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The photographer and the sweep One person I remember from my childhood in Cheltenham (a time that came back to me forcefully when I recently visited The Wilson in the town and came face to face with the figure in my previous post ) was a photographer called Eric Franks. Eric, who was a neighbour of a relative of mine, worked for a publisher of guidebooks, Burrow, who were based in Cheltenham; they presumably sent him round to the various places they were covering in their books to photograph old buildings, picturesque high streets, and atmospheric views. Although colour photography was well established by the time I knew him, colour printing was still costly, and most of his work was in black and white. Eric Franks didn’t put away his camera when he left work. He was always taking photographs, and built up a large archive of images of Cheltenham between the late 1930s and the 1950s. He was still at it when I came across him in the 1960s and 1970s, but those earlier images especially c...