This page is currently a work in progress. The current areas covered are around Benfleet, Hadleigh Thundersley, parts of Canvey Island, and the seafront from Leigh-on-Sea, through Westcliff-on-Sea to Southend-on-Sea, almost to Southend East.

The opening map shows three of the Living Landscapes in South-East Essex. These are highlighted as follows:

• Light Green for the Hadleigh and Daws Heath Complex Living Landscape (LL47).
• Light Red for the Hadleigh Castle and Marshes Living Landscape (LL48).
• Light Yellow for the Southend Seafront and Maplin Sands Living Landscape (LL49). Note that the green background of the foreshore shows through the yellow highlight.

The Living Landscapes vision is to restore, recreate and reconnect our wildlife habitats including SSSIs, Local Wildlife Sites and nature reserves, so that the species living within them can move through the landscape more easily, and continue to survive and thrive long into the future. Living Landscapes is not purely focused on wildlife, as we are looking to improve links within the community and promote local economies so that everyone can benefit from the scheme. This is a vision shared by all 47 Wildlife Trusts in the UK and by the UK government, as outlined in the Natural Environment White Paper.

(From the Essex Wildlife Trust website.)

Edward Clack joined the RAF in October 1942 and has been a pilot since 1956. He spent 20 happy years as Chief Flying Instructor with Southend Light Aviation Centre starting in 1968, flying some 15,000 hours himself and supervising about 100,000 hours. Always a keen photographer, he was able to see beauty where others cannot, and aerial photography fitted easily into his role as instructor. As a long-time member of the Essex Wildlife Trust, he willingly agreed to fly over the Castle Point area to record the woodlands and nature reserves here for us. Out of that came a project to sell copies of these pictures to people whose houses happened to be included in those photos, which soon led to taking more pictures of the urban areas, principally as a fund-raising exercise. This became so popular that producing the prints became onerous and Edward offered to sell the copyright to the Trust so that the administration of the system was by trust volunteers. Edward died in May 2010, aged 85.

The copyright of these photographs belongs to the Clack family. Usage is managed by Skyscan on behalf of the family.

If you wish to use any of these pictures for any purpose, please contact Skyscan. You should make a note of the code number of any pictures that you are interested in and include this in your email.

This page allows you to select a location in Castle Point or part of Southend. It will then take you to a page and show the nearest of Edward Clack’s Aerial Photos.

Use the map below to select a point and click on it. A marker will appear, and the Grid Reference will appear in the form below. If you make a mistake, click on the marker and it will disappear, allowing you to select a new point. You can use the navigation icon at the top left to pan and zoom, or you can pan by clicking and dragging.

The form also asks how many images it should find. The default is five, but you can select up to twenty.

You can also select how far from your chosen point to look for images. The default is two kilometres (2000 metres or just over one mile). This distance is that between your chosen point on the map and the (approximate) centre of the area covered by each image.

Note: You may need to double-click on the check-box for it to function properly, depending on your browser.

The Geograph Britain and Ireland project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland. Most of the images here are also on Geograph. The advantage of linking to a Geograph page is that it provides more detailed information about what can be seen in the photograph. This includes the main features of interest including roads and significant buildings. Clicking on an image will normally take you to the appropriate Geograph page. If there is none available, it will simply display a larger version of the image.