I’m having a cacophonous week, doing fun things with the kids over half-term. This week’s newsletters will therefore be a bit shorter than usual, but I hope no less engaging.
Today, I’m going to make like it’s 2002 and commend a couple of new/revamped websites to your attention. I’ll finish by flagging a few additional sites that everyone with an interest in London history should know about.
Locating London’s Past
Readers of Londonist: Time Machine will immediately feel at home on Locating London’s Past (LLP). The site’s centrepiece is the 1746 map of London by John Rocque — the same one that I’m gradually colouring in. LLP also adds colour to the map, but this time to display historic data by location. The site has been around since 2011 but recently got a sizeable revamp.
So what data can we look at? The options are tremendous, almost intimidatingly so. To list just a few, the site has fire insurance records, poor relief data, 1665 plague deaths, population density in the 1801 census, and tax receipts from the late 18th century (a proxy for wealth). Pick any one, and you’ll find a tree of further options. The Old Bailey dataset, for example, can be used to map any type of crime. We can ask it to show all trials for theft between 1684 and 1819, and this is what it spits out:
The biggest hotspot, as with so many crimes, is St Giles, which was notorious for its squalid ‘rookeries’ well into the Victorian era. The East End around Whitechapel Road and, to a lesser extent, the Wapping docks, also light up, as we might expect. But we also find plenty of theft in well-to-do areas. The parish of St James’s Westminster, which includes Mayfair and St James’s, had its own issues. The interested reader can dig down further and analyse the results by gender, time interval or type of theft. The map can also show verdicts and punishments, so you can see, for example, if a petty thief would get more leniency if their crime was committed in a particular neighbourhood. Any combination of these visualisations can be shown together, to aid comparison.
“One of my favourite functions,” says creator Prof Tim Hitchcock of the University of Sussex, “is the ability to map words in the Old Bailey dataset. Below, for example, is 'tea' and 'coffee' mapped in green and blue respectively. I would have to drill down to the trials themselves to know what this actually means! But the east-west pattern, and prominence of The Strand and Fleet Street, already makes me want to make an argument about coffee houses and tea drinking.”
LLP draws on data collated on two other websites, Old Bailey Online and London Lives 1690-1800, where you can dive still deeper into individual cases and historic records. Both are also the work of Tim Hitchcock, along with Prof Robert Shoemaker of the University of Sheffield. Have a play here.
And now for something completely different…
Memory Palaces
Nigel Smith has big plans for his new website Memory Palaces, which delves into the history of cinemas and cinema-going in London.
(It’s a topic close to my own heart. My grandfather Brown was a projectionist, and met my usherette grandmother between the reels. I wouldn’t be typing these words were it not for cinema-going.)
Memory Palaces collects together stories and history about London’s cinemas, both lost and surviving. According to Nigel, “Since film first flickered on London screens in 1896 the capital has been home to thousands of cinemas ranging from grand architectural marvels to neighbourhood fleapits.” Photos and commentary on some of those are collected here.
You probably know a few of the grander ones. Brixton Astoria started out as a picture house, as did Kentish Town’s Forum. Some early cinemas are still in use, such as East Finchley’s much-loved Phoenix, or Islington’s Screen on the Green.
Nigel is using the site to tell the stories behind these remarkable venues. It’s still early days, but so far you can read about:
🎥 London’s first ever public screenings of the Lumière brothers’ films at the Regent Street Cinema in 1896.
🎥 The earliest colour films, at the Maida Vale Picture House in 1913.
🎥 Harrison Ford buries a time capsule to mark the reopening of Leicester Square’s Warner cinema.
Memory Palaces has a third dimension — and one for which you don’t need to wear filtered glasses. Nigel leads regular guided tours that take in the old cinemas of London. You can join him on walks around the West End, Islington or Acton, with a Camden route coming soon.
Take a look around Memory Palaces here, and if you like what you see, consider joining Nigel’s newsletter email list for regular updates.
And some honourable mentions…
Obviously, we could fill several newsletters discussing the many excellent London history websites out there. I already provided a list of blogs, Substacks and other narrative-driven history sites, but I’d like to flag up a few places that are particularly good for research purposes.
Layers of London: If you want to see how London’s street patterns have changed over the centuries, this is the best site. Dozens of different maps can be overlaid and faded in and out to aid comparison. This non-commercial site from the Institute of Historical Research at University of London includes many other features to visually and cartographically explore London’s past.
London Remembers: Another non-commercial site, London Remembers seeks to find, photograph, map, transcribe and explain all of London’s memorials. 7,380 and counting! Remarkably, it’s almost entirely the work of one person (who wishes to remain anonymous). If you don’t know this site already, please do give it a spin (click ‘Map’ for a quick window onto how thorough this site is).
The Grub Street Project: I’ve only recently discovered this rich collection of material about 18th century London, but it’s been going since 2005. The Grub Street Project is another site that brings together dozens of old maps of the capital, as well as key information and transcripts. I’ve found it most useful for finding information on long-vanished streets. The site maintains an excellent database of these, with explanations (where known) of their etymology.
That’s it for now. I’ve got to go and play Barbie with my daughter whilst somehow simultaneously building a Lego version of the Strictly Come Dancing studio with my son. Wish me luck!
Thanks for reading! Do you have a favourite London history website you’d like to share? Feel free to mention it in the comments below. Email me any time on matt@londonist.com
Marvellous. I'm bookmarking all these websites for later research purposes (or idle mucking around). I also really want to write a romance about a cinema projectionist falling in love with an usherette in the 1940s.
Thanks so much for the write-up Matt. Hope anyone new to the Memory Palaces site enjoys it and perhaps see some of you on a walking tour before too long.