A RENOWNED photographer, whose work has been featured in Cumbrian newspapers for seven decades, will have his work placed in national archives. 

Ivor Nicholas famously photographed a Royal visit to Gibraltar has received a letter from the chairman of The Gibraltar Heritage Trust informing him of the honour. 

READ MORE: West Cumbrian photographer Ivor Nicholas shares a piece of unseen history of Gibraltar

Ivor was serving in the RAF in 1954 when Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the Rock and as an official Forces photographer, he was given access that other photographers could only dream of.

Ivor's friend and business owner Gerard Richardson said: "Ivor's career has been quite remarkable and it's even more so because he doesn't always realise it himself. Ivors is one of those naturals who has always been in the right place at the right time and we are still having fun digitising his archive of negatives."

When he returned home from his forces service, Ivor continued his photography career as an independent, and one of his biggest coups was when he was the first photographer to capture images of the Windscale Fire in 1957. Ivor's images were used by the national press and not for the last time.

In recent years it was announced that his work would be featured in a publication called The Gibraltar Chronicle. They have now deemed his work so important that they have placed it in national archives. 

Ivor's local archive of several thousand negatives includes hundreds of Whitehaven and Workington Rugby games as well as the now famous FA Cup tie between Workington Reds and the Busby Babes only weeks before many of the Manchester United Team perished in Munich.

In total he has 25,000 negatives in his archives depicting scenes from across Cumbria, the UK and the rest of the world. 

Ivor has used some of his photos to produce history books on the local area. He has done this with the help of Gerard Richardson MBE. 

The pair have been working together for some time and managed to release their fourth book together during the national lockdown caused by Covid.