The Isca Photographic Collection Project

A unique and irreplaceable visual record of twentieth-century Exeter is being saved from destruction thanks to a project by the South West Heritage Trust and funded by a £178,579 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Preserving and Sharing the Collection

The Isca Photographic Collection Project will rescue and preserve 24,000 images depicting the city and its inhabitants during the first half of the twentieth century. The acetate negatives are suffering from vinegar syndrome; an irreversible chemical deterioration process that destroys the negative.

Supported by a team of volunteers the project will digitise the images before they are lost forever, and make them available to researchers. There will be a display at Custom House in Exeter and community events to share the remarkable photographs and the stories they uncover. The images will be used to support wellbeing with reminiscence sessions in residential homes and for work in schools to raise environmental awareness.

Photographer Henry Wykes 

Photographer Henry Wykes pictured aged 87

The full collection of almost 50,000 images is mainly comprised of the life’s work of the photographer Henry Wykes (1874-1964).

Wykes opened his first studio in Exeter in 1914, quickly establishing himself as the city’s foremost photographer, a status he held until his retirement in 1962, by which time he was Britain’s oldest working photographer.

The project pays tribute to the foundational work of historian and photographer Peter Thomas who created the Isca collection.

A Record of Exeter

Wykes’ images chart the growth of the city in the 1920s and ‘30s and the wartime carnage wrought by the devasting ‘Baedeker’ raids. The collection is also a uniquely personal record of the residents of Exeter with thousands of images of individual and family portraits. Many hundreds of other images document local residents at work and play in shops, factories, at weddings, sporting and other social events. It captures the lives of inhabitants of the city whose stories have too often remain unexplored, including those of the residents of St Loye’s College and School of Occupational Therapy, who navigated physical disabilities and learning difficulties.

Exeter Cathedral, surrounded by rubble, after the ‘Baedeker’ raids that took place in April and May 1942
Workers at the Bodleys Foundry on Commercial Road, Exeter
Residents of St Loye’s College and School of Occupational Therapy, taking part in a sewing workshop

Acknowledgments

Thanks to National Lottery players

The Isca Photographic Collection project is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, we have been able to preserve an irreplaceable record of twentieth-century Exeter.

The project builds on the foundational work of historian and photographer Peter Thomas who created the Isca collection. It is supported by the Friends of Devon’s Archives.  

HEADER IMAGE: Nurses and babies at Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital, Bowring Ward, during Christmas 1933.