 Welcome to Cambridge Museum of Technology. I'm Pam Hulls, the museum's curator. We are reopening the museum to the public from Saturday the 22nd of May, so you'll be able to visit our beautiful Riverside site and explore Cambridge's fascinating industrial history. We have had to make some adaptations to keep our visitors, volunteers and staff safe. You can find all of the information that you need to prepare for your visit, including online booking on our website. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the museum's first public open day. We have a full programme of events lined up throughout the year, including our birthday bash weekend on the 24th and 25th of July, when we'll have a host of activities and entertainment to tempt you. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest news so you don't miss out. We are also running a fundraiser to help us to continue to care for our industrial heritage for another 50 years. Please consider giving us a birthday present. You can find out how to donate to our appeal on our website. Make 2021 the year that you visit Cambridge Museum of Technology. Cambridge is renowned as an ancient university town, an even older market town and a modern centre of the high technology industry. In this video, explore a different side of Cambridge, industrial Cambridge from the air. Many industries grew then disappeared from the landscape of Cambridge in the 20th century as newer technologies emerged. Former industrial sites were often redeveloped for other uses such as residential housing, retail and technology business parks. Cambridge hosts numerous archives of aerial photography that provides a time-lapse glimpse of Cambridge's changing industrial landscape over the course of a century from the 1920s to the present day. As a result, it is possible to build aerial time lapses of areas of Cambridge beyond the collegiate centre. In this video view, the transformation of transport networks including Cambridge Railway Station and the A14, the evolution of utilities such as sewage treatment, the transformation of manufacturing sites such as factories and the development of new industrial areas such as Cambridge Science Park and Cambridge Business Park. Such a modern picture of your factory, business premises or property. The first publicly available aerial photography of Cambridge was undertaken in 1920 by Aero Films with additional sequences photographed later in the 1920s and early 1930s. Aero Films took the fledgling technology of military reconnaissance developed in the Great War and repackaged it for the commercial and leisure markets. Unsurprisingly for Cambridge, Aero Films' initial focus in 1920 was the tourist market picture postcard style photography of the collegiate town centre. When Aero Films revisited Cambridge in 1928, aviators took more photos of industrial and residential areas. It is worth noting just how early these sets of aerial photography are in Cambridge's own aviation history. These Aero Films predate the construction of Marshall's aerodrome later Cambridge airport to the east of Cambridge which would not begin operation until the late 1920s. Industrial Cambridge emerges from the sky in 1928. The industrial quarter in the Newmarket Road and Riverside area comprising the sewage pumping station, gasworks, quarks and quarries was first photographed in 1928. Post-industrial development now includes retail parks, residential housing, a nature reserve, Logan's Meadow on the north Chesterton bank of the river. Also photographed in the November 1928 aerial series. The Cambridge Corporation sewage farm to the north of Cambridge to which the sewage pumping station at Chedders Lane pumped Cambridge's effluent through two miles of pipes. Partly visible in the background of the 1928 aerial photograph of the Newmarket Road industrial quarter is the manufacturing site of the electronics company Pi in Chesterton. Founded in a garden shed in Cambridge in 1896 the company grew in the 20th century to be leaders in scientific instruments, radio and television equipment, home entertainment and telecommunications with its headquarters always remaining in the St Andrews area of Chesterton. The Pi manufacturing site was photographed in more detail in 1932. In 1932 view of Chesterton featuring Pi Radio Limited Works looking southeast towards River Cam towards Chedders Lane sewage pumping station and Cambridge University and Town Gaslight Company on Riverside. 1932 view of Pi Radio Limited Works and St Andrews Church Chesterton Historic England Licensed to Cambridge Museum of Technology. In 1930 the fruit preserving factory of Chivers in Houston approximately two miles north of Cambridge was photographed in detail. The Chivers factory continued to operate until the 1980s. The former factory site is now Vision Business Park with food processing factories now located to the north of the original factory site. The railway line through Houston and Impington has been converted into the Cambridge regarded busway. The photographic quality of a bleak aerial photography of Cambridge in the 20th century would peak with flyovers in the early 1930s. By the 1930s techniques and technology had been further refined to enable low-altitude oblique photography that could render details at the level of pedestrians or cyclists at street level. Capturing social history not just geography. Cyclists and pedestrians are visible as matchstick men in a scene reminiscent of the contemporary artist Larry. The Cambridge University and town gas-like company and adjacent Chedders Lane sewage pumping station were extensively