The themes of the site are (i) Richmond Surrey (as was) and immediate surroundings and (ii) old views of the Thames and nearby from the Estuary up to Walton on Thames with just a few higher up. This site contains scans of old postcards, pictures from nineteenth century magazines and books and a few older prints. As time has gone on I have added more of the non-postcard pictures.

Click on a thumbnail to bring up a bigger image, click on the image to go back to the thumbnails or use the arrows to scroll though images. If you click on the magnify button it will display the picture at maximum size in a new tab (300 or 600 pixels per inch on the original image, increasingly at the larger size) and you can scroll the image by holding down the mouse and dragging. If you download by right clicking from either of these two screens it will get the maximum size image.

These are all fairly old items, should I have offended anyone's copyright I apologise and will withdraw that item (email rtcards@rthcards.co.uk). The scans were made by me, all but three from originals. They have no watermarks and I reserve no rights to them. Ditto any of the "now" pictures.

Cards can be hard to date precisely. A card may be older than its postal date. For most of the Valentine cards the date of registration of the photo is known. Before 1902 cards had undivided backs and any message had to be written on the front, around or over the picture. From 1902 to 1906 different countries gradually allowed the back to have both a message and and address - the UK first - and cards from this period have warnings about this, which I have noted as "id" (stands for "inland divided") in some of the filenames. If the card says "Printed in Germany" - which most early cards were - it will date from before the first world war. This period was the heyday of postcards, which were used in much the same way as SMS messages 100 years later - there were six postal deliveries per day in London.

There are no cookies or ads on this site. There are some links to other places, marked as "external links", and these may well leave cookies though I haven't noticed any ads. I have altered the images by de-spotting, colour re-balancing and converting some sepia cards to greyscale to minimise staining. In a few cases where this has been more extensive the original state can also be seen. Half-tone images have been at least partially de-spotted. The site depends on Javascript and all processing is done on the client side.