The National Maritime Museum recently put online a collection of 515 historic photographs of the interiors and exteriors of liners taken by Bedford Lemere & Co, 1891-1919.

Bedford Lemere and Co. was founded in the late 1860s as a specialist architectural photographer. Considered as the most productive architectural photographers of their age, they remain to this day a key source for images of the built environment in England from 1870 to after World War II.

The NMM collection was purchased from the National Monuments Record in 1961. These evocative photographs provide a vivid insight into the golden age of transatlantic travel and they offer us a guided tour of some of the most lavish floating palaces of the period.

But the Bedford Lemere collection at the NMM also encompasses more modest images such as the third class passenger accommodation, as well as a series of pictures of the Clydebank shipyard, thereby offering a striking spectacle of the technological innovation and modernism that underpinned ocean travel at that period of time.

We are in no doubt that this new resource will be a significant tool for researchers and academics across the fields of maritime history but also design and decorative arts history, and the history of photography.