Tilbury Steamer - Public domain image of a steam ship or boat

A humorous 1889 novel by Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon river Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), was thought to be a serious travel guide but slipped into a brilliant specimen of humour (humor). The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff: the time when commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity. This collection is a fictional set of illustration to the book as it was initially intended.

This exhibition of photographs from The National Archives was produced in 2000 as part of a larger exhibition put together by partners in the Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access (SEPIA) project. Institutions from across Europe provided images from their own holdings showing transport of all kinds across the Continent. The collection shows the technical development; the marvels of design and construction that improvements in transport spawned. Transport has fundamentally altered the world in which we live and these images cover everything from horsepower to airpower.