This post celebrates the completion of the tagging and labelling of all 4750+ images in the Smith collection on British Methodist Buildings. But who was Bill Smith? And what do we know of his project to photograph Methodist buildings from all over Britain?
William Aubrey Smith (1932-2018) was a carpenter and coffin-maker from Dunstable in Bedfordshire. He was a committed Methodist and member of the London and the South-East meeting of the Wesley Historical Society. Other than photography, he also had interests in postcards, philately and coins. Smith did not drive, so all of his photographs were taken having travelled the country by public transport. His voluminous and intricate notes on local bus routes and rail times survive with the collection. Between 1979 and 2007, together with his wife, Jean (who can be seen in many of his photographs), he catalogued and listed churches and chapels he had seen, building up a large card index that accompanies his photo albums.
The chronological arrangement of Smith’s photographs allow us to observe his travels, and the expansion of his project over time. Initially, he began documenting buildings in the counties immediately adjacent to his home in Dunstable – Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Greater London and Hertfordshire – all of which are well-represented in British Methodist Buildings.
These photographs ‘local’ to Smith are interspersed with shots from his coastal getaways, with buildings appearing from Bournemouth, Brighton, Great Yarmouth, Margate, Portsmouth, and Skegness. Later, Smith toured more extensively through the Midlands and beyond, lending to the strength of the collection in Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, and the West Midlands. The nature of Smith’s travels also explain the bounds of his collection. Aside from a single image for Bowness in the Lake District, Smith’s project took him no further north than Whitby, and only as far west as Somerset.
The completion of work on the Smith collection in British Methodist Buildings marks the first time that this photograph collection of national significance has been made readily-accessible to researchers.
Visit BMB now at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/britishmethodistbuildings/albums
Westminster Oxford Research Network 