Let me introduce myself. My name is Jim Croucher and I have been interested in shipping since the age of 12 when I moved to Portishead, near Bristol in England. I was able to see across the Severn Estuary from my bedroom window and I soon began to take an interest in the vessels that frequently sailed by. I started to investigate what cargoes they were carrying, where they had come from and to where they were going. My interest in shipping developed as I grew older and after leaving school I studied for a degree in Maritime Business at the University of Plymouth, where I graduated in 1996. After working as a boarding agent in the Port of Bristol during my university vacations, I had already decided I wanted to pursue a career in the shipping industry.
I moved to Southampton late in 1996 after accepting a job as a port agent and I lived and worked there until 2005. I worked for several different companies during that time but I was always based at the container terminal, sometimes working in other areas of the docks and at other ports around the country. I have been employed by CMA CGM (the French container shipping line) since 2002, although I had previously worked for the same company in 1999 and acted as their port agent for the two years in between. In 2005, I moved to Essex to manage their port operations office at Tilbury, where I remain to this day.
The purpose of this website is to gather my collection of shipping photographs into one place and to make them available to anybody who wishes to see them. The majority of my images are of vessels in one of four main locations: The Bristol Channel (from my early years, living on the Severn Estuary coast), Southampton and the Solent (while I was based at Southampton, and during more recent visits to the port), Tilbury (since 2005) and Malta (where I like to go to get away from it all...). The rest are simply images of ships I have come across during the last couple of decades. Many of the older images are scanned photographs but the more recent ones are digital. The website layout is very simple as it's something I have put together from scratch. Instead of using website design software, I chose to learn the basics of HTML myself and decided to try it out...
All photographs on these pages are available for personal use - please feel free to copy any images to your own website; the only condition I have is that you acknowledge Jim's Shipping Website as the source. I have downsized most of the photos before uploading them to the server (hence the poorer quality of some of the older scans) - please contact me to request any higher resolution images or if you wish to use any photographs for commercial purposes. All content on this website is Copyright © 2005-2013 Jim's Shipping Website.
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