Lens of Sutton was established around 1927 by T Lens and was taken over in 1948 by John L (Leslie) Smith who turned the small shop at 50-52 Carshalton Road, Sutton into a business famed throughout Great Britain for selling back numbers of railway, tram and bus magazines, advertising as ‘The Back Number Specialist’ and for stocking almost all the transport books currently in print. In addition, John Smith sold photographs of transport subjects, both taken by himself and increasingly from a vast collection of negatives that he acquired over the years, together with many old postcards that he copied. In 1973, the shop moved to 4 Westmead Road, Carshalton, and the sale of photographs continued until John Smith’s death at the age of 80 in 1999.

John died intestate and there was considerable concern that this important collection might be broken up and effectively lost to the many authors who relied on it to illustrate transport books and articles. The Lens of Sutton Association was formed in 2001 in order to try and preserve intact the vast collection of railway negatives that John had accumulated. It was successful in acquiring all the celluloid negatives of railway subjects and the glass plates of stations taken by A W Croughton. The remaining glass plates were acquired by Rail Archive Stephenson and the negatives of buses and trams had already been sold to A D Packer by John Smith. The negatives of several other photographers have since been added to the collection, including all the negatives taken by Denis Cullum and a partial selection of those by P M Alexander and C F H Oldham.  

In all, it is believed that there are over 100,000 negatives in the collection. The collection is particularly strong in its coverage of stations with numerous views of virtually every station in the south and west of England in the collection, together with an extensive range of views of locations in the rest of the country and the noted C E J Fordyce collection of Scottish station photographs. While Lens of Sutton was known for its copies of Edwardian station postcards, there are a great many original negatives of stations, taken by John Smith himself, and by other photographers. There are also very large numbers of locomotive and train photographs, mainly from the 1930s onwards, covering the whole country, together with excellent coverage of passenger rolling stock, especially that of the Southern Region and Pullman cars.

The Association is a non-profit making body where all income goes to support the cataloguing, conservation and storage of the negative collections. Our aim is to continue to keep these photographs available to researchers, authors and collectors at a modest cost. We have an agreement that the negatives will eventually be placed with a registered museum or archive.

The Lens of Sutton negatives were, at the time of acquisition, uncatalogued and were stored loose in filing cabinets. Since then, work has proceeded on cataloguing and the majority of those negatives that came from John Smith have now been listed, together with those by Denis Cullum. They have been filed in wallets and file prints are being created. Secure storage has been obtained. The immense task of digitising the collection is something we are aiming to do in the long term as it is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to obtain materials for traditional darkroom prints. We have made a start and are making inroads into scanning the negatives but there is still a long way to go.

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