Mel Torme

A weekend in my hometown. Wonderful aerial pictures (the old ones, at least) over at Portsmouth College's "Portsmouth From The Air" galleries. I have to say tht I adore the saturation of colours on 1950's-1980's films, before cameras and film became electronic, digitised and manageable. The colours that frequent not only Soviet postcards of towns (I have a wonderful set from Kazan, as well as Petrozavodsk and Kizhi, and, I think, another from Moscow), but also British films, postcards and brochures from my childhood. It may be that many of the photos in these were taken in the 1970's, a period not renowned, in the UK at least, for a fear of garish colour(s), but, as you can see from the sample, this may have had something to do with colour processing as well as the decade-long temporary national colourblindness. I am 99% sure that the Solent has never looked quite so blue (except possibly millions of years ago when much of the South Cost was part of a tropical sea).

In fact, having perused the site further, this picture, from the early 60's actually has my family home in it - now, I have a romanticised view of childhood summer holidays that seemed to be six weeks of permanently sunny freedom, but even through my rose-tinted spectacles, my patch never looks like this. And an entire housing estate is missing in the bottom left-hand corner, as well as two sizeable naval estates to the top left and bottom right (both of these have now been handed over to housing associations as the naval influence in Portsmouth diminishes). Bizarre, like GoogleEarth with a time machine.