The Bill Rudd Collection


The late William J Rudd spent 50 years exploring the history of Morden, and captured on film the changing face of the area over those decades. The Society is delighted to be able to hold this important collection, though it is still facing up to the challenge of sorting, scanning and cataloguing it (offers of help welcome!).

Meanwhile, a taster of the range of his photos is given in the slider at the top of this page, while many of his Morden photographs can be accessed here, though more await scanning.

One of Bill’s major projects was to photograph the changes in Morden’s shopping centre, and some slideshows of these photographs have been put together to enable comparison over nearly four decades.

A few photos from forays over the parish boundary are also displayed.

Many of these reveal his involvement in archaeological excavations and surveys in and around Morden, while others reveal some of his other special interests – his eye for a good photo of sky or weather conditions; his fascination with transport of all kinds – rail, buses and vehicles of all kinds, mechanical, horse-drawn and man-powered; his delight in a wide range of items that might be described as ‘street furniture’, from road signs to horse troughs; and his love of fairgrounds, carnivals and other celebratory events.

Bill spent most of his life on the St Helier estate and took many photographs of the houses and roads of the area, and of scenes around St Helier station, railways being another of his interests.

Most of the roads on the estate took their names from former monastic sites and Bill spent many years visiting and photographing all these sites. All the black and white photographs taken for his Abbey Roads project have been scanned and are accessible from this website but two boxes of coloured slides await scanning.

His account of the project has been published by the Society as Abbey Roads: a modern pilgrimage. It is generously illustrated with a good selection of his photographs.

The Society is looking for a more appropriate home for the five boxfiles of photos and ephemera relating to this project.