Phill Rawlins Online - Manchester aviation and transport photography

About this archive

What the collection is, when it was made, and how the site was put back together after its original server disappeared.

Why the photographs exist

Phill Rawlins Online started in 2001 as a personal homepage and turned into a photography site almost by accident. The camera went everywhere anyway: to the end of the runway at Manchester, to air displays at Morecambe and Southport, up in a light aircraft over Trafford Park, and along the towpath of the Ship Canal. Publishing the results gave them somewhere to live.

Between 2002 and 2004 the site built up around 110 photographs across roughly forty pages. Nothing was staged and nothing was borrowed from a picture library. If a page shows a helicopter at Barton Aerodrome, that is because it happened to call in during a recruitment exercise and someone was there with a camera.

What the archive covers

The strongest material falls into four groups.

  • Aviation. The retirement of Concorde in October 2003, seen at both Manchester and Heathrow; the Red Arrows at Morecambe and Southport in September 2003; military visitors including a Royal Navy Merlin and an RAF Gazelle; helicopter types from an Enstrom 280FX to a Sikorsky S-76; and the police air support units of Greater Manchester, Merseyside and West Yorkshire.
  • The city of Manchester. Aerial surveys taken in 2002 and 2003, the redevelopment of Ancoats and Spinningfields, the Arndale Centre and Urbis, and the skyline after dark.
  • The Manchester Ship Canal. A page of history and a gallery covering the locks, the swing bridges at Barton and the sluice gates at Stanlow.
  • Elsewhere in the North West and beyond. Dunham Massey, Liverpool's waterfront, and the far north of Scotland around Dunnet Head and John o' Groats.

A note on this rebuild

The original site ran on a single web server and was last updated in 2004. When it went offline, the pages were recovered from an Internet Archive capture dated 2 January 2004 along with a second batch of images captured later that year.

The rebuild keeps every original page address exactly as it was, so links and search results still land in the right place. The pages themselves have been rewritten in modern, accessible HTML, the layout is now responsive, and the text and metadata have been tidied up. Six pages that were placeholders in the original capture (they showed a 404 message even then) have been written properly for the first time, using the content their titles promised and the images that exist in the archive.

What has not changed: no photograph has been retouched, added or removed, and no caption has been invented for an image that does not exist. Where a photograph was never captured by the Internet Archive, the page says so rather than showing a placeholder.

Copyright and reuse

All photographs remain the copyright of Phill Rawlins. You are welcome to link to any page, and to quote short extracts with a credit and a link back. For anything more than that — publication, commercial use, prints — please make contact first and describe what you have in mind.

The site carries no advertising, no analytics and no tracking of any kind, and it makes no requests to third party servers.

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