Locating London's Past: A Gem of a Website

Locating London's Past is a new website that lets users find information from a vast array of  historical sources that cover crime and punishment, the distribution of wealth, poverty and occupations, mortality, and the ownership of consumer goods.

Partial view of the website

Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are turning increasingly to geographical analysis as a way of bringing the facts and figures to life. What’s exciting about this resource is that the existing data you can explore today is just the start – the interface could be expanded to include new data sets and new maps, making it potentially useful to scholars in dozens of different disciplines. JISC’s commitment to funding open source projects means that other universities are already looking at how they might reuse the programmes that the Sheffield team has developed.” 

Trial accounts from the Old Bailey, tax and population data, and even archaeological records can all be uploaded onto John Rocque’s famous 1746 map of London, now fully referenced to modern geographical coordinates by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). 

Locating London’s Past is the result of a collaborative project between the University of Sheffield, the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of London. - JISC