Just make sure you pre-book and take along a National Lottery ticket, scratchcard or Instant Win game
WW Winter in Midland Road(Image: Derby Telegraph)
The world’s oldest working purpose-built photography studio – based in Derby – will be throwing open its doors to the public later this week.
WW Winter Heritage Photography Studio in Midland Road, opened in 1867, is not normally open for viewing but for three days on March 12, 13 and 14, National Lottery players will be admitted free.
The studio has more than one million images in its archive and the heritage rooms behind its Victorian facade are seen by almost no one.
Walter William Winter took over the photography business from EN Charles in 1863. In 1867, with the studio thriving, he built a brand-new purpose-built daylight photography studio on what had been a grazing yard beside Derby’s Midland Hotel.
Nothing had previously been built on the site. It was designed and constructed for a single purpose – to take photographs – and 159 years later, it still is.
The Winter’s studio on Midland Road, Derby, in 1905(Image: WW Winter Ltd)
Simon Vaughan, heritage and volunteer coordinator, said: “You can literally open a door and step back in time. Nothing has been done to the studio other than the odd bit of painting.
“You are standing in a space where millions of people have had their photographs taken. Even some of the furniture we can date to well over a hundred years ago, from photographs taken here in the 1880s and 1890s. There is nowhere quite like it.”
The studio was one of the last in the UK to continue using glass plate negatives, switching to digital in the early 2000s.
The transition came when a phone call arrived to say the final box of glass plates had been dispatched. There were no more. The current photographer is only five generations removed from the founder.
Mr Vaughan said: “People walk in and ask when was the last time a photograph was taken here? It could have been half an hour before they arrived.
“I don’t think people always expect that it’s actually a working photography studio. That’s what makes this place unlike anything else.”
Volunteer-led tours take visitors through what working studio customers never see – the original first and second class waiting rooms (one still with its Victorian fireplace and over mantle), the Victorian daylight studio with its north-facing gothic windows, a recreated framing room, and the original retouching room on the second floor, designed with floor-to-ceiling glass for working on negatives by hand.
Mr Vaughan added that the archive at the studio “is an unbroken record of Derby and its people from the 1850s to today”.
He said: “Factories, businesses, civic leaders and workers. Weddings, christenings, school portraits. The studio served people of every background.
“Among its most remarkable holdings is a collection of glass plate negatives documenting German officer prisoners of war held at Donnington Hall, near Derby, during the First World War.
“With National Lottery Heritage Fund support, we produced a book and exhibition from those images — Behind the Barbed Wire revealing a story most people did not know existed.
“Every week, family historians from around the world contact the studio asking whether relatives they think may have been photographed here are in the archive. In many cases, they are.”
Free entry is achieved by showing any National Lottery ticket, scratchcard or Instant Win Game (physical or digital).
Pre-booking is required and for more information click here.