Also included in the collection are view books, photographs by Zangaki and others, cartes de visite, postcards (often sent from the Canal zone), maps and plans of the Canal, and prints (including an unrecorded caricature satirising the British idea of a second canal) offer visual perspectives on the Canal’s precursor, the Overland Route, and on the Canal itself and its development.

The Suez Canal, one of the world’s greatest feats of engineering, was opened by Empress Eugénie of France on 17th November, 1869. The Canal realised not only the plans of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Canal’s chief prime mover, but also the ideas of those who saw in it a meeting between east and west, as expressed in the phrase aperire terram gentibus – ‘open the earth to the nations’.