Lottery cash will help preserve a remarkable collection of historic photographs saved for posterity thanks to The Argus.

Archivists were delighted to learn that the Heritage Lottery Fund had granted £32,500 towards the preservation and cataloguing of the Walter Gardiner Collection.

West Sussex local studies library bought up to 250,000 photographs following a tip-off from Argus reporter Paul Holden.

He stumbled across the collection during a visit to wgphoto, a commercial photography studio run by Mike Hemsley in Broadwater, Worthing.

Holden alerted county local studies librarian Martin Hayes, who purchased the photographs so they weren't broken up among private collectors.

Now a team of volunteers has been appointed to research, conserve and catalogue the collection, started by Victorian photographer Walter Gardiner, who had studios in Worthing.

They will begin work in January on a scheme expected to take up to a year. The archive was so vast it took 12 car journeys to transport the images to Worthing Library in Richmond Road.

Mr Hayes said: "I think there are thousands more treasures to be found. We are discovering new things practically every day.

"It has taken us over a century to assemble the current county photograph and picture archives. Now we have this vast treasure trove of pictures dating back to the Victorian period it means we have trebled an already extensive collection almost overnight."

The archive includes breathtaking, pin-sharp images of streets and buildings from Worthing and surrounding towns and villages from the 1880s to 1945.

There are striking, historic scenes of shepherds, sheepwashers and wood-cutters taken just before these traditional rural occupations died out. A series of images showed early aircraft and pilots at Shoreham less than a decade after the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903.

Mr Hayes said: "I have seen at least nine or ten of these so far and I think there might well be lots more. They really show the beginning of aviation at Shoreham.

It's incredible."

He was equally fascinated by Worthing's wartime pictures, which depict air raid shelters, gun emplacements, Home Guard parades, and the pier with a hole blown in the decking to stop German marines using it as an invasion landing stage.

Strict military censorship meant very few photographs were taken in Worthing during the war, but in 1944 Mr Gardiner's staff were given special permission to record unprecedented scenes.

There were also important industrial pictures, showing technological innovations, commissioned by leading local companies in the area such as Link Miles, Nissan, SmithKline Beecham, and Southern Water.

The collection was the third acquired by county archivists thanks to Holden alerting Mr Hayes, who is now pursuing a fourth, consisting of thousands of postcards - again thanks to an Argus tip-off.

paul.holden@theargus.co.uk