THE
ESSEX NATURALIST:
BEING THE
Journal of the Essex Field Club
FOR 1903-1904
(VOLUME XIII.)
PROPOSALS FOR A PHOTOGRAPHIC AND
PICTORIAL SURVEY OF ESSEX.
By ALBERT E. BRISCOE, B.Sc, A.R.C.Sc., &c., Principal of the
Municipal Technical Institute, West Ham.
[Read January 31st, 1903.]
THERE is but little need in these times to point out the
value to historical students of contemporary pictorial
records: every one is familiar with the interest that attaches to
old prints and drawings. A splendid example of the way
they may be used to illuminate history and to give valuable
information regarding the social life of the people is the well-
known illustrated edition of John Richard Green's Short History
of the English People.
No books give us such a vivid understanding of the social
life of the Eighteenth Century as is given by the prints of
Hogarth; to our descendants, pictures like Frith's "Derby
Day" and "Railway Station," will be equally valuable.
We live in a time of great changes ; probably the changes in
the appearance of the country during the next fifty years will be
even more marked than those of the last fifty. Old customs
are fast dying out; old houses are disappearing, and no record
of either is being left behind.
Those of us who have lived in Metropolitan Essex during
the last decade know this only too well. However, even yet
there are bits of the old villages buried away in out of the way
corners of the new towns that are springing up like mushrooms
in "London over the border."
Within the last five years, old Rokeby House has disappeared