west to Potton in the north east.

Difficulties of 2020-21

The project began in February 2020 with two workshops to discuss the brief. The threat of Covid-19 was on the horizon but none of us realized just what that would mean. A week after the second workshop England went into lockdown. The photographers were unable to get out and about to take photographs and activities we would have liked to record were all cancelled. Several project photographers filled this gap by submitting images taken over the last 20 years.

This exhibition is therefore a taster of what we set out to achieve. Let us hope that we can soon start to get out and about to take more images of Greensand Country and beyond to continue to Fill the Gap in the archives.