West End Village Society History Project

Karen Neville

West End History Project is spreading its wings to build a collection of digital images to add to the 4,000 prints collected and as Guy Consterdine tells us they want your input  

The village of West End has benefited from the History Project for 20 years: the gathering of photographs and documents of the village spanning the last hundred years or so.   

Initiated and run by John Smith, pictured, it has amassed an immensely valuable collection, including over 4,000 print photographs, which have been used for mounting fascinating displays of historic photographs at fetes, agricultural shows, in Surrey Heath’s Heritage Centre and West End Social Club. The collection has also been the source for numerous articles written by John for local media. John is now retiring from the Project.   

West End Village Society (WEVS) is taking it into a new phase. We will build our own digital collection of photographs. Unlike John’s archive of printed images which are not accessible for residents to examine, the WEVS collection will be freely available online on a new section of WEVS’ website.   

WEVS will set up the resources for digitising the photos and publishing them online, for open access. The project will be led by Johan Schoeman, Savitri Kegge and myself.   

We would be pleased if residents would send us any photographs they have of events or views in West End, from the early years of photography through to the present, and of course into the future as the months go by. They can be in any form: prints, slides or negatives, or digital images. Prints, negatives and slides will be digitised and the originals returned. The information we would like about each image (as far as possible) is title, photographer, date, and description including identifying any people. Please send the photos to Johan at historyproject@wevs.org.uk or contact Johan to discuss them.  

In addition to being an historic collection available for anyone to browse online at any time, the project will be a resource for articles, displays and presentations, complementing John Smith’s original archives.  

An online demonstration of some images already in our collection was given at the WEVS AGM on 18th February in the Sports Pavilion, Benner Lane, West End. The photographs may be accessed through the WEVS website, wevs.org.uk