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230 years of scholarly works, travel books and Official Documents. Each book is processed with optical character recognition (OCR) for comprehensive text searching.

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Film, TV & Video archive covering a wide variety of New Forest related subjects. Newsreels, Cinema Shorts, Television Programmes, Events and Local Contributions.

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Photos dating back nearly 150 years. The archive has a comprehensive search. Photos include known details and names plus location links.

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A growing archive of New Forest related Books, Films, TV and Photographs.
Coming Soon: Film and Book Reviews.
& The New Forest Show - Year by Year

Recently Featured Films

What's New In The Forest (1974)

A film by The Wildlife Society
Narrated by Tony Askew

BBC South 50 years: Episode 1 BBC South

50 years of BBC South. A series of 19 mini-features made by BBC South at Southampton in 2011 to celebrate the station's 50 year history.

Episode 1 BBC South. Steve Humphrey tells the story of BBC South from the first broadcasts of South at Six. Introductory footage is from the British Pathé Archive.

NFG are indebted to the BBC staff at Southampton for their help in sourcing items for the archive. See more episodes in the Category - BBC South.

A House In time (1997)

Building a Cob house in a day.

Imagine the year is 1650, a young couple, Jacob and Catherine are about to get married, but have nowhere to live together. Their respective houses are already over-crowded. Up to 10 or more people would live in a Cob house 25 feet long and 13 feet wide.

Hence the practice of erecting a house in a single day by the whole village for the newly-weds. A communal venture. Once the house was completed, the householder would treat their guests to a party of eating, drinking and dancing.

But how was it possible to build a house in a little over sixteen hours, and could it be re-attempted 350 years later? The following is an account of an incredible day and a brilliant group of volunteers who made it all possible.

Our thanks to the staff at Meridian Broadcasting in Northam for their help in sourcing this film.

Ytene England's Ancient Forest (1995)

Ytene is an ancient name for the area now known as the New Forest. It was the site of the Jutish Kingdom and translates as "of the Jutes".

Filmed over a two year period by Manuel Hinge, Ytene explores the wildlife found in the New Forest in southern England.

The woodland, bogs and heaths of the area are home to wild ponies, fallow deer, badgers, foxes, wildfowl, and insects. Seasonal changes are shown, and some elusive species, such as firecrests, hawfinches, woodlarks and tadpole shrimps are pictured. The programme is interwoven with historical re-enactments and describes the change in land use from mediaeval times.

Filmed and Directed by Manuel Hinge
Music by Martin Kiszko
Film Editor Martin Elsbury
Dubbing Editor Angela Groves
Dubbing Mixer Graham Wild
Unit Manager Christina Hamilton
Production Assistant Elizabeth Toogood
Field Assistant Len Mummery
Sound Recordist Nigel Tucker
Produced by Steve Nicholls
Executive Producer John Sparks
Originally broadcast in The Natural World series 1995

This is the version as aired on BBC in 1995.
Our thanks to The Natural History Unit for supplying the original master.
Film upscaled by New Forest Gateway (Media Archive).

Forest Heritage (ESSO) (1952)

18th century Agisters and pigs with rights to wander are just some of the ancient traditions celebrated in this beguiling look at life in the New Forest. Less familiar sights are captured, too, such as broom making and logging, forestry planting and sailing on the River Beaulieu near Buckler's Hard. No film about the area would be complete, though, without the famous Forest ponies – who are seen here in all their equine glory.

Black and White
Director Roy Layzell
Featuring John Snagge
Released 1952

https://www.fawleyonline.org.uk/forest-heritage/
A portrait of the landscape, people and traditions of the New Forest in the 1950s.

Forest Heritage is a poetic portrait of life in the New Forest in the 1950s.

The cinematography by Roy Layzell, music by Clifton Parker and commentary by John Snagge combine to make this a gem amongst the documentary ‘shorts’ of the period.

It was commissioned by the Esso Petroleum Company in 1952, just as they were establishing a new refinery on the eastern edge of the New Forest at Fawley, but Forest Heritage is entirely concerned with the natural beauty and traditions of the area: ‘A place out of this modern world where simple pleasures are enough – a miraculous survival of pre-Norman England’.