photographed in the 1930s. The town gas works had operated on the New Market Road and River Lane area since the 1820s. Built close to the river where the raw material for the gas making process coal could easily be unloaded from barges. The adjacent sewage pumping station was constructed in 1894. Photographs in the late 1920s and early 1930s captured the expansion of the gas works to meet rising demand for energy utilities. Gas storage capacity had doubled with the construction of a three million cubic feet gasometer between 1925 and 1927. The landscape directly opposite the gas works, now a flourishing nature reserve, Logan's Meadow, was bare. The war memorial to gas workers initially erected in 1921 can also be seen in its original site. When the former gas works site was redeveloped for retail and residential use in the early 21st century, the Gas Workers War Memorial was moved to New Market Road. Cambridge had a flourishing brick industry, producing the Cambridge White Bricks, which can be seen in many 19th and 20th century housing estates. Glimpses of this industry can be seen in aerial photographs from the late 1920s and 1930s. Many of the brick factories were found in the area around New Market Road near the pumping station, where there were deposits of clay. In the late 1930s, an aerial photograph of Barnwell illustrated the depths of the quarries created by extractive industries. It was in quarries near here that workers discovered some of the earliest prehistoric evidence of human technology in Cambridge, carved elephant rib together with rhinoceros and hippopotamus bones. Now stored at the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, a private aviator, major GWG Allen, had also caught a glimpse of what would become the edge of Marshall's airfield when photographing Cherryhinton in May 1934. Aerial views of Cambridge at War. During the Second World War, an aerial atlas of Britain was published by the Nazis. Personally commissioned by Herman Goring hit the second in command and founder of the Luftwaffe. The Coffee Table-style book was a hastily assembled montage of industrial sites, churches, country homes, and beach resorts, often copied from aero films originals. Part bombing guide for his Luftwaffe, part invasion tourist guide, Goring's Vanity Project was published after the Luftwaffe's defeat in the 1940 Bessel of Britain as a face-saving exercise. The section on Cambridge tends to overlook industrial Cambridge at the expense of university and college buildings, although Marshall's aerodrome is located approximately on a hazy horizon. The quality of photos in the Nazi air atlas was not at the same level as stereo comparators used by military photographers to study aerial topography in three dimensions. For example, a stereo comparator used by Allied reconnaissance built by Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company from Lone from the Whipple Museum of the History of Science is on display at Cambridge Museum of Technology. The Nazi atlas demonstrates how oblivious the Luftwaffe was to strategic industrial sites in the immediate vicinity of the Cambridge photo. A case in point, just down the road from the University Library in West Cambridge, the camouflaged Sebro Shorts Bomber Repair Factory for short sterling heavy bombers was unnoticed in the Nazi air atlas and throughout the duration of the war. Recent investigation by Cambridge University's Archaeology and Geography departments has illustrated how the Sebro Shorts Sterling Factory was camouflaged during the Second World War. Pino Lombardi 2015, short sterling, the first of the RAF heavy bombers. I was told about a large factory in Cambridge which repaired damaged sterlings and that many who had worked there were women. I found what I thought was the factory on Maddingley Road, hoping to find a sterling. Most of the buildings had been demolished. There were small pieces stamped with numbers while others even had the word sterling on them. Although there was little left of the factory, I realised that it must have been a huge undertaking. Post-war Royal Air Force photography of Cambridge for Ordnance Survey was taken top-down at increasingly higher altitudes. For example, the corporation Sewage Farm. Future sites of the A14 Road, Cambridge Science Park, the Business Park and Innovation Park were still fields. Most post-war photography was at high altitude and top-down, vertical in angle. Useful for urban planning but less valuable for industrial archaeology. An exception was the Cambridge Railway Station area which was photographed at low altitude on several occasions in the 1950s and 1960s by sources including the Cambridgeshire County Council Planning Department and the Cambridge University Geography Department. Visible in this close-up is the engine shed with footbridge connecting to Devonshire Road. Visible in this close-up, several of Cambridge's stations. Later sequences photographed in the late 1950s also capture the junction to the railway station located in Brooklands Avenue, train sheds and buildings in the station road area and the cattle market which is now a retail development. And from the other side of the station with a view of the railway sidings looking northwest up Hills Road towards Fenner's Cricket Ground and Parker's Peace. In the 1960s aerial photography, this time taken from higher altitude again illustrated the surface area that the railway stations occupied in southeast Cambridge. Today, six decades on, the railway station area looks very different. There is only one passenger railway station, Goods Yards and the Cattle