IT must have been a mild autumn day when this young woman decided to pick apples in her swimsuit.

The happy snap was taken by photographer George Garland in the 1930s at Marshalls Farm in Kirdford, near Billingshurst.

It is one of thousands of vintage local images of people and places available on West Sussex County Council’s Sussex Pictures website.

The council’s records office contains a fascinating history of the county and charts its economic, social and geographic history.

It contains maps from the nineteenth century of places including Worthing and Chichester as well as vintage black and white portraits, urban and rural scenes and seaside posters.

Visitors to the website can search by the names of individual villages and towns, or topics such as the seasons, churches, shops or celebrations.

For example, a search for “autumn” will produce plenty of images including mangold pulling at Barlavington, near Chichester, a girl feeding turkeys at South Farm, Petworth, acorn picking at Fittleworth, also near Chichester, and a ploughing match at West Grinstead, near Horsham.

A similar hunt for “Worthing” throws up a wide variety of fascinating snaps including a picture of the pier from the 1920s, children sitting on a gate in Salvington Road, Durrington, a very crowded Worthing beach, Findon Fair in 1932 and an old windmill in Lancing Road from 1909.

Assistant county archivist Matthew Jones said: "We have a vast collection of more than 250,000 photographs, prints and drawings relating to people and places in West Sussex.

“We've been supplying copies of these for many years but we set up the picture gallery so that people can browse some of our images and buy them online.

“It's been very popular and I would encourage anyone interested in the history of West Sussex to take a look.

“The images come from a variety of collections but many of them were taken by local amateur or professional photographers.

“George Garland, for instance, was a photographer based in Petworth who worked from the 1920s to his death in 1978.

“He left 70,000 negatives to the Record Office and we’ve been able to digitise some of them and put them online – it’s an ongoing process and more photos are going on every week."

For more details, visit www.sussexpictures.co.uk