HERs, journals & other resources

 a charity registered in England & Wales, no  1163854.

Mapping data across Britain

Across the Roman Empire

The Ordnance Survey’s mapping website has an aerial layer, accessible in the bottom right corner of the screen. The images are usually very recent.

Everyone is familiar with Google Maps, however Microsoft’s alternative has a different set of aerial photographs which frequently show cropmarks not present on Google’s equivalent.

The National Collection of Aerial Photography, based in Edinburgh, holds over 26 million aerial photos of places across the world. They are all viewable online, and coverage of Britain is reasonably  good

The Aerofilms collection of 96,000 high resolution images, now part of the Historic England Archive, sadly only available online in very low resolution. If you want higher resolution, these have to be purchased.

The Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography (CUCAP) is the result of airborne survey campaigns which were started in 1947 by the pioneering JK St Joseph. Since then the collection has grown to almost 500,000 images of obliques and verticals in black and white, colour and infra-red. Virtually the whole of Britain has been covered, with the obliques depicting a wide variety of landscapes and features and the verticals being of survey quality and so can be used in mapping projects. Sadly, only a m inority of images are available online, and the collection is currently unstaffed so little is likely to change. Neverthless, a valuable resource.

Not to be confused with standard Google Earth, or Google Maps, Google Earth Pro must be downloaded and installed on your device first. After which, you can use the historical imagery feature, which enables the user to go back through previous aerial photography sometimes as early as 1945

As well as maps, Esri also provides aerial photographic coverage

Unlike Google Earth Pro, standard Google Earth will only show the most recent images

HereWEGo is not the best known, but provides both mapping and recent aerial photo coverage. The layers control to access the aerial imagery is in the bottom right corner of the screen

Zoom Earth. Generally the same imagery as Bing.