The Past on Glass was a Heritage Lottery funded project to conserve. catalogue and digitise the David Knights-Whittome Glass Plate Negative collection (1905-1918), held at Sutton Archives, UK between 2014-2018.

This site showcases the results of that work, which is reproduced here in low resolution via a CC by NC license. Please be sure to credit @SuttonArchives for the use of any images.

While the original photographic plates are now out of copyright (Knights-Whittome lived from 1876-1943), Sutton has undertaken extensive conservation work to enable digitisation to take place and images produced as a result of this constitute a record of this endeavour. Sutton Archives retains the copyright of these, and of all associated high-resolution scans. We do not make these available via any external picture agencies. if you wish to license these for commercial purposes please contact local.studies@sutton.gov.uk

We welcome any additional information you may have about any of the subjects of these images. Please add your comments below photos or email us at the above address if you have more detailed stories to share. We also share stories from the collection on our blog at pastonglass.wordpress.com/

Background/About the Collection:

From 1904-1918, 18 High Street, Sutton, South London (then Surrey) was occupied by David Knights-Whittome; ‘Photographer to the King’. From this small shop, named ‘The Studio, Sutton’, and another premises at 24 Station Road, Epsom, Knights-Whittome produced thousands of photographs of local people, places, events and institutions as well as images of country houses, aristocratic events and the Royal Family during a seminal period in British history. In 1918, Knights-Whittome abandoned professional photography and moved away from Sutton altogether, eventually taking up a career in local politics in Hertfordshire. The vast collection of glass plate negatives he had produced during this period were left behind in the cellar of the shop and over time were largely forgotten.

In 1988, the building housing 18 High Street – later occupied by Linwood Strong optician – was demolished, but not before the photographic legacy of this remarkable man was discovered by a member of the public and removed to the Sutton archive service. The collection, of over 10,000 glass plate negatives, remained undocumented and unseen by the public for close to 100 years. In 2014, a Heritage Lottery Fund grant enabled work on this important and endangered archive to begin and around half of the collection was conserved, digitised and catalogued. A second award was granted in the summer of 2016 which over a two year period saw the completion of this vital work. Today, a small team of volunteers continues to research and document the collection and many families have been reunited with images of their ancestors. Images from this wonderful collection appeared in the 2019 Sam Mendes movie 1917.