Kieron Pelling – Compelling Photography

In 2011, I started a blog with the aim of showing the photographs I take. Driven by the need to produce content to support the photographs, I began to research the history about the places I visited. As time has passed this interest in photography and history led me to start creating the ‘Then and Now’ images.

I started using Then and Now imagery to show changes to buildings, structures and even the shoreline to my home town of Hastings. Of course many of the old photographs I’ve used show the residents of the town. In some of them they are staring at the photographer. During the editing process these faces of the past fill my screen. I can’t help but wonder who they were and what they did.

I had no idea that my home town of Hastings acted as a staging post for British soldiers as they moved from training towards the front line. Like most people, I associated WW1 with European battlefields. The images of the soldiers parading, training and living in East Sussex brings home how deeply involved everyone was in the war. No one was untouched by it.

The people in these images stood where we now stand. We should never stop remembering what they went through. I hope that my contribution to this website helps to bring the past to the present.

See Kieron’s First World War ‘Then and Now’ photographs on our website