This website hosts the photos, maps, plans and images of the JR James archive, digitised in the summer of 2013 by Philip Brown and Joseph Carr - MPlan graduates of the Department of Town and Regional Planning at the University of Sheffield (now the Department of Urban Studies and Planning). The project was funded by the University of Sheffield Alumni Fund and directed by Alasdair Rae, an academic in the Department of Urban Studies and Plannning.

JR 'Jimmy' James was Professor of Town and Regional Planning at Sheffield for several years before his untimely death in 1980. Prior to that he was the Chief Planner at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government. He left to the Department his large collection of fascinating planning-related photos, maps and plans spanning many decades. We have put them all online for all to enjoy. In the future, we hope to add to the collection by using photos from student field trips and site visits.

Want to use one of our images in your work? We simply ask that if you use any of the images you acknowledge the source and do not seek to derive commercial benefit from them.

A small number of images were added to the collection by others at a later date and were not captured by JR James himself. If you are a previous TRP student or staff member who contributed to the collection, please get in touch.

There are thousands of images here so the best way to find something specific is to use the search box. However, we recommend looking at the Sets tab as an initial starting point for browsing the images. The slide collection was in a bit of a state when we got our hands on it and many of the slides didn't have captions - or are rather vaguely titled - so you may notice that we've made some errors with naming places. Indeed, a number of images remain classified as 'Unknown'.

If you can help us identify a place, please let us know. Similarly, if we've made a mistake please let us know via the comment box under the photo and we'll try to correct it!

Disclaimer: some images in the collection are taken from old textbooks, maps and plans used in teaching during the 1960s and 70s. We have published them here in good faith - and as planning enthusiasts - but if you are the original publisher of any of these images and want us to remove them, please get in touch and we will gladly oblige.