| Description | The Survey prints comprising MS 2724/2/BB are mounted on larger mounts. The material in this series comprises of the new Birmingham General Hospital by Bedford Lemere and Company. The prints appear to have been commissioned by the hospital and presented by Howard J. Collins, House Governor of Birmingham General Hospital, to the Survey Council around the time the institution was opened.
Bedford Lemere and Company were one of the pre-eminent commercial architectural photographers in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are numerous prints from the original Bedford Lemere negatives in both the collections of Birmingham Archives and Heritage and elsewhere.
The majority of the firm's surviving negatives were deposited with the National Monument Record and National Building Record, now English Heritage Archive (see www.englishheritagearchives.org.uk).
Many of the 100,000 or so negatives that of the firm that were produced do not survive. English Heritage have digitised around 9,000 of the surviving negatives (as of July 2012) created by the firm with more to be made available by the end of 2013. More information about the firm can be found in their publiction 'The Photography of Bedford Lemere & Co.' by Nicholas Cooper (English Heritage, 2011). |