Exploring Britain's History from Above

You can now explore over 80,000 historical aerial photographs of Britain dating from 1945-2009. Cambridge University’s Collection of Aerial Photographs contains thousands of aerial photographs captured by the University’s Air Photography Unit since the end of World War II. There are nearly half a million aerial photos in the collection. 80,000 of them have now been digitized and can be found and viewed on the Cambridge Air Photos website.

You can search and browse the aerial photos of Britain by location and by category. If you want to search the collection by location then you can use the Cambridge Air Photos interactive map. When zoomed out the map only shows a selection of the available aerial photographs. You need to zoom in on the map before all the available photos will appear on the map.


Some of the best images in the collection have been organized into featured collections, such as Ancient Britain, Castles and Coasts. Around 1,500 of the aerial photos are also available as high resolution zooming images. These images are also being made available using International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) technology, so you can explore them in detail on any IIIF viewer.