Newly-wedded British couple Denys and Margaret Gardiner spent their honeymoon driving 900 miles up and down the east coast of England in August 1939, just weeks before the Second World War broke out. But the best thing (that is, the best thing for us) was that they took color pictures of the countryside they drove their convertible through.

After the death of his grandmother in February 2014, Barney Britton found an unexpected treasure while cleaning out her attic: a wooden box filled with dozens of 35mm slides documenting his grandparents’ honeymoon trip in 1939. Although Britton’s mother remembered seeing the photos as a child, they were long presumed to be lost after several decades and multiple house moves. To Britton’s delight, most of the slides were remarkably well-preserved even after nearly 75 years of storage. Many of the photos were shot using Agfacolor film—a novelty at the time—providing a rare and exceptional look at England in color in the month preceding the outbreak of World War II.