Market have been redeveloped as residential, commercial and leisure buildings. Chalk pits to the southeast of Cambridge adjacent to the Cambridge to Newmarket railway line were photographed on several occasions in the 1950s and 1960s. The chalk pits are visible in this photograph from 1958 looking west from Coldham's Lane towards Cambridge this photograph of the same site in 1969. Cambridge Archives holds sales brochures printed by estate agents that featured aerial photographs of former industrial sites. For example, the former site of Atlas Stone Company on the junction of Coldham's Lane now the site of a supermarket and offices. This 1968 photograph also captures the Portland cement works. Aerial photographs during the 1970s captured numerous construction projects in and around Cambridge. In the south of the city, there was construction work at the new Adam Brooks Hospital. The vicinity would expand to become a biomedical campus in the 21st century. In the city centre, the Elizabeth Way Bridge was built across the River Cam as part of a ring road project. In the north of Cambridge there was construction of the A14 road section at Fenditon. Photo. A14 road construction work at Fenditon over flooded River Cam and Cambridge to Water Beach Railway Line May 1978. In north Cambridge there was development of Cambridge Science Park, Business Park and Innovation Park. A14 junction, Milton. May 1984. The area around the Corporation Sewage Farm photographed by aerofilms in the 1920s and Royal Air Force Ordnance Survey in the 1940s would be transformed in the late 20th century with the construction of industrial and office buildings. Aerial photography in the 1970s also captured changes in manufacturing and utilities landscape in east Cambridge. Since the aerofilms photographs of PIE's radio works in Chesterton in the late 1920s and early 1930s, PIE had diversified into many broadcast telecommunications and home entertainment technologies, employing thousands across numerous sites in Cambridge. This photograph shows the scale of the PIE Scientific Instrument Centre in York Street, Cambridge which had opened in the 1960s. The site is now a residential area. PIE, which had become part of Dutch headquartered electronics company Philips in the 1960s, was also photographed just a few days before opening of new facilities in the St Andrews Chesterton area in May 1978. The river cam had flooded, but this did not prevent the opening of the new buildings. These photographs also offered glimpses of the electric powered riverside sewage pumping station on the south side of the river cam. The new pumping station had opened in the late 1960s to replace the capacity of the Victorian era pumping station next door. By the 21st century, the area had been redeveloped. The PIE site had been converted to a mixture of residential housing and office buildings. The riverside pumping station, which was replaced by an underground pumping station in the 1990s, was demolished for housing, leaving the original Victorian pumping station next door, which was converted to Cambridge Museum of Technology for reopening in 1971. The National Grid Gas Archive also preserves an aerial photograph of the gasworks site in East Cambridge in the 1970s. Since the aerial photographs in the 1920s and 1930s, the University and Town Gaslight Company had been nationalised within British gas. The Eastern Division site became a store of North Sea gas when the coal powered town gas infrastructure was demolished in the 1960s, although amenities such as tennis courts and bowling greens survived. The brick and tile works in the aerial photographs of the 1930s had been replaced by industrial units and motor vehicles. The site was closed in the 1990s and redeveloped for retail and residential housing in the 21st century. 1980s, top-down views of Cambridge, the Soviet Red Atlas. A view of Cambridge in the 1980s from a Soviet map. Updated as late as 1989 with lists of industrial sites and utilities, as well as sites of public administration, the map is now archived in the Cambridge University Library Map Room. According to the authors of the Red Atlas, photographic sources for UK maps were derived from satellites rather than aerial photography, but supplemented by ordnance survey maps and some on-the-ground reconnaissance. However, information was not always accurate. An example, Starbridge Common, close to Cambridge Museum of Technology, was misidentified in Cyrillic script as a lorry park, possibly conflating the historic site of Starbridge Fair or possibly with the industrial sites that adjoin the Common. In the last 30 years, satellite photography has captured Cambridge's changing landscape, but from a long distance vertical angle, rather than the low-altitude oblique angles of Cambridge, captured in the first half of the 20th century. More recently, aerial drone technology has enabled low-altitude photography and video from oblique angles, comparable once again to the level of detail seen in series from almost a century ago. Aerial drone technology has enabled Cambridge Museum of Technology to photograph industrial Cambridge past, present, and future. From the chimney of Cambridge Museum of Technology to the recycling plant adjacent to Starbridge Common to Cambridge Science Park for relatively new constructions such as Riverside Bridge and Cambridge North Railway Station, you can explore more about the industries featured in this video by visiting Cambridge Museum of Technology from sewage pumping to gasworks to Chivers Fruit Preserving Factory, pie electronics, scientific instruments, and much more.