Francis Frith & Co. Continues
His family continued the firm, which was finally sold in 1968 and closed in 1970. Following closure of the business, Bill Jay, one of Britain's first photography historians, identified the archive as being nationally important, and "at risk". Jay managed to persuade Rothmans, the tobacco company, to purchase the archive to ensure its safety.
Frith was re-launched in 1976 as The Francis Frith Collection by John Buck, a Rothmans executive, with the intention of making the Frith photographs available to as wide an audience as possible.
In 1977, John Buck bought the archive from Rothmans and has continued to run it as an independent business since that time – trading as The Francis Frith Collection. The company website enables visitors to browse free of charge over 125,000 Frith photographs depicting some 7,000 cities, towns & villages. The website encourages visitors to add "memories" of their own, and there are already over 30,000 such memories. The website also contains text extracts from some of the 1,100 local history books published by the company.
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