WME Flickr Focus: December 2012

2012 has been a fairly prolific year in terms of raids on the WME photo vaults, and December offered up a spectacular heist of its own by way of a fitting finale…

The safebreakers have been hard at work, coming up trumps with the combinations to prise open the doors of Exploration Extra. After the initial code was cracked in November, further valuables have been plundered from the repository, with images from far-flung locations now at large on the WME Photostream. These include Rail Rover gems from 2006, 2007 and 2008 along with some family holiday treasures, so we’d better take a quick blast around the country.

Starting at Land’s End in Cornwall we proceed through Newquay, Falmouth and St Austell to reach Devon for glimpses of Paignton, Exmouth and Dawlish. Next we hit the Capital with a March 2007 London visit, pausing at Victoria and Whitechapel before we tiptoe into Essex with calls at Clacton-on-Sea and Walton-on-the-Naze. With scintillating speed we burst into East Anglia, putting down markers in Great Yarmouth and Cromer then returning through the East Midlands courtesy of Rail Rover haunts Derby, Beeston and Hinckley. Cheshire offers up a little taste of Nantwich, whilst Chirk takes us up to the Welsh border and back. Add in a sprinkling of bus rally photos from events days at BaMMoT and Aston Manor, and then we can collapse exhaustedly in North Yorkshire with our closing stops at Pickering and Whitby.

As we recover from that breakneck tour, let’s take stock with some end of year number crunching. Going into 2013, this is how many of the original Fotopic pictures have been reinstated; Wolverhampton (371 out of 435), Walsall (172 of 208), Birmingham (244 of 330), Dudley (180 of 262), Sandwell (110 of 180), Coventry (52 of 80), Solihull (71 of 112), Staffordshire (223 of 299), Worcestershire (57 of 90), Telford (44 of 68), Warwickshire (34 of 45), Shropshire (53 of 58) and Extra (150 of 192), bringing us to 1761 out of 2359 in total.

That still leaves 598 images dangling in the ether, waiting to take their rightful place in the Flickr fold. My mission in 2013 will be to extract as many of these from the vaults as possible, so there will be plenty more safebreaking to come. However, I also hope that 2013 will be the year when new deposits start to get banked, and the unseen more recent sections of my archive should soon start to get the exposure they deserve.