The Harry Price Website - Borley Rectory in Colour Photographs

The History of Borley Rectory

Borley Rectory in Colour Photographs by Steven Wiltshire & Paul Adams

The classic view of Borley Rectory taken from the lawn at the time of Harry Price's first visit in 1929 (Reproduced from Confessions of a Ghost Hunter)

As far as is known, no colour photographs of Borley Rectory exist. Henry Bull's red-brick Victorian monstrosity "an example of the worst that the bad taste of 1863 could produce" to quote Sir William Crocker, is familiar in the classic black & white photographs which first saw the light of day in Harry Price's two Borley books and have subsequently been reproduced in other books and magazines down through the years.

In order to satisfy my own curiosity I thought it would be interesting to try and get an impression of what the Rectory really looked like by carrying out colour restorations of some of the well-known photographs and presenting them on this website. I approached a former colleague of mine Steven Wiltshire and he very kindly set to work and produced the versions which are on this page. Until we can all get into that time machine and whisk ourselves back to 1929 and take a stroll across the Rectory lawn, Steven's superb work gives us a tantalizing glimpse of what Borley Rectory would have looked like photographed in colour. The images may take a time to load.

The Dining Room photographed around 1910 when the Bull family were in residence at the Rectory.

The Rectory ruins taken on 17th August 1943 (Reproduced from The End of Borley Rectory)

The rare view along the driveway taken by Sidney Glanville on the occasion of his first observation period at the Rectory on 20th June 1937 (Photograph courtesy of Richard Lee van den Daele)